insomagent

You took it like a champ, dude, and I mean that in full sincerity. Best of luck on your journey to the sky.

Actually, Gavin, I think you're an excellent writer, actually, and I rather enjoyed your articles. I hope you'll keep posting.

It's just that... the US government, OSB and FBI agents, whoever is handling your application... They don't really have a sense of nuance when doing background investigations, nor should they be expected to have the resources to do so.

I don't mean to shit on your dream of flying commercially, in fact I hope you achieve it. I really just pointed out what I saw, something that might be a "code smell" type red flag that could lead to bias in the FAA's selection process, consciously or not.

I hope that my initial comment wasn't too crass, but sometimes people need to hear what they need to hear.

Hey dude, I'm a Christian too. However, you gotta realize that it's extremism that leads people to want to fly planes into buildings, something the FAA might be inclined to care a bit about.

Also, mix religious extremism with quips like "the US must die", and you've got a pretty good explanation for why your application might have been denied.

Also, extremism like this is not the best way to lead new people to Christ, bro. Jesus didn't care about whose face was on the denarius.

You think the FAA isn't doing background checks and internet searches, finding out everything they can about applicants?

If I apply for a part-time job at McDonald's, they're at the very least going to Google my first and last name.

I don't know man, maybe you should remove some of these posts next time you apply:

https://gavinhoward.com/2020/10/the-next-great-project-zion/

(This one jumped out to me in particular.) https://gavinhoward.com/2022/08/the-nature-of-heaven-what-i-...

https://gavinhoward.com/2021/07/the-next-free-nation/ https://gavinhoward.com/2021/06/israel-is-not-an-apartheid-s... https://gavinhoward.com/2020/07/political-slavery/

These posts you've been making might have more of an influence on your application than your medical history, bro.

edit:

In this post: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/07/the-next-free-nation/

You stated ..."So the United States must die.

But what will rise in its place will be even greater: Zion."

Bro, I would NOT want you flying my plane after reading that.

That is a good reason to forever hide your mental illnesses, which mean they will never get treated. Stupid policy.

ChatGPT, is this comment "good"?

ChatGPT, what websites are worth reading? I am interested in x, y and z.

It's funny to see a real article on Wikipedia divert so greatly from the trademark neutral encyclopedic writing style.

I tried it out for Chinese. Why does it only look up single characters instead of words, which are often composed of multiple characters? Also, some of the pronunciations are wrong. For example: 乾净 gan1jing4, 乾 showed up as qian2, which is wrong.

It means it all sucks.

I tried "Language Reactor" (Chinese) and it was full of errors and only looked up words as one character, which is borderline useless.

Crazy idea, if local LLMs are good enough to translate languages reliably, an open source extension that translates every page you visit would be so incredibly useful. You don't even have to change your habits, just carry on like normal, but while becoming a language sponge.

I guess you can already do this with Chrome's built-in translation, but that built-in translation leaves a lot to be desired, doesn't it?

Not only possible, but likely trivial.

I live in Taiwan, I've been learning Mandarin for 8 years and use it daily.

I kind of can't stand the mainland accent, and I can't understand simplified characters. You may have an easier time finding interesting content if you are learning mainland Chinese.

The big problem with Mandarin is that there's a content drought. I ask all my friends here what TV shows, games, YouTubers, movies they recommend. It's kind of hard to find good content in Mandarin.

Off the top of my head, though, there are a few really good ones. Here in Taiwan, though, the best stuff is either mixed with Taiwanese (Southern Hokkien) or purely in Taiwanese. That's a bit inaccessible for L2 folks such as myself, but I'm doing the best I can.

If you're not interested in Taiwanese content, sorry if these are of no use to you.

In no order: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marry_My_Dead_Body https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%A4%8D%E5%8A%87%E5%A0%B4%E2... (Taiwanese heavy, maybe 100% Taiwanese) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_in_Love_(2021_film) (I think 100% Taiwanese, sorry!)

I think the content/culture drought is one of the most difficult factors in learning Chinese, personally. I used to study Japanese very seriously, and there was always a never-ending stream of amazing anime, games, TV shows, music, you name it.

I will say, though, if you're into music, the Taiwan indie music scene is world-class. Really good stuff.

Is this the same one that made the Vader experience?

The congressional hearing was hilarious. I thought the TikTok CEO did great, and the vast majority of questions Congress asked were pants-on-head ridiculous. They are so out of touch.

Maybe we need oligopoly laws in addition to monopoly laws.

Crypto. Now you know why it's being so heavily regulated, demonized, and lampooned.

> The stories come courtesy of Microsoft’s MSN content network, which syndicates content from hundreds of web publishers: some reputable, some less so. Full disclosure: Our parent company, Future Plc, has a syndication agreement with MSN and many of its sites, including Tom’s Hardware, occasionally have articles appear on the network. What’s problematic here, though, is not that MSN syndicates content but that it often pushes the equivalent of the Weekly World News table of contents right into the Windows operating system where it can be hard to avoid.

CRA is deprecated? Glad I switched to Vue a while back, jeeze.

Does anybody have a torrent for the 13B weights used for alpaca.cpp?

Bard will go down as one of the LLMs ever released.

John Carmack left Oculus to work on an AGI startup. Of course he's not going to fearmonger AI's disastrous effects on the job market, he has a business to market.

Just a fun observation, these layoffs are happening around the same time GPT-4 was released.

I think the current train of thought is "keep increasing the size of the language model and you don't need to worry about integrating with LSPs".

Perhaps there is some merit to this. If the language model is large enough to contain the entirety of the documentation and the LSP itself, then why bother integrating with the LSP? _Especially_ if you can just paste the entirety of your codebase into the LLM.

I mean, we already kinda do that with Stack Overflow and cargo cult programming.

Your comment made me suddenly remember just how high our opinions were of Google in the early days. They could do no wrong. "Do no evil" was truly their DNA, and we felt like they were the good guys in this evil tech world.

Boy, how times have changed.

Yeah, TikTok is to blame for falling birth rates in America, not the fact that our wages can't keep up with inflation, I'll never own a home, I'll never retire, the job market is plummeting, and WW3 looms right around the corner.

In part? What part?

Then let's change your company's name FFS.

Reminds me of the Boston Dynamics dog robot being kicked, it felt like getting stabbed in the gut when I saw such a display of "cruelty."