bre1010

Agreed. LLMs are the Manhattan Project of the class war. It really looks like they're betting everything that this will "win" it for them

This sounds depressing. Imagine going to work every day and your boss is a computer telling you to do rote nonsense so it can barely-better-than-brute-force search for breakthroughs in whatever field. Then when it finds one we get another breathless news cycle like this while you get no credit at all. If you could understand what you were working on, you might be able to contribute more than a .csv of data, but the computer can't read you in because there is no understanding under the surface.

I also noticed this. I was working on my solver but my dictionary kept suggesting options that wordle didn't consider to be words at all (what the heck is usr/share/dict/words anyway??). So I looked through the source for the dictionary wordle is using and then also found the list of all solutions which really took the fun out of that whole exercise :(

I wish the key word was instead dontawait and was used inversely to how await is used. 99% of the time I'm using an async function, despite however slow it is, there's nothing for my code to do but wait for it to finish. But if for some reason I would like the next line of code to run before the current one is done, I'll let you know.

Like, why can't my sync function await something asynchronous? If it has to lock up the whole thread while that function executes, that's fine because that's how it was going to work anyway 99% of the time

I discovered project euler as a novice programmer in high school around 15 years ago. I loved how solving a problem unlocks a secret forum only available to other solvers. I would spend hours reading through everyone's prior solutions and trying to understand them. One guy had tagged his profile as "haskell" but would always provide his solutions in ruby which threw child-me for quite a loop (I actually thought ruby and haskell were the same language for some time)!

Thank you for this feedback. Definitely a failure on my part to follow my personal guideline of if I don't have anything thoughtful to post then it's better not to post at all, not to mention the actual posting guidelines that I violated.

Andrew Bosworth somehow short-circuits me though as he is responsible for so much bad in the world (I have multiple grandparents who have been totally captured by the Facebook infinite-scroll newsfeed -- his idea and for which he shows no shame). Like this sociopath can just get away with it all: multi-millionaire AND wannabe thought-leader? And I'm supposed to just scroll by and let his pontifications about moral philosophy get promoted on this site. That being said, I thought about posting something more significant in my OP but gave up because who am I convincing anyway. That should've been the trigger not to post at all.

Thanks for the call-out and for the compliment on my ant-post from back in the day.

This is a fair response. I googled "bosworth + terrorists will kill people" before I posted this to make sure I got the wording right but purposely didn't link to what I found because it's mostly clickbait stuff and anyways the real source is that I was an employee at facebook when he wrote "The Ugly".

Never good to be posting in anger but I truly can't stand this guy and I can't help but throw in something snide when I see him trying to smart-wash the fact that he's just Zuck's enshittification czar: Ads --> VR --> and now CTO

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You would just say "improving efficiency". Whereas theirs is like: "Improving the efficiency [... of what?]"

I love C#, but have actually found LLMs to be quite bad a producing idiomatic code because the language is changing so fast and often they don't even know about the latest language(/blazor) features. I constantly have to undo my initial prompt and rewrite it to tell them that we don't use Startup.cs any more, only Program.cs, and Program.cs is a flat file and not a class.

Completely agree. People lament the death of the RTS genre for all kinds of reasons but I think the biggest one was the early-2000s switch to 3D. Performance considerations meant you have way fewer units. The only exception was that Supreme Commander was somehow able to get around this, but suffered heavily from the second big problem with 3D RTSes: the tiny unit models are so much harder to tell apart in 3D compared to 2D.

The RTS switch to 3D was a mistake and I think RTSes will continue to fail until their developers realize what actually makes them fun is actively hindered by this technology.

I really enjoyed this essay. I'm just a cosmology bystander/hobbyist, but your takedown of the dark matter hypotheses was very appealing to me. I was shocked when I got to the section where you talk about all these macro-scale simulations using only dark matter. It's like an ouroboros of cosmological theories eating themselves, totally disconnected from reality. And relates to one of my favorite quotes that "simulations are doomed to succeed". I don't understand physics well enough to really understand black hole jets, but it feels like an elegant theory and I hope you're able to take it somewhere.

This was my first time hearing about the idea of universes producing children inside of black holes that may have slightly different physical properties. This is also really cool and interesting, but clearly a different level of theoretical compared to your first half about the black hole jets. I haven't had time to delve into any of your links, but it seems like you skipped over explaining how a universe would form inside a black hole in the first place. I saw in the comments on substack that someone pointed out the concept of "black hole electrons" and it's like, yeah, if we don't know what's going on inside black holes, then why couldn't they be their own universes? And if that's the case for black holes, then why not also electrons, or protons, or any other sufficiently dense and mysterious object? But then again why would we suppose that another universe would necessarily form inside those things? I'm curious if you could expand on what you think the mechanism would be for universe formation, as well as what you think the mechanism would be for variation/heredity in the child universes.

In college Intro to CS was taught with Racket (a lisp) and we even had to write code with pen and paper during our exams. Got really good at quickly visually matching parentheses which is still helpful to me today in non-lisps. (But given that the handwritten code would never be run, you could also just fudge it and write a bunch of )))))'s at the end and hope the TA grading it wouldn't count them either)

automatic circumsizers when

I guess it depends whether you want your system to work, or whether you just want it to be not your fault when it breaks

Andrew Bosworth (FB's blathering sociopath-in-residence) said Trump ran “the best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen” and they even had marketing people embedded with the campaign to help them run more effective ads.

The final straw for me was in October of 2019 when Zuck had a closed door meeting with Trump and then "randomly" the next week announced that politicians are now allowed to lie in ads on facebook. Hmmm, I wonder who would disproportionately benefit from that policy change??

Worked at Facebook from 2016 - 2020. I couldn't handle how flippant the leadership was about profiting off of genocides, Trump, and the degradation of everyone's mental health.

Now I work for my county government as a computer programmer. I make 20% of what I would've been making at Facebook if I hadn't left (60k vs 300k) but I don't regret it at all. My work helps real people in my community instead of siphoning off bits of attention here and there from strangers all over the world.

These things are all becoming more likely again

"bodycount"

I agree that this is what OP is saying. But it's funny that that didn't actually happen? All I saw was mainstream media outlets continuously chiding their own readers for not being sufficiently empathetic to poor, white, Trump voters.

So you disagreed when other people were saying freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, except now when it's consequences you like you are relishing it. So how are you different from the people you're sarcastically making fun of?

Why does it link to a scam website at the top of the post?

With all the usual caveats about first-past-the-post and the two-party system not offering a good range of choices in the US, this guy is pretty off the mark. Democrats and Republicans are meaningfully different choices and I tend to assume that anyone suggesting otherwise is (purposefully or not) helping Republicans -- who stand the most to gain from people cynically removing themselves from the political process (as when more people vote, Democrats win, since their values are actually more representative of the majority of Americans). Plus Republicans are currently psyching themselves up for another coup attempt, while Democrats are... not. So that's a pretty salient difference.

The reason I think this guy is a actually just a right-winger posing as "above the fray" is because anyone who actually thinks Republicans are more in favor of free speech than Democrats has either been taken by propaganda or is a purveyor of it themselves. Consider how many Republican-led states are passing actual laws (e.g. "Don't Say Gay" in Florida) that prevent people from talking about certain topics, presenting themselves in certain ways, or freely traveling between states. There is absolutely no equivalence to this on the left. Which is the say the right is both worse AND different from the left in America, unlike what this guy claims.

Kissinger also helped Nixon sabotage the Vietnamese peace talks in 1968 to help him get elected -- Nixon promised the Vietnamese a better peace deal if they refused to participate until after he was elected. Literal treason.

but not if Coca Cola's continuing growth depends on their ensuring that many many people are drinking it to excess

I'm into the art style, but was tipped off that it's AI-generated because it's filled with almost-letters making up almost-words

Hah, apparently my adblocker is over-aggressive. Thanks

Looking at Wayback Machine snapshot from April 26, 2023.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230426020715/https://www.cia.g...

This is tough because it seems like they're just using javascript to populate this page. So when you click the P filter or the Next arrow, nothing happens.

However I don't think Palestine was listed then either because both the snapshot and current version say that there are 199 results.

I was very confused by this too and finally realized the mistake. The chain of logic went like this:

> There are 2.4 standard hours in 1 metric hour > Therefore there are 240 standard minutes in 1 metric hour > Then divide by 100 to get 2.4 standard minutes per metric minute

Except there aren't 240 standard minutes in 1 metric hour. There's 2.4 * 60 = 144. That the author of the page couldn't keep the conversions straight does not bode well if we were to switch as a society...

The E.O. Wilson anecdote at the end amused me since he says if there are ants invading your kitchen you should lay out a piece of food and I thought he meant this to trap the ants somehow. But no he meant to just introduce yourself to your new neighbors!

In my experience, the best way to get rid of ants is to find where they are getting in and trace their supply lines back to the colony where you can dig it up and kill the queen. When I was little we had an ant problem in our house and one evening on the back patio I laid out an oreo, a strawberry, some saltines, and a few other snacks to see which ones the ants would like the most. The next morning our patio was a literal carpet of ants. The oreo and strawberry were long gone and they were working on the crackers with less enthusiasm. Following the ants we could see that the colony was underneath our green turtle sandbox off the end of the patio. Pushing it aside revealed the most intricate and bustling ant colony I've ever seen -- with separate chambers for eggs, larva, and pupa and tunnels interconnecting them across a 3 foot radius. Sadly, this colony was a big problem for us so my mom and I dug into the chambers until we found the queen (the one ant 10- or 20x larger than the rest) and then we killed it. Within weeks the colony was collapsing and our years-long ant infestation was resolved.

Since then everything about ants has been fascinating to me, from their physiology as this article gets into, to their behavior and organization. I even made a web game about ants at antocracy.io where you control a queen ant and use pheromones to influence your otherwise-autonomous workers.