icambron

I think generally the opposite is true. A place with bad coffee but great decor can charge the same as a place with good coffee but crappy everything else. And so to maximize profitability, it does just that, meaning that at any price level, the place with the worst non-coffee has the best coffee. If you judge them by their posters, then what you’re paying for is the posters.

I think people complaining about AI art at businesses are making an aesthetic argument and then laundering it into ones with more heft. I mostly agree with the aesthetic argument, but it’s only that, not some wider indictment.

I actually wanted it to play them as it went, so that it would be <unsorted><sorted> each time through, with the former shrinking and the latter growing.

It does look terrible, but I haven't found it to be unstable, personally

I use it regularly when driving an unfamiliar car. I also don’t think it’s ambiguous: it’s a drawing of a gas pump and an arrow telling you where it should be from here, which is a convention from signage the world over. “Paris ->” has never meant “you are this way relative to Paris.”

The design I used to find confusing was the controls for periodic windshield wipers: does the width the triangle indicator represent frequency or period? I eventually just managed to memorize that it means frequency because you get more wiping as you turn it “up”. I don’t think anyone else ever found this ambiguous; we all have our little intuition gaps, I guess.

In 2004 or so, 1.00 was an intro to Java course. I took it very cynically to pad out my units; I was a course 6 senior at the time. I got side-eyed by TAs a lot.

You need to read their entire comment as a joke.

Another one is, believe it or not, trees: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...

Luxon author here. Obviously I (and many others!) put a lot into Luxon, but only because it seemed so useful. Now that it's hopefully becoming obsolete, I get to look at it fondly as a nice bridge to the future, and I appreciate all the love it's gotten. All things end.

In the US too. Every family I know has a little balance bike for their toddlers

Putting aside all the sleazy parts for a moment, there is some good advice on actually writing a cold outreach email. But this part seems mistaken, or at least would be if I were your outreach target:

> My best rule for writing good subject lines is that they feel like they could be the subject lines of an internal email—this helps them feel natural in the inbox. For example, “Quick question”, or “Idea for better outbound” are two casual, natural-feeling subject lines.

I immediately delete any email with a subject line like “quick question”. It does not give me any reason to think I will get any value from it, and what are the chances I will care about answering whatever the question turns out to be? I’m not sitting around waiting to answer questions from strangers, so an email subject line has to tell me what I’m being offered for me to invest that time. In fact “quick question” is already asking me for something (“answer my question”) which just seems unreasonable from an unsolicited email.

I don’t get it. The document setting out this fact is the license, which also tells them they’re allowed to use it at all. The MIT license is short and simple and very explicit about lack warranty.

If we were to say “no one reads the license; it’s just boilerplate!” and add it elsewhere — say the bottom of the readme or in another file like disclaimer.md — it would quickly just become other, different boilerplate that no one reads.

You can’t solve the problem of understanding norms by writing copy. I’m resigned to everyone learning the hard way.

Seems like it enables you do things like use git repos as per-customer or per-some-business-object storage, which you otherwise wouldn't even consider. Like imagine you were setting up a blogging site where each blog was backed by a repo

I notice this one a lot. My sense of time is attached to how much I’ve changed, and my rate of change—-at least for music consumption—-attenuates as I age, dilating time. A couple years can seem like an eon when you’re 14 and each new album transforms you. Now a decade of music feels static and irrelevant and I barely notice it go by.

Related: it sure seemed like the mid-90s were special for rock music; I was 13 when Dookie came out and I felt (still feel) like I was in a sort of alternative renaissance, just crammed with amazing new music. But I’m sure every generation feels that way about whatever happened to be popular when they were teenagers.

It’s loud enough you hear earlier repetitions as a vague buzz in the distance, then crescendoing to a blare on your block, then receding with agonizing slowness like some hellish echo. And the whole time you thinking, awake now and very annoyed, “I don’t even own a car.”

I don't see why the security question answer has to be stored in the clear. If you have to give it over the phone, the agent can type it into a form field that hashes it and compares, just like a password on the site.

The “why not” form just seems to be a special case of “explain why this code is weird”, which is my commenting metric in its entirety

Instead of patronizingly giving women a false hero, instead introduce them to a real one: Klara Von Neumann (yes, that Von Neumann) who was the first coder for what we might recognize as a digital computer in the modern sense. She had to pioneer a lot of stuff!

To have all these thoughts, I think you'd have to have never really used an LLM to help you code, or to be almost comically closed-minded when you do. What they feel like when you actually use them is a combination of a better SO and a very prescient auto-completer. It does not at all feel like delegating programming work to a robot. No loss of artistry comes into play, and it's damn useful.

In an ideal world, our abstractions would be so perfect that there would be no mundane boiler-platey parts of a program; you'd use the abstractions to construct software from a high level and leave details be. But our abstractions are very far from perfect: there's all kinds of boring code you just have to write because, well, your program has to work. And generally that code is, if you look, most of your code. This because making good abstractions is really hard and constructing fresh ones is often more work than just typing out the different cases. If you think this is mistaken, I'd gently suggest you take a fresh look at your own code.

Anyway, that's where LLMs come in. They help write the boring code. They're pretty good at it in some cases, and very bad at it in others. When they're good at it, it's because what the code should do is sort of overspecified; it's clear from context what, say, this function has to do to be correct, and the LLM is able to see and understand that context, and thus generate the right code to implement it. This code is boring because it is in some vague sense unnecessary; if it couldn't be otherwise, why do you have to write it at all? Well you do, and the LLM has taken care of it for you.

You can call this work the LLM is displacing "art", but I wouldn't. It's more the detritus of art performed in a specific way, the manual process required to physically make the art given the tools available.

You could object that the LLMs will get better in the sense that not only that they will make fewer mistakes, but they will be able to take on increased scope, pushing closer to what I'd consider the "real" decisions of a program. If this happens -- and I hope it does -- then we should reevaluate our lofty opinions of ourselves as artists, or at least artists whose artistry is genuinely valuable.

thanks!

I'm interested, specifically with the vim keybindings, which would make getting started with it much easier for me.

I don’t really mind paying for SSO. It’s fine. But I hate that it’s the one feature in the “enterprise” tier that I need, and now I have to talk to a sales rep and sign a contract. You could have just charged me more per seat and it would have been better for both of us. Instead I looked for another vendor that didn’t let their sales team convince them to let the AEs gatekeep a basic feature.

FWIW, it worked fine on my phone. Brave on an iPhone

It’s like wordle: different word every day and everyone gets it. At least that’s what the text says once you get it.

Helps keep everyone on the same frequency

It wastes a fair amount of your time blabbing on about this cartoonishly evil company, but that evil company has no real effect on the gameplay, so it's just distracting and irritating. And it's not some sly or evocative social commentary; it's ham-fisted and over-the-top. It almost feels like listening to the caricatured horribleness of this company is an extra price you have to pay to play the underlying game.

The gameplay itself is just great though.

I don't know of anyone who thinks any idea can solve any problem instantly. And I don't see where I've expressed any view of the complexity or simplicity of anything. The discussion I thought we were having is whether it is wise to try a technical solution.

Iodized salt is a good example of a technical solution success story, and the one that was top of mind for me too. I don't think anyone thinks we should have waited for the underlying social problems to clear themselves. It certainly points out that these solutions need to be implemented well and have government support in order to be successful, but that's exactly why people are so upset about the political setbacks to golden rice.

Allowing people access to bullet proof vests sure seems desirable to me!

But also I think the "treating the gunshot wound" analogy is a better fit. A crop that produces vitamin A is a treatment for population suffering from vitamin A deficiency. And "let people grow this crop" is a much smaller social problem than "dramatically reduce poverty".

This seems confused to me. I don't see how bees playing, octopuses reacting to harmful stimuli, and cuttlefish remembering things is evidence of consciousness, and the article seems to confuse those things with bees having fun, octopuses feeling pain, and cuttlefish having reflective inner lives. But those are different things! Those are what we would experience doing those things, but it doesn't follow at all the other beings will just because they perform these activities.

A thought exercise is to imagine programming a little robot. It can play with balls because you program it to stimulate objects in its environment, and it has a heuristic called "interesting" that controls what it plays with. It can detect when it is damaged and avoid places where the damage happened (you can even call the variable where you store the quantity of damage "pain" if you want). It can remember places or objects by encoding characteristics about them and storing on the onboard flash drive. While none of that is at all easy, those are all things you could imagine programming without some great conceptual breakthrough. But you would probably not suspect your robot is conscious.

That's not an argument that bees are not conscious, and as far I understand it, there's no conceivable way to really know, and we don't even really have a great definition of consciousness to begin with. We have only guesses, and usually those guesses are something like "well, it seems like something that must emerge from a sufficiently complex brain, and mammals and birds have big complex brains, so they probably do, and mollusks don't, so probably they don't", etc.

A related thought exercise is to imagine an alien that is very smart but is not conscious, and doesn't understand us when we ask it about the experience of being itself.

I just read this whole thread, and it's all very silly. You've laundered "I don't like the water" into "it is not recommended that you drink the water" which are really different things. The latter implies that there is a consensus understanding about this, the way there is for, say, Guatemala. 200+ million Americans drink their tap water, and most visitors do too. There are many parts of the US where water could be improved, especially in lower-density places and especially for recently-discovered contaminants, but the idea that travelers need to be careful about it as a matter of safety just isn't true. Flint is a huge news story precisely because it is so aberrant in a country with otherwise good water.

I'm not quite following; are you saying it's not recommended that you drink American tap water? Or that there are bunch of other countries with sketchier water full of drinking fountains?