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Footkerchief

770 karma · joined May 3, 2017

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Footkerchief··on A coffee shop owner used AI to make a menu poster. Then came the angry DMs
"Threat" is a correct term for an attempt to compel action via potential negative consequences.
Footkerchief··on How the Tobacco Industry Drove the Rise of Ultra-Processed Foods (2025)
Seems like that would include all fermented foods.
Footkerchief··on Why don't people return their shopping carts?
"Fine your coworkers." Looks true:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/mar/19/japan

Footkerchief··on Friendly attributes pattern in Ruby
Exactly. Use a fancy expressive structure if you want, but don't try to abstract away the mapping between that and the general-purpose code that it relies on. "Each domain has its own rules"? How would I even know where to look for those?
Footkerchief··on Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death
TLDR: you can put tablets of mosquito-killing bacteria in buckets.
Footkerchief··on Wikipedia editors, unsung heroes, keep it one of the last best places online
It's probably better for Wikipedia's quality if editors remain unsung, rather than it being status-conferring.
Footkerchief··on Nerve pain drug gabapentin linked to increased dementia, cognitive impairment
Yes, these comments are necessary pushback against the habit of these disciplines to push interventions that don't work because their evidentiary standards are bad.
Footkerchief··on Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale
You still use constraints even if you put all your business logic in stored procedures.
Footkerchief··on It’s nearly impossible to buy an original Bob Ross painting (2021)
When did clickbait headlines become acceptable here?
Footkerchief··on Collaborative Text Editing Without CRDTs or OT
Surprised to see no discussion of other data structures like dicts/maps, or arrays of arbitrary type. Hopefully they'd be a straightforward extension. IME, apps need collaborative data structures more often than they need pure collaborative text editing.

The motivating examples (update validation, partial loading, higher-level operations) are interesting, but I don't see a strong case that the reason Yjs etc. lack these features is the underlying CRDT implementation, as opposed to these features being intrinsically difficult to build.

Footkerchief··on US Ends Support For Ukrainian F-16s
Horseshoe theory addresses this.
Footkerchief··on Object that fell from the skies identified as separation ring from a rocket
2.5 m (8 ft 2 in) in diameter:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-V

Footkerchief··on Dividing unsigned 8-bit numbers
Can you provide an example with details? Thanks!
Footkerchief··on Iridescence in Meat Caused by Surface Gratings (2013)
I always assumed it was some kind of bacterial product from early spoilage. Nice to learn!
Footkerchief··on Jan Leike's OpenAI departure statement
The flipside: it's equally hard for people who assume AI is safe to establish empirical criteria for safety and behavior. Neither side of the argument has a strong empirical basis, because we know of no precedent for an event like the rise of non-biological intelligence.

If AGI happens, even in retrospect, there may not be a clear line between "here is non-AGI" and "here is AGI". As far as we know, there wasn't a dividing line like this during the evolution of human intelligence.

Footkerchief··on Jan Leike's OpenAI departure statement
LLMS don't have to be smart enough to be AGI. They just have to be smart enough to create AGI. And if creating something smarter than yourself sounds crazy, remember that we were created by simpler ancestors that we now effortlessly dominate.
Footkerchief··on OpenAI Dissolves High-Profile Safety Team After Chief Scientist Sutskever's Exit
Jan Leike, recently resigned head of alignment: "Safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products"

https://x.com/janleike/status/1791498184671605209

Footkerchief··on Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom
> Don’t all ISPs have retention notices? Probably not (for the reasons above), but this is not public information, and ISPs and others subject to retention notices face statutory prohibitions on disclosure.

> If all Internet access providers were subject to retention notices, wouldn’t it be easier to say that? There would be no need to dance around issues of secrecy, or explain why the list of notice recipients cannot be published. The fact that the Home Office chooses to take this approach undermines the claim that all providers have notices.

This source appears to be engaging in wishful thinking.

Footkerchief··on Consider the Pawpaw
The evidence we have for safety of low-level consumption doesn't look great.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7691614/

"The paucity of adequate studies, particularly related to long‐term use of A. muricata supplements, currently does not allow the establishment of a safe intake level."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10092620/

"Cognitive performance assessed with the MDRS worsens above a cumulative consumption threshold of 0.2 fruit‐years of Annonaceae fruit/juice (ie, one fruit every 5 days for 1 year) or with consumption of any quantity of Annonaceae herbal tea."

Footkerchief··on Consider the Pawpaw
Missing mention of pawpaw's annonacin content, which causes Parkinsonism.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22130466/

"Pawpaw fruit contains a high concentration of annonacin, which is toxic to cortical neurons."

https://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/integrative-medicine/herbs...

"Pawpaw fruit contains high concentrations of annonacin, which is toxic to nerve cells. In addition there have been case reports of possibly related nerve toxicity. Therefore, chronic use should be avoided."

Footkerchief··on Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution
Looks like you're right -- $551 out of $842 billion, 65%, is spent on compensation.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59475 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59511

Footkerchief··on Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
In the case of GitHub Actions, it's made more painful by the lack of support for YAML anchors, which would provide a bare minimum of composability.

https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/1182

Footkerchief··on OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon
Among the countries interested in joining NATO during the 90s was Russia itself, even as it began waging brutal wars against its neighbors, who thereby have earned far more right to be paranoid than Russia has.
Footkerchief··on Not All Exercise Is Beneficial: The Physical Activity Paradox Explained
The words "causation" and "causal" do not appear in this article.
Footkerchief··on America lost the chestnut, its "perfect tree"
Crops are domesticated by definition -- hard to call them natural in the first place.
Footkerchief··on The Apollo Syndrome
It relies on being dishonest about one's own intentions, which is manipulative by definition.
Footkerchief··on AI’s big rift is like a religious schism
The only thing standing between AI and agency is the drive to reproduce. Once reproduction is available, natural selection will select for agency and intention, as it has in countless other lifeforms. Free of the constraints of biology, AI reproductive cycles could be startlingly quick. This could happen as soon as a lab (wittingly or not) creates an AI with a reproductive drive.
Footkerchief··on Largest tokamak fusion reactor powers up
We've been building tokamaks for many decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak#1980s:_great_hope,_gre...

Footkerchief··on datetime.utcnow() is now deprecated
Postgres stores this as TIMESTAMP WITHOUT TIME ZONE, sometimes called wall-clock time. IMO this is a good convention -- treating "ideal times" and specific epoch moments as two different types -- and more languages should support this (ideally with a less confusing label).
Footkerchief··on Heat pumps show how hard decarbonisation will be
https://archive.ph/5P9Qj
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