Ivoirians

Meanwhile, on this side of the Pacific, the Trump administration is waging a war against the renewable energy industry... because, um... well, presumably, at the behest of oil and gas lobbyists.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/climate/trump-administrat...

It's one thing to have a backdoor so your engineer can unfreeze someone's phone or fix their smart lights. These are motor vehicles carrying people inside of them on highways.

I think various parties have managed to frame political discourse in America as an us vs. them, ingroup vs. outgroup, purely partisan sport. All that matters to people is that their team scores points and the other team loses points. There are no real principles or foundational beliefs, evidenced by how easily people flip their opinions on issues depending on who's acting on them. Biden using Executive Orders? Bad. Trump using Executive Orders? Good.

It's just a game, and winning the game feels good.

I have to assume they meant Visual Studio licenses, but whoever penned the tweet didn't know there was a difference between VSCode and Visual Studio. I mean, the names and logos do look pretty similar.

I'm generally optimistic for the potential benefits of chatbots to people who are lonely or depressed. But I wouldn't want to just hand over the burden of society's mental health to an unrestricted language model, especially one sold by a profit-motivated business. It would be akin to letting people self-medicate with a cheap and infinite supply of opiates. And that's basically the mental health crisis we are barreling towards.

What's the alternative? Regulation? Does a government or a public health agency need to make a carefully moderated chatbot platform with a focus on addiction-prevention and avoiding real-world harm? Why would people use that when unlimited/unfiltered AI is readily available?

Doesn't Google do that thing where if your team becomes redundant, they don't lay you off, they give you some time to find another team if you choose to transfer?

That almost sounds like a made-up joke, but I guess it's a free government-subsidized pizza dinner.

I received this email yesterday, which I found amusing in a sad way.

Hello, Thank you for booking time with me to discuss your background and opportunities at Microsoft. Unfortunately, I need to cancel our meeting because I will be leaving the company due to changes in our business and reduction in force in Talent Acquisition. I am grateful for my time here and recommend Microsoft to anyone. I wish you all the best in your career and your next opportunity!

It doesn't matter if someone thinks Cantor "breaks the rules", or the square root of -1 "doesn't exist." The (majority of) mathematicians who take those as true have created a wealth of rigorous, interesting, and worthwhile results built on top of these concepts. I vehemently believe mathematics is more "abstract thought experiments" than "discoveries of universal truth".

It tricks people into (temporarily) thinking that it is real. For a brief moment, your brain has to work out that it's too absurd to be real.

The Onion actually recently submitted a hilarious satirical amicus brief to the Supreme Court for the case Novak v. City of Parma [1] that made a splash in legal Twitter, for a case where a man who was arrested for making a parody Facebook page of his local police department. The amicus brief is itself a parody, an irreverent joke that has been submitted as a sincere legal document. (Thanks to LegalEagle for making a video on this [2]).

The entire point of the amicus brief is an argument that labeling a parody as a parody destroys the point of the parody. The four arguments:

I. Parody Functions By Tricking People Into Thinking That It Is Real

II. Because Parody Mimics "The Real Thing," It Has The Unique Capacity To Critique The Real Thing

III. A Reasonable Reader Does Not Need A Disclaimer To Know That Parody Is Parody

IV. It Should Be Obvious That Parodists Cannot Be Prosecuted For Telling A Joke With A Straight Face

It seemed a bit relevant to this. It's pending certiori and might go ignored, but the Supreme Court could rule that parody is protected under the first amendment, which would make Twitter an opponent of actual free speech (the legislative definition, not the new internet definition).

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/2022...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxTWonQvXkw

I've noticed that one article which was marked for deletion on Wikipedia is marked as "hooray survived deletionism" on deletionpedia, but only got changed to a redirect after a lot of data was deleted.

https://deletionpedia.org/en/Jeopardy!_College_Championship

Imagine if a polarizing figure, who you and many other people strongly dislike and whose vision for your company is openly controversial, were going to take over your company in the near future. How could the company function? It seems almost a foregone conclusion that there will be (a small proportion of) passionate and disgruntled employees who will go rogue and sabotage and leak and do whatever various subversive things to hurt Twitter before they resign.

The problem would be that you probably wouldn't want to exclude the page from the results in case people expect to find it. Did the page get ranked above other more relevant pages that had the quoted term more prominently? If it did, you're right, that should probably be a stronger signal.

It does work. In the past when I mentioned it, someone provided an apparent counterexample, a search with a term in quotes that wasn't found on the page. When I reported it to the search team, they found that the quoted term was actually in a hidden submenu on the site. So the term was still on the page, but not findable with ctrl-f, except in the source. Try it out and if you find a counterexample, let us all know.

This is true, a universal oracle would probably lead to some chaos in the world's computer science departments. I wonder how many mathematicians would switch over to help formalize and solve their fields, and how many would stick to their pencils and paper :P

>Why is there no value in that?

Because it's uninteresting. The point of pure math is not to be "useful", it's to be interesting. The Collatz Conjecture is (as yet) a completely useless result. Like I said, if God himself came down and told the world "The Collatz Conjecture is true", all we'd get is a useless piece of trivia. "The Collatz Conjecture is true for the first 2^68 natural numbers" is even more worthless than that. Maybe it'd be useful if we had an application for it, but for context, many pure mathematicians are quite derisive at the idea that their work should have practical applications.

Here's a digression, a simple math problem. If you take a checkerboard and remove two opposite corner squares, can you tile the remaining 62 squares with 31 dominoes?

You can probably write a program that can exhaustively churn through all the possible arrangements of dominoes in a checkerboard, and it'll spit out the answer (it's "no"). But is that interesting? No. This is a boring fact, "if you take a checkerboard and remove the two opposite corners you can't tile the remaining squares with 31 dominoes". No one cares about that.

But, here's a proof that this is true. If you look at the colors of each square on a checkerboard, there are 32 black squares and 32 white squares. When you remove the two opposite corner squares, you're removing two squares of the same color. So you have 30 black squares and 32 white squares left (or the converse). Meanwhile, every domino takes up one black square and one white square. So no matter how you place 31 dominoes, they should cover 31 black squares and 31 white squares. Therefore, we've proven the tiling is impossible.

That's somewhat interesting. You have an easily understandable argument for why the fact is true, and you have an application of a method (here, invariants) for looking at other math problems. Plus, it's kinda fun and satisfying and "elegant" to solve a problem like this. The proof is much, much more interesting than knowing the answer to the problem. Hopefully this helps convey that.

They've verified that the Collatz conjecture holds for all numbers up to ~2^68, but that's precisely 0% of all the numbers that need to be checked.

But more importantly, the goal of (pure) mathematics isn't to declare truths. If you had a machine from God himself that outputted True or False for theorems you put in, that wouldn't demotivate (pure) mathematicians from doing the work they're doing. Understanding the reason things are the way they are (and being able to share those understandings) is the purpose of math. I'd be willing to wager that almost every mathematician would rather have a proof that Collatz holds for all numbers divisible by 17 rather than a definitive yes/no answer to whether it's true or not, because the former would lend much more illumination to the secrets behind the problem, and would lead to new, more interesting mathematical methods and disciplines. The latter would be a fun fact to share at parties.

Your comment is not a gotcha. She'd clearly prefer that stock trading not be frozen at all. Freezing purchases but not sales is a gift to short sellers because retail investors can only lower the price, which will induce more people to panic sell.

When I google "white wine and beer new orleans" I get this blog post as the top result:

http://psycho-gourmet.blogspot.com/2014/06/boozing-with-brod...

which suggests that besides one line in a movie, this isn't a thing that exists in reality. So... what else should be returned? Other websites that describe how this combination doesn't exist?

User behavior has changed. Look what happened when a similar law was passed in Spain. Google News pulled out and people stopped visiting Spanish news sites, they didn't flock back to purchasing subscriptions and physical newspapers.

This is going to be a fascinating PR war. Apple was probably caught by surprise with how immediately public Epic was willing to take this.

But besides the fun of that wonderful drama unfolding over the next months/years, I actually feel like this could be catastrophic for Apple's image. Epic has an underestimated amount of influence and clout over the Gen Z crowd, and by aggressively rallying teenage gamers against Apple, I think anti-Apple sentiment could become popular (or viral) where it basically was nonexistent before (outside of some techie/developer circles).

The real-life goal is closer to "HR picks 7 blue, 6 red, 2 white instead of 10 blue, 5 red, 0 white".

To be more specific, they're being screwed because the department is now unable to add new (8hr) positions. Class size pressure will increase because the price of instructors has gone up, and fewer students will get to have cushy teaching jobs. The last point is what most of the former instructors feel: they felt privileged to work 8hr positions and now those opportunities are eliminated.

Here's my high level summary, as a former instructor.

1. Berkeley offered tuition remission as a benefit to grad student instructors essentially as a stipend/subsidy of living.

2. The union representing instructors negotiated tuition remission for undergrad instructors doing the same job as grad instructors, primarily to protect grad students from being short-changed by departments trying to hire cheaper undergrad instructors over the grad instructors who had greater need for the income.

3. CS class sizes increased, and the CS department lacked the funds to hire both enough grad and undergrad instructors to properly staff, so they offered 8-hour positions to undergrads as an alternative.

4. Undergrads were more than happy to take these positions, spend a few hours a week teaching, earn some income, and get close to professors. As 20-hour-a-week instructor, I still felt like it was an incredibly cushy and privileged job.

I wouldn't argue that the union is to blame here. It seems that only the CS department (as opposed to other departments) has hit this budgetary issue of being unable to afford enough instructors to staff its classes--the solution to me is that the university should look at the massive growth in the department and allot commensurate funding for instructors. Instead, the department took a (fairly reasonable) alternative solution which apparently has run afoul of some labor agreement.

Also, as someone who knows some instructors who stand to benefit from this decision: almost no one is happy about it. No one gains except these instructors--the department, future students, and future would-be instructors are all getting screwed (unless the department gets much more funding as a result of this).

Not that I would personally blame you, but the collapse of WeWork hasn't directly affected peoples' jobs, home values, or retirement savings. The implosion of the company has left the rest of the world pretty unscathed.

Disclaimer: Googler.

I'm going to retread a comment I made when I first learned about Epstein a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19167084

In short, and ignoring my ad hominem attack on his motivations, I encourage you to read/skim his two "studies" [1][2] and see how absurd they are. You might dismiss my claims and summaries as biased, but I think I was pretty open-minded towards his conclusions until I read them.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with...

[2] https://aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_&_ROBERTSON_2017-A_Metho...

I can't stop playing with this. Plugging in foreign words and locations is pretty fun, like Nouakchott, N'Djamena, Lviv, Hagia Sophia, Ibiza, Louvre, etc. Just getting the variety of organic, candid pronunciations is fascinating.

Do you have an example of this not working?

I was super confused too--to this day I get annoyed when I see apps that never updated their icons to circles, rendered as a square-in-a-circle with >50% whitespace. And now less than a year later, we're going back to squares??

But looking more closely, it seems like this is for Play Store icons, not the APK icons on your phone. Which makes me go... meh, whatever.