IgorPartola

I was thinking about this in terms of products recently. Gendered products tend to move from men to women, but rarely the other way around. High heels, Chuck Taylors, motorcycles, etc.

Some products do move the other way but it is a slow process: massages, wet wipes (Dude Wipes anyone?), manicures, etc. But I think a good majority of products marketed to women have a much harder time crossing over.

For what cost? Last I saw you had to pay at least a few hundred dollars a year and run enough network infrastructure to justify it.

Scored approval voting takes care of ten candidates. And sure let’s say after 3 elections with no winner fines could be imposed too, Australia style. But I would hope that having no representation while having the opportunity to have representation would be motivation enough.

Yes and the idea would be to change both politician and voter behavior. To me these arguments are like saying that because we have always put water into round glasses it would never fit in a square one.

I think my idea for this is that a candidate doesn’t win the election unless they get more than 50% of all eligible votes, not 50% of the votes cast. If there is no clear winner the seat is vacant, but a new election is scheduled for two weeks later. Districts and states that don’t care to vote simply don’t get a say.

When I was in undergrad we used CF quite a bit for the custom university applications. I cut a lot of my wed development teeth on it. But everyone hated it. So we were actually quite excited to get a PHP server. It could run open source alternatives to Blackboard after all!

I played around with PHP quite a bit in my senior year and got a job as a developer working for a PHP shop when I graduated. Boy was I absolutely disillusioned within 12 months. PHP nearly ruined my love of computers. It was an abusive relationship: I would spend my working hours writing horrible little patches to ancient systems that were made of spaghetti 10 miles long, then go home and night and weekend try to write beautiful code in PHP. The more little patches I wrote the more I felt the need to somehow make them right.

I escaped to Python and JS and have done a lot of therapy since. Doing much better these days, thankfully. My addiction to C seems like such a minor vice in comparison.

This looks so much like https://dns.he.net/ that it seems to me it can’t be a coincidence. Is this a case of copying a well known design or is there more to it?

So you are trying to DIY a government but with no prior experience? Sounds like a nightmare.

I didn’t say it was good. I said it was better than Temu and AliExpress.

Those flashlight are amazing and amazing value. I would also include in this Triangle Labs and MKS offerings for 3D printer parts.

There are some differences.

Temu’s UI is unusable. You are constantly presented with roulette wheels for coupons you can’t dismiss. Its dark patterns have dark patterns. AliExpress is only mildly better in that you can dismiss stuff.

Both T and A still have listings for things that will likely result in you getting something entirely different. This usually applies to more expensive and physically larger items. You might order a greenhouse and get a photo of one or a schematic of one. And I don’t mean that the description will make it clear.

Both have a pattern where they might list let’s say an MP3 player which costs $30 but the price on the listing will be $3 because one of the product variants is just the case.

Amazon has comparatively reliable shipping and it’s included with the price on a majority of products if you have a Prime membership. While Temu and AliExpress do have US-based shipping they still don’t guarantee when the thing will arrive and if you are looking at these products the price difference basically disappears.

I am not defending Amazon by any means, but purely on usability it wins hands down.

Is too. They could have thought through the law they were writing and predicted malicious compliance. Or written a stronger law. Or revised the law when they spotted malicious compliance.

I have a love/hate relationship with OpenSCAD. The idea of coding up shapes is neat and for some things that’s the path of least resistance. On the other hand nothing in OpenSCAD really makes clean code the happy path. Sometimes it is just easier to hardcode a known value or to design a part in a way that is difficult to modify later. Yes you have modules but what a module is is arbitrary. The idea that by default things are positioned globally and you can’t attach two parts to each other is rough. The fact that it generates surfaces and not solids means you can’t export 3D models into other software if you use hull().

Yet I tried alternatives and found them way too complex with their UI. I have a FreeCAD tutorial bookmarked so when I find a dozen hours to learn it I will. In the meantime when I need something simple and quick, OpenSCAD gets me there.

Mac got the Command key right. Windows got the Home and End keys right. Wish we could have both on one system.

Now that this work is done and out in the open what in theory would prevent the next generation of LLMs from ingesting it and eventually a non-Apple employee creating yet another driver “from scratch” but with the knowledge of how the hardware works acquired from an LLM or with the help of one?

Basically, aren’t we facing a situation where LLM-assisted knowledge laundering is becoming a thing?

It can still invoke them in subagents and does this.

My parents learned to program on punch cards. They told me it was a day of preparing the program, an hour of running it, just to get a syntax error.

There are apparently several traditional roof shingle makers who have previewed solar tiles. A friend of mine who is a roofer told me he would not trust Tesla and is waiting for a reliable supplier. Apparently he is a smart man.

In Russian we use tomat and pomidor interchangeably.

For some reason Claude Code keeps using awk, sed, and even Python to do basic file editing. Anyone know why that changed with the 5 series?

1. JSON parsers are available at your corner convenience store.

2. The format is too simple to have ambiguous behavior. No weird “yes” means true, 0 means false, odd rules about comments, blah blah blah. It’s hard to fuck up JSON (but obviously not impossible if you get creative).

3. It errors out early in the parsing if you mess it up.

4. Its data types are present in more or less any language.

5. Most configs are just key/value. JSON does this reasonably well.

6. It is easy to generate and validate JSON documents. For some use cases you don’t need a library (though you should use one).

7. There is only one way to do anything (sane).

8. Everyone is familiar with it.

9. It is dynamic. You do not need to pre-define your sections or keys ahead of time.

10. It can easily be auto formatted to look good with zero risk of changing semantics.

11. Data stores often natively support storing and querying JSON objects.

12. If you are old enough to remember the era when every tool invented its own, often very buggy, config format and parser you will also remember the moment you first saw a JSON config file that was parsed with a standard library parser and thought “finally, this is the modern way”, you will understand why JSON continues being popular. It was the first thing that unambiguously worked compared to what came before it.

This is like asking why people use their keys to open packages: it might not be the right tool for the job but it’s hard to mess up, is the closest thing to you that can get the job done, and everyone (with functioning hands/fingers) can do it with little issue.

I am also certain there is some small but non-zero percentage of people who do it simply because everyone else moralizes about not doing it. Spite is a powerful thing.

What’s really fun is mixing signal handling and threads, especially on Linux. There is a simple way to do it and about a thousand ways that include at least one gotcha.

I am curious why LLM writing has such an uncanny valley feel to it. Like if I was talking to a person who constantly used a phrase they liked I would notice it and it is possible I might get irritated by it, but I wouldn’t necessarily.

In high school I had a teacher that would say “that type of thing” a lot. One time my friend and I counted it during one class period and he averaged to use the phrase every 48 seconds on average. It was funny, but it never irritated us.

And this is just one example of I am sure thousands I have personally experienced where a friend, family member, or coworker has a peculiar way of speaking and it at most feels odd but not annoying. Yet when I see an emdash now I instantly feel irritated.

And I say this as someone who actively enjoys using Claude and other LLMs, including coding, casual research, or even having it explain pop culture phenomenon or sociology research to me.

On the other hand this shows that it is possible and gives a floor for performance.

I guess I am in the minority but I did not have a good time with Darktable. I used it for a few years and then had to hold my nose and transition to Lightroom. On decent hardware (MacBook Pro that was only a few years old) it was dog slow. But the worst part was transitioning from their version 2 to version 3 of the workflow or whatever they called it. None of my old photos would render correctly after that and half of the modules I learned to use to edit my photos were not obsolete.

The documentation for it is dense. It’s like you need to know the inner workings of the software to be able to do things like basic color correction. And even basic masking was just awkward as hell. When I quit it did not have smart object detection either so removing things from the background required editing the photo in external software.

Lightroom isn’t perfect. But it is fast, it is intuitive, and it does not expose modules that the documentation says to never use.

I really wish I could use open source software for this. But I have yet to find a good alternative that lets me do what I want (which is fairly basic, I don’t go crazy with my editing) that doesn’t require me to get a Masters degree in its usage.

They include an LLM response with every single Google search, whether it is warranted or not. That scale is, my guess, many orders of magnitude higher than what OpenAI and Anthropic serve. And for Google none of these are paid interactions since their LLMs do not (YET) insert ads into the responses.

So my guess is that Google will continue having compute shortages until the Gemini enshittification starts.

To be fair Microsoft was always shitware. I don’t remember a time when using a Windows machine just worked, didn’t take up gigabytes of space, didn’t crash, and didn’t get messed up by simply using it requiring a yearly or semi-yearly reinstall.

Lots of programs report progress when you send SIGUSR1 or SIGUSR2.

https://sbaproject.org/ has the same thing. Sometimes visiting a website can have very real and very violent consequences. Thankfully these folks know what they are doing.

My thesis on that is just that AI generated content is generally viewed as worse than human-generated content, but it is a lot cheaper. There is a lot of (financial) incentive to create and post a lot of cheap AI generated content and trying to pass it as higher quality human-generated content than to be honest about it.

It’s the same reason recipe websites don’t honestly label that they ripped off other recipe websites: it would train users to go to the source.