bbminner

While better, a person modifying PizzaDetails might or might not expect this change to affect the downstream pizza deduplication logic (wherever it got sprinkled throughout the code). They might not even know that it exists.

Ideally, imho, a struct is a dumb data holder - it is there to pass associated pieces of data together (or hold a complex unavoidable state change hidden from the user like Arc or Mutex).

All that is to say that adding a field to an existing struct and possibly populating it sparsely in some remote piece of code should not changed existing behavior.

I wonder whether there's a way to communicate to whoever makes changes to the pizza details struct that it might have unintended consequences down the line.

Should one wrap PizzaDetails with PizzaComparator? Or better even provide it as a field in PizzaOrder? Or we are running into Java-esq territory of PizzaComparatorBuilderDefaultsConstructorFactory?

Should we introduce a domain specific PizzaFlavor right under PizzaDetails that copies over relevant fields from PizzaDetails, and PizzaOrder compares two orders by constructing and comparing their flavours instead? A lot of boilerplate.. but what is being considered important to the pizza flavor is being explicitly marked.

In a prod codebase I'd annotate this code with "if change X chaange Y" pre submit hook - this constraint appears to be external to the language itself and live in the domain of "code changes over time". Protobufs successfully folded versioning into the language itself though. Protobufs also have field annotations, "{important_to_flavour=true}" field annotation would be useful here.

I have not looked into the HM algorithm much, but is there (an educational or performance wise) advantage over implementing a (dumb) SAT solver and expressing a problem as a SAT problem? It always seemed like the "natural representation" for this kind problem to me. Does knowing that these are types _specifically_ help you somehow / give you some unique insights that won't hold in other similar SAT problems?

I would not say that this is due to a social media bubble - HN is the only social media i use, i have friends along the political spectrum, and still i can relate to many of the points that the author raised. At one point, I found myself increasingly uncertain and conflicted about my own "actual convictions", and "underlying motives", and whether someone else (even potentially!) labeling me as a creep or assuming poor intentions automatically makes me one. Some unfortunate preceding life experiences corroded my self image as well, which might have contribute to it, but that's not the point.

I'd actually go further and argue that what appears to twist this social fabric inside out is not only the online nature of the interaction itself, but the corporate centralized algorithmic nature of it. I am in no way a proponents of decentralizing everything (social media, money, infra, etc) for the sake of it - most systems work more efficiently when centralized, that's just a fact of reality. Maybe the fact that ads, corporate communications (linkedin -speak posts / slack / mcdonald's twitter account) and social interactions now live in the same space (and barely distinguishable in feeds) must have somehow forced these spaces to use the most uniform neutered language that lacks subtleties allowed in 1:1 communications? So people speak in political slogans and ad jingles instead of actual thoughts? Because these spaces NEED people to speak like that to stay civil and "corporately acceptable"? I am just brainstorming, in no way suggesting that a "free for all" is a solution.

I watched a movie called Anora recently, and toward the end there's a dialogue along the lines of

- If not for these other people in the room, you'd have raped me! - No I wouldn't. - Why not? - (baffled and laughing) Because I am not a rapist.

One way to interpret this movie, this dialogue, and what follows is that the main female character has been used and abused her entire life by the rich / capitalist system in general / embodied by a character of a rich bratty child of an oligarch in particular - that her world almost assumes this kind of transactional exploitation as a part of human relationships - and struggles to feel safe without it - almost seeking more exploitation to feel somewhat in control. And the other person in the dialogue above (who is not a rich child) counters that by asserting and knowing very well who he is (and isn't), and that knowledgeable doesn't require or provide any further justification.

Tldr maybe the magical dream of a conflict-free society where people understand each other is not ours after all - maybe it is the ideal grassland for ad-driven social media to monetize our interactions in a safe controlled fashion? one evidence towards that is the de-personalized neutered templated nature of the kind of "advice" that people give online to earn social credit - that leaks into real world 1-to-1 interactions in the form of anxiety of being "watched and judged" - as described by the author?

True! And yet, oddly enough, I'd argue that this obviously bad advice is, in a way, the expected online (corporate?) etiquette, that is being, for some odd reason, applied in the real world.

It is akin to situations that several comics I heard described -in which either a caretaker (or even the relative with a disability themselves) was corrected and schooled for using "non inclusive language" when addressing their relative / a relative referring themselves. To which, anecdotally, the typical reaction of the said relative was along the lines of "oh, i am sorry honey, i wanted to say it is hard for a damn useless cripple like me".

While llms accept json schemas for constrained decoding, they might not respect all of the constraints.

I am surprised by how many people seemingly independently come up with a completely indescriptive "bad day" label - for the lack of a better one.

Good that things are working out for you.

Recently found that, on top of meds (that started wearing off - after taking them for a couple years now following a challenging life situation), going to social latin dance classes for a couple hours almost every day after work helps quite a bit.

I've heard that to ship hl2 (or anything really) they had to stip some of that flatness somewhat.

Seriously though, i doubt that "the rich across the globe" conspired to ban emergency currencies. I'd be curious to see a more in depth analysis of what are factors driving such local economies vs centralized currencies.

Is it precisely that the currency could not be exported outside the local region - that made it a barter tool vs an investment tool - that made it less affected by such external events as great depression?

What was the central government fearing? I'm sure there's a reason why it might be a less than ideal situation. Maybe because it is effectively a financial pyramid (more so than the primary currency) - a bunch of local govt making their local currencies with unclear unregulated printing schedule could result in many people not assessing their real purchasing power adequately?

How come they eliminate competition? What if inheritance taxes are progressive?

But the same applies to the person you are talking to - it is their job to reach out to you if they need help. It is not your job to prove anything to them by reaching out when (your heightened vigilance picks up that) something is off.

I am never buying the story of "i did not reach out / i betrayed you / i treated you poorly, and you deserved this treatment, because you failed to know me well enough to know what i needed (even if i didn't know that myself)" ever again.

There's no failure in asking. But there's no failure in not asking either - because you might be dealing with your own shit, as a responsible adult does.

One school of phenomenology of empathy makes an interesting point that empathy is an aesthetic category, not a moral one - you don't really choose to feel it. But you can choose to show up for someone. You can choose to show up for yourself as well.

I have been dancing lately, and i think it's helping a little. Our tango teacher says semi-jokingly to followers (usually women, although i find occasionally following quite fun as a man) "if you teach men that you will do everything yourself, they will learn that" - meaning that they should not anticipate a move - if it is not being communicated clearly, it is not your job to guess it. On the other hand, leader's job is to very clearly suggest a move with a gentle push or a shift in their pose, but not force it. Ideally, that's a fun exchange of clearly expressed and contextually relevant suggestions and responses.

I have been trying to manage other people's feelings and reactions for as long as i can remember. That's a self-soothing fantasy of sorts. With this mindset, you are naturally drawn to people who need such emotional management - a realization that you can't actually manage other people's happiness was long and painful. These days I am not sure that getting people to open up by altering your presentation is a good idea. Maybe we should learn to accept that we have no insight into another and just observe them with patient curiousity? That we are fundamentally alone and isolated and the best you can hope for is a person who's values align with yours - and so you feel safe around them?

I think the artcle might be missing one core premise of ACT - that it is not meant to help you to deal with negative emotions it the moment all that much.

The book on ACT I'm reading (happiness trap - from the founder of the technique) goes to great length to say that trying to "deal with negative emotions" (anxiety, sadness, etc) using affirmations, rationalization, etc is a dead end - it's not helping in the long run most of the time and is actively distracting and takes a lot of effort that could be put elsewhere.

The suggested path (that i am finding somewhat helpful) is to learn to act in accordance with your values regardless of how you feel and the story you tell in your head. It will still suck balls day to day, but on top of that, in the long run, you will feel more at peace and in control and respect yourself for following your chosen path.

The core realization is that while it may seem like your feelings (anxiety) and the story that plays in your head* is what makes up YOU, you may treat these as biological and early developmental "warnings" that your brain has learned to warn you of danger, and you most likely will feel this way for the rest of your life and won't have control over that, but you are actually FREE to choose how to act in response to these situations.

It may seem like these feelings and thoughts are making you act in a certain way, but they are not!

In your example, the feeling of financial anxiety could be accompanied by a thought like - "shit, how am i going to pay for that, why does it always happen to me, how do i fix it, why do i have to ruin it for myself and people i care about by being so sloppy, why does the universe makes it so hard for me and so much easier for others.." - and there's nothing you can do to change that feeling or that thought pattern in your head.

But what you can do is to use one of the techniques to (very temporarily) tune out of this thought train, check in with your values (eg taking care of loved ones), and choose a course of action that fits these as much as possible given the circumstances (eg find a way to spend quality time with them on a tighther budget) and DESPITE all that noise in your head.

A large chunk of the book is focused on consciously discovering your core values.

Is it easier to act with integrity (eg not snap at loved ones) moment to moment if you are not under financial stress or if that stress was not a part of your upbringing? Sure as hell! And given these unfair and idiotic and unnecessary circumstances that caused your internal machinery to work the way it does right now (stay alert at all times), it is your decision to commit to a further course of action - either numb your pain short-term (by ruminating, or alcohol, etc) or act in accordance with your values. Your (highly uncooperative ancient meat lizard) brain will still pull you towards a short term fix - because it is its primitive reward-seeking job, and you will inevitably loose control and let it win sometimes (esp under stress), but there is a part of you that can choose to patiently course correct your behavior towards your higher level values every time that happens. Or maybe you know that at this very moment you do not have resources to course correct much - and that's okay, as long as you are being honest with yourself and act accordingly (eg "i need to find a way to take better care of myself atm - to free up resources to take better care of others, it would be against my values to overwork myself to the bone and be so exhausted that i struggle to catch myself when I'm being mean to them").

One additional realization that i found helpful is that, in the face of such challenges, your brain is quite good at making you think that it knows how everything works - so you feel more in control, and so that the path of least resistance (doing nothing or numb your pain now) seems like the most rational one that agrees with your values. An antidote to that I found helpful is to remind yourself that you know very little about who you are (beyond the silly story playing in your head on repeat), and how you will react to things, and who other people are, and what's going on for them. So you can choose to plan your behavior to align with your values under the assumption that you know infinitely little about both yourself and others.

tldr is that pain is inevitable, but you may reduce (but not eliminate) suffering if you learn to act with integrity in the face of it

If people are talking about important personal matters, one might fall into the trap of thinking that one can understand another fully by asking more questions. Some authors argued that love and empathy starts precisely once you hit this boundary of your ability to perceive and understand another - it is a strange lived experience of living with the facts that something active and free and incomprehensible exists outside oneself, and still profoundly affects you.

Right, sql optimizers are a good example - in theory it should "just know" what is the optimal way of doing things, but because these decisions are made at runtime based on query analysis, small changes to logic might cause huge changes in performance.

I'd make a weaker statement - tinkering helps aquire (your personal) taste - not necessarily a good one.

Ah, I expected a graphics paper :)

It is difficult to understand the examples you described about "not reacting naturally" without a conocrete example of "thing A not working" and then "your thing working" in the same setup. A concrete real example possibly with comments from you like "after this line A B C happens, so ...".

Could you provide an example conversation that showcases the quality? For example either inferring states of npcs and re-ranking response options?

Kind of reminds me of the social interaction puzzle in oblivion :)

Now that 90% of the work is done, it is only 90% of the work that remains :)

I suppose that's because higher level VPs at large companies have broad goals and even broader notion means. It is not necessarily bad - allows to fiddle with different approaches before locking in on a specific technique. Wasteful? Yes. Efficient at satisfying board mandates informed by real time tectonic shifts in the industry? Also yes.

Afaik the win of columnar storage comes from the fact that you can very quickly scan the entire column across all rows making very efficient use of os buffering etc. so queries like select a where b = 'x' are very quick.

Oh, my honest apologies then, Greg! :) I am not a native speaker myself. And as far as i can tell, the phrasing is absolutely grammatically correct, but there's some quality to it that registers as LLM-speak to me.

I wonder how the causal graph looks here: do people (esp those working with LLMs a lot) lean towards LLM-speak over time, or both LLMs and native speakers picked up this very particular sentence structure from a common source? (eg a large corpus of French-English translations in the same style?)

Re ending - while it probably alludes to the fact that we need community to feel better - expecting another person to be able to help you with your emotional state (or expecting from yourself that you might be able to fix someone's emotional state) is a slippery slope.

One might argue that if someone is appreciated on the basis of whether that person makes one feel good in the moment - they are being treated no different than a drug (alcohol, etc). Some argue that such unhealthy dependencies on soothing agents (drugs or people) stems from lack of self soothing skills. Apparently, most "happy healthy people" (there are ofc caveats with this definition but for arguments sake let's assume that we share some understanding of what that means) have an intuitive understanding of how to take care of themselves both physically and emotionally in ways that return them to a baseline state of sorts. If you lack such skills, you often resort to less healthy coping strategies to draw yourself towards this baseline state.

Funny quote from sir Terry Pratchett: Death: "THERE ARE BETTER THINGS IN THE WORLD THAN ALCOHOL, ALBERT." Albert: "Oh, yes, sir. But alcohol sort of compensates for not getting them."

Am I the only person who can sense the exact moment an LLM-written response kicked in? :) "sharing some of the test results/numbers you have would truly help cement this case!" - c'mon :)

Oh, that's the only way to write a good paper - first you write 1.5x pages to figure out what you want to say, and then, with this knowledge, you replace entite confusing paragraphs with short sentences focused on exactly that. When i don't know how to express an idea, i ask myself "-so what idea are you trying to communicate? -well, that XYZ holds -if so, just go ahead write literally that!"

A real history of AI should start with Pierre-Simon Laplace developing a closed form solution to least squares in 18th century :)

I bet that the recent wave of VPN bans implemented in Russia also uses this tech. For example the mechanism of how suspicious websocket endpoints are being "knocked" by the firewall itself or how suspiciously traffic heavy ssh connections are being dropped suggests that Russian govt simply bought the entire stack from China.

In the meantime, Russia erected a copy of the great Chinese firewall with DPI and everything - blocking YouTube, foreign news, most voice chat apps, most vpn traffic, and even actively dropping ssh connections when too much bidirectional sustained traffic is being detected.

Oh, i thought it was a satirical critique of how arbitrary promotion criteria can be. Turns out someone is seriously claiming that someone else "doesn't not feel the right way" about the work they do, and THAT is their core problem. Ha. Well, at least the author feels that they are feeling the right way, good for them I guess.

While I can share the sentiment, my small experience teaching (and studying the same area for over a decade) suggests that giving students a trivial formula to play with "as is" helps motivate its future usage well. It is difficult to teach everything important about X in one go, knowledge is accumulated in layers.