baryphonic

This research is cool, but I always feel it needs an asterisk. Requiring a click or event or some external clock feels like a cop out. I've seen a similar thing with PowerPoint.

It would be a bit like saying a language with iterations but neither first-class functions nor recursion is Turing complete as long as an external stack is provided. Or maybe it allows a stack (or recursion) but requires external intervention for function application.

Cool hacking nevertheless.

MiniKanren, then?

> No declarative language can ever handle every use case.

Prolog would beg to differ.

> Now, it's true that the advertisers used to get a good deal from the platforms, and that it came at the expense of the users. Facebook lured in users by falsely promising never to spy on them.

It did? I joined in 2005 – back when the footer read, "a Mark Zuckerberg production" – and never saw any such promises. The only promise I remember seeing was that it was free and always will be.

> But once those advertisers were locked in, Facebook turned on them, too. [...] This is the thing that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product" fails to comprehend. "If you're not paying for the product" is grounded in a cartoonish vision of markets in which "the customer is king" and successful businesses are those who cater to their customers – even at the expense of their workers and suppliers – will succeed.

But advertisers clearly wield the power, at least the direct power, over social media. How many "adpocalypses" have we had at this point? Social media companies have giant teams dubbed "trust and safety" whose job is to ensure the gross content doesn't end up next to ads or scare away the eyeballs.

If socialists want to overturn the "you pay for it or else you are a product" conventional wisdom, they need to account for that.

I have been surprised that environmental activists haven't protested return-to-office policies for the incident increase in pollution. Seems like there is very little data backing up RTO other than commercial real estate sunk costs, and loads of costs like lost time commuting, energy used to commute, emissions due to traffic, etc.

California's building a paywall and they're making Google pay for it so they can make articles great again.

Yep, that's when I quit downloading from SourceForge as well

The link you cited references El Niño bringing heavy rains and spreading "black pod disease," neither of which are caused by climate change.

That's fair enough, but Meta, Google, OpenAI, etc. are all American companies, thus US law would likely apply.

Ironically, weights and biases are likely not copyrightable.[0] I looked into this first when the LLaMA model was released on BitTorrent, and concluded that downloading it was perfectly legal. The courts even have controlling precedents that say "sweat of the brow" is not a valid justification for copyright, meaning that the effort these large organizations put into training their models does not grant them protection.[1]

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35121093

[1]https://definitions.uslegal.com/s/sweat-of-the-brow-doctrine...

Honestly, this has been predictable since the beginning of GPT-3 and Copilot. Programmers tend to overestimate how much time we spend sitting down banging on the keyboard, and management severely overestimates it. Even when we are typing code, much of the time we maintaining code already written rather than creating greenfield code out of whole cloth. So a system that is by design oriented toward creating new things out of whole cloth will be missing a lot of what programmers must do.

GPT-4 makes enough errors when I use it to generate code that my chats with it become excessively long where I am effectively feeding it error messages until it makes something that will at least parse or compile. Having to maintain those over time seems like it would be a nightmare, much worse than the often mediocre tooling programmers are used to.

I'm not anti-LLM, but the hype around them has been unbelievable, and I suspect that's part of the reason for these immense layoffs over the past 18 months. LLMs make me more productive, but I would honestly be terrified to depend on a product that relied on LLMs in its critical path.

When I was in high school, we read the Canterbury Tales. In "The Wife of Bath's Tale," a knight violates a young woman. He is described as having a "lusty liver."

I miss this era of the Web. Thanks for the enjoyable walk down memory lane!

Here's one: I have some pretty long chats, but I can't use the "home" key to scroll to the top if I want to view previous messages. I always have to find the scrollbar and drag it all the way up (not so easy on macOS). It's quite annoying.

> Given Apple's general money-grubbing ways (see: the App Store), this is somewhat surprising.

Far be it from me to give Apple credit for altruism or openness, but this narrative isn't quite true. When the iPhone launched, Jobs and the execs at Apple envisioned that web apps would be the way the iPhone functionality could be extended. There was even a relatively straightforward way for web apps to be cached and saved on the Home Screen. The desire for compatability with open standards was even reflected in Jobs' open letter explaining why Flash would not be put in the iPhone.[0]

Public outcry for the native APIs along with prodding from other Apple execs led to the App Store becoming a thing.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100501010616/https://www.apple...

For the 'stans, I remember TUTK (west to east), and that Turkmenistan is closest to Turkey.

Great work! Only feedback would be to make the drop-down search aware of the abbreviations for various countries. For example, St. Lucia rather than Saint Lucia, DPRK for North Korea, or even CAR rather than Central African Republic.

> Purjury is supposed to be serious. But it's not enforced against police officers. [...]

> So why should I believe, if this law passes, anybody in the justice system will enforce it?

I haven't read the text of the bill, but according to this article, evidence obtained during an interview where the cops were lying can be excluded. This forces judges to consider the evidence during pre-trial motions in limine, and if a judge errs in allowing such evidence, that error can be appealed. That doesn't 100% solve this issue, but if enacted this will provide a real remedy. And trial judges hate to be overturned on appeal.

The only existential risk that worries me is nuclear weapons proliferation. It's the only one I have nightmares about.

In America, the reverse is true. Most French words are butchered, most Spanish words are at least pronounced properly (sometimes with an accent).

I suspect it has something to do with proximity to native speakers of the language, as France (effectively) borders the UK and Mexico borders the US.

Ironically, I had a subscription to the print WSJ years ago. I never read it, but canceling was extremely difficult.

A couple years in: "We really have no explanation for the rapid increase in cervical and testicular cancers."

> In general, the Senate's ability to set its own rules surely cannot be unrestricted. For example, when the Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate would it have been constitutional for them to create a new rule that all tax decreases require unanimous consent of the Senate? Or for Republicans in the same situation to create a rule that all tax increases require unanimous consent? Both of these changes would seem to be within the rule-making authority of the Senate. However both rules would be profoundly undemocratic because they would generally prevent a majority (or supermajority) of US voters from changing US tax law in the future.

I think we should clarify that there is no "filibuster rule" in the Senate. The rule is that debate by default is unlimited; in order to close debate on any non-rule change, sixty senators must agree to invoke "cloture," after which debate continues for up to thirty hours under various restrictions. Then the vote on the underlying measure (e.g. a bill, a resolution, advice & consent on an executive matter) takes place with the majority vote rule. (Debate about rule changes can only be ended by 2/3 of the Senate, followed by a majority vote on the rule change itself.)

With that settled, we should also consider that the Constitution itself mandates super-majorities in the Senate for various reasons, including expelling a senator; giving advice and consent for the president to ratify a treaty; convicting an impeached president, vice president, other officer or judge; overriding a veto; or proposing an amendment to the Constitution. It further specifies certain procedures that can be invoked by less than a majority, like the 1/5 vote to record the names of those voting on any given measure, or the minority vote required to compel the presence of absent senators in the absence of a quorum. The Constitution clearly contemplates these situations where the vice president's vote wouldn't matter, so it stands to reason that the Senate is free to adopt rules requiring a different vote threshold than simple majority.

As to the hypothetical about rules governing tax legislation, I see nothing in the Constitution forbidding such a ludicrous procedure. I do see loads of evidence that it would be extremely impractical, including the 2/3 majority required to invoke couture on rule amendments; the "nuclear option" precedent; and the fact that the tit-for-tat is possible.

Finally, all legislative bodies have substantially undemocratic procedures. Referring matters to committee is undemocratic, restricting floor amendments is undemocratic, points of order are undemocratic, etc. It seems to me that preserving the minority's right to further debate is not so different.

How is the filibuster unconstitutional? The Constitution explicitly gives each House the power to select its own rules, and the Senate is never "dissolved" like the House of Representatives is, so its rules carry on.

Madison elaborates also on this theme in Federalist 51, but with separation of powers rather than federalism & factions.

Just for reference, the "ambition must be made to counteract ambition" line comes from Federalist 51, also by Madison.

> Then having to go to work each day at a place that keeps saying we are all family here knowing that 2/10 of you are going to get axed.

Sounds like the mafia

> > When firing employees becomes too hard, hiring becomes risky

If a firm has severe restrictions on firing anyone, then it must be extremely diligent with hiring, because employees will be around as long as they want to be. If an employee is unproductive, lazy, or just a bad fit, then the firm will be stuck giving a paycheck to someone who really ought not to be there. Thus firms will simply delay hiring.

> > giving people broad latitude is risky

I admit, I'm not exactly sure what this means, but I would surmise it means that employees need to be micromanaged to ensure loyalty to the firm, since they have no natural consequences of going rogue.

> > compensation suffers because high comp is risky

If the firm grants significant pay increases but cannot terminate someone, that pay increase becomes a permanent recurring expense, even if some future event renders that pay increase inappropriate or unnecessary. Thus firms will minimize pay increases.

These are "deadweight losses" where optimal exchange between employers and employees is limited by some policy.

Ah, so regulatory capture? I can see that.

It also seems like the ATC system is stretched thin, as well as the airlines themselves in terms of pilots. Though I may be biased since I'm much more aware of ATC problems given the various YouTube channels I watch covering aviation.