pugets

It probably does suck! I’m not very experienced, and I was just whipping up something quick to test if my random MSFS2020 mod idea could work.

Copilot is crazy. The other day, I was writing a Python function that would call a Wikipedia API. I pulled from the internet an example of a GET request, and pasted it as a comment in my code.

  # sample call: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&list=geosearch&gscoord=37.7891838%7C-122.4033522&gsradius=10000&gslimit=100

Then I defined a variable,

  base_url = "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?"

Then, like magic, Copilot suggested all the remaining keys that would go in the query params. It even knew which params were to be kept as-is, and which ones would come from my previous code:

  action = "query"  # action=query
  format = "json"  # or xml
  lat = str(latitude.value)  # 37.7891838
  lon = str(longitude.value)  # -122.4033522
  gscoord = lat + "%7C" + lon
  ...
  api_path = base_url + "action=" + action + "&format=" + format + ... + "&gscoord=" + gscoord

As a guy who gets easily distracted while programming, Copilot saves me a lot of time and keeps me engaged with my work. I can only imagine what it'll look like 10 years from now.

Any organization willing to put "Civil Liberties" in their name should be foremost concerned with the individual liberties of Americans. So it worries me that their position on the Second Amendment is:

> Given the reference to "a well regulated Militia" and "the security of a free State," the ACLU has long taken the position that the Second Amendment protects a collective right rather than an individual right.

https://www.aclu.org/other/second-amendment

Of course, they have their reasons. And they concede that there are some instances where the state goes too far with regulations and prohibitions. But I would want to see an organization which defends civil liberties to frequently err on the side of protecting the individual than the government.

Related: 53% of Democrats and 56% of Republicans see other Americans as being the greatest threat to America's way of life (over foreign threats, economic disaster, and climate forces). [0]

It pains me what's happened to discourse in the last 10 years. I suspect social media has played a role. Many liberals and conservatives frequent these online partisan bubbles where they are exposed to the crazies of the other side (and only the crazies) while dodging the controversies that would make them question their own beliefs.

Surely, if there are foreign propaganda peddlers on social media, then the strategy they follow is not to aid one party or the other, but to pull from both sides until we collapse in the middle.

[0] https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...

It's okay for people to vote D on some issues and R on some other issues. That's pretty much an inevitability for any person with diverse views in a two-party system.

Besides, at the end of the day, how different are the two sides? One party wants to prosecute a reporter who found a site vulnerability, and the other party wants to prosecute the man who exposed the world to the dragnet surveillance being conducted by the NSA.

My questions: What about the children? Are we ready as a society for it to be legal for someone to possess an image of a topless 14-year-old girl on their computer?

Should the law view child toplessness differently than adult toplessness? And if so, then how would we be making be a step towards the desexualization of the nipple?

As someone with ADHD, I had to uninstall TikTok because it became too much of a distraction in my life. When videos auto-load, have no previews, and take a commitment of only a couple of seconds, it's too easy to watch one more video too many times.

A lot of teenagers only care about being popular, and will stray from their true selves to achieve popularity. That's why parents always tell their kids "just be yourself," and why kids sometimes respond "it's not a phase, mom, this is who I am."

I couldn’t think of a more Californian approach to fixing racial inequity. Instead of providing more economic opportunities for minorities to become executives, just make it illegal for the companies to not make them executives. Meanwhile, continue your state tradition of gentrifying diverse neighborhoods and letting techies take over San Francisco and LA.

I think a lot of these dumb laws get pushed through because few people are willing to speak out against them for fear of being mischaracterized. The liberal Democrats are riding the wave of the cultural zeitgeist.

I wonder how many of these users are unique. TikTok makes it simple to have two or more accounts. A number of content creators (especially ones who make NSFW non-nude content) have alt accounts that they can use when their main gets muted.

I think I understand the motivation for having a law prohibiting auto makers from selling straight to consumers. I’m sure it has more to do with money than ethics.

My question: Why autos, but not other consumer goods? Should I be restricted from buying an iPhone from an Apple store, rather than Greg’s Phone Emporium?

I agree with all of that, but I think you’re making the case that leftists are in fact averse to debate. If an outsider can’t interact with a couple people on social media without having already read all the important literature and knowing the “established” answers to pesky questions like “why do attempts at establishing communism so often result in authoritarian conditions,” then the community is not open to being prodded. Many of these communities are intentionally insular. Why would they be open to people questioning their philosophy when most of society does that already?

Modern American leftism, at least on social media, is really weird.

You have a lot of these so-called leftists rebelling against the philosophies of Marx and other communist philosophers on very fundamental issues (e.g. gun ownership for the proletariat, or the freedom of speech) all because of the current political climate in America. At the same time, these people will support and protect Big Tech and other capitalist interests when it is politically convenient to do so. I've heard American leftism once jokingly called Socialism with Silicon Valley Characteristics.

Ask any one of these new-age leftists what they think of Alex Jones' YouTube channel being banned, and they will hit you with a response that would disturb any of the Gen X leftists who grew up in an era where Communist was a dirty word and the protection of free speech was a top-most necessity. New-age leftists have grown up in the left-sympathetic social media era and cannot conceptualize the pendulum ever swinging the opposite direction.

I tried to do this on a few different sites, but in my experience, there simply aren't enough good-faith actors. The dirtbag left[0] reigns over the nice fellows in leftist circles on Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook. They don't want to engage capitalists in debate... they don't even want anyone in their own ranks playing devil's advocate. They want to call you a chud and take a screenshot of it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirtbag_left

I read the comment in a different way: We are all literally primates. Humans and apes share a lot of physical characteristics. It's not odd that an AI would confuse humans with primates, it's just unfortunate.

I also have ADHD, and worse still, I'm all out of medication until mid-September.

The reality is we have to be in control of our lives despite our condition. If you can't remember things, write them down. If you have a hard time focusing, try to remove distractions from your environment. If your day is unstructured, plan tomorrow out tonight. If you are constantly awake at 3am, set your bedtime earlier and use whatever tools you need to make sure you are asleep at 10pm.

I'm convinced there's just no other way to handle life. The world won't wait for us to be ready, so we have to ready ourselves. It's unfair, but that's life.

On episode #1682 he talks about both figures. He was saying he does feel a responsibility to vet his guests so that he doesn’t just have crazies using his platform to spew vile, but ultimately that neither figure harms anyone just by being a guest on a podcast. He talked about how even if you hate Alex or Milo, you can still gain something from listening to them speak. Maybe you can figure out why you hate them, or maybe listening to them directly will make you understand them in a different light.

Maybe this is a 1990s George Carlin thing to say, but so what if Milo offends people? Should we only be allowed to hear things that don’t offend us?

For all you React users (Reactionaries?) out there, there's React Leaflet. I'm in the process of making a little React portfolio app that randomly generates airports within a user-defined distance of each other (for all the indecisive Flight Sim users), and with this library it took all of about 20 minutes to put the airports on a map, draw a line between them, and center the map on them. Really neat stuff.

https://react-leaflet.js.org/

The point is that the house is valued at around $1 million, and Buffett’s net worth is around $82 billion.

I found politics to be too pervasive to escape on Reddit, which is why I eventually deleted my account. I tried to stick to non-political subreddits, but when I found myself reading comments about police brutality in r/dogswithjobs, I knew I no longer wanted to use the site.

What's sad is the political discussions aren't even good. Comments are written to appeal to the lowest common denominator of reader, and a lot of subreddit comment sections move at breakneck speed, so what you end up with is a bunch of politically like-minded people dogpiling on top of each other to write something like "Being a republican at this point is basically saying you agree with killing the planet" (an actual current top comment on r/news right now). A few comments down in the chain will be a Futurama reference.

Not to the average person. Even CS freshmen seem to think game design means playing early prototypes of Grand Theft Auto 6.

What I miss more than anything else is having an attention span. Years of abusing social media has left my brain pinballing all over the place. I am a collection of unfinished thoughts. Even as I write this, I can feel my mind needing to latch onto something new.

I think it depends on the website. I used Reddit between 2012-2020 and I believe that website's community was ruined by the upvote/downvote system.

For me, what it always comes back to is this: A downvote is meant to indicate "this comment does not contribute to the conversation," but many website userbases misuse downvotes to say "I disagree." If upvotes/downvotes are proxies for agrees/disagrees, then the comment sections can get ugly.

I believe HN thrives despite the upvote/downvote system because this website is a little more mature than others.

We should take a step back. The location of the recording doesn't matter so much (though sometimes it does matter). The bigger idea here is that some interactions between citizens and LEOs are private matters and not in the public's interest.

As an anecdote, when my friend was the victim of domestic violence, she confided her history with her abuser to an officer, and that officer gave her very individualized care. Whether their conversation happened inside a bedroom, at a front door step, or at a public park doesn't matter. My friend would not want her abuser, her estranged family members, or anyone else to a hold of the conversation she had with the officer.

Keep in mind, you’re retired. Shorts have infinite risk.

The public is partisan if it dislikes damnatory but true information when the timing of it is inconvenient to a political party.

It's sort of similar to the Brett Kavanaugh ordeal. Going from memory, the first accuser told her story in private to a Congresswoman in the summer of 2018, I believe it was in July. That politician sat on the information for the rest of July, the entirety of August, and the first few weeks of September. Only when it was closer to the midterm elections and the confirmation process did the Democrats launch their attack against Kavanaugh's character. They urged Congress to delay the vote until after the midterms, which they were hoping to win in a landslide, so that they could deny Kavanaugh a seat.

In either case, we have politically-minded people deliberately timing the release of information. As regular voters, we have to decide what's more important: what the information reveals, or how it is being weaponized.

I can't understate how much a fitness program and a proper wardrobe can turn your life around. In college I learned how to dress myself, how to layer, how to buy shirts that fit, etc. and after college I lost a lot of weight. Hoo boy. I became an entirely different person. If I knew I looked this good under all my baby fat, I would have started dieting 10 years prior.

To all the young men out there in particular... live up to your potential, man. You're only going to be in your 20s once. You don't want to spend it all waddling around in cargo shorts with messy hair. Lose the weight, lift some barbells, eat more protein, buy a Seiko, iron your work shirt, layer your clothes, try a skincare routine, and look as good as you possibly can. You'll become more confident, and people love confidence, so you'll be even more liked.

Post-scarcity is a pipe dream. Even amoeba understand that life is a competition for resources. Stand still and you die.

Even if the whole world lived in a post-scarce global society, there would be wars fought over who controls the supply chains, who lives downtown and who lives uptown, who eats veal and who eats chicken, etc. And there would be entrepreneurial types who are willing to trade food for lumber, or land for sex.

It's very unofficial, but I heard a debate last fall after city officials uprooted a children's playground over concerns of COVID spread. It lead me to an article which mentioned health officials who were advocating for opening children's playgrounds, with the CDC stating that surface transmission is "not thought to be the main way the virus spreads."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/playground-safe...

Optimal Stopping is the first chapter of Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths' book Algorithms to Live By, which does a good job describing the problem in laymen terms.