Nzen

I had to stop using these terms as I really meant the time zone and not anything about the daylight savings situation. Someone called me out, asking whether I really meant to get together for an hour in the past of the time I said. I've opted to say ETZ when coordinating a meeting with people in the Eastern timezone (and I don't expect anyone to learn that it is UTC -4 with me).

Popular works regularly mine the (public domain) past. Disney animated movies like Cinderella did so. Seth Grahame-Smith did so with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. and so on. That is literally the benefit of copyright expiration, that other people can utilize and transform a published work.

I would be interested in reading some reporting about USAID's role in support of the CIA (or DoD intelligence?). Please recommend some that helped form your opinion.

I have, luckily, read a personal account of the logistical assistance that a USAID contractor had [0]. Doug Muir wrote about improving customs practices in Rwanda and training locals to take over for him. Improving, in this case, means standardizing inspections of trade goods to decrease holding time.

[0] https://crookedtimber.org/2025/03/08/usaid-my-next-to-last-p...

Their github page links to the github site. That site has up to date videos, albeit unlisted, ex https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L_J0J8-_m4

I assume this person heard about keepass [0] and accesses it from multiple devices with a dropbox or icloud style service. Or doesn't access it from multiple devices. I just synchronize my password database on a slow cadence or as needed.

[0] https://keepass.info/

I think that you've missed the reference [0] implicit in kelseyfrog's response. Or am I missing some reference about how japanese gardens are germaine to AI/LLM/covert-discussion ?

[0] https://iep.utm.edu/chinese-room-argument/ tl;dr a thought experiment about a non-chinese-reading person translating chinese texts solely by using proscribed rules, intended to highlight whether the translator develops some sort of understanding

I can't speak to computing history in China, but Read Only Memory has books about the Japanese [0] and British [1] video game companies. MIT has published books about computing in Taiwan, Bulgaria, and China [2]. The former two are even open access, so you can download them for free.

[0] https://readonlymemory.com/products/japansoft-an-oral-histor...

[1] https://readonlymemory.com/products/britsoft-an-oral-history

[2] https://direct.mit.edu/books/search-results?f_ContentType=Bo...

On the clean hand, are the trustworthy tools there for me to plunge out a big poop or wipe a bit of overspray ? I sometimes see a plunger, but don't ever bring rubber gloves and a roll of paper towel that would make me feel comfortable cleaning up a nasty toilet.

On the dirty hand, I used to see (evidence that) someone clog(ged) a one of the toilets in an office building that I shared with lawyers, once a month or so. I developed a head canon that this person acted out their dissatisfaction with the lawyer or counterparty on the rest of the building.

Laurence Paulson laments a bug that fooled Ramana Kumar using both Lean proof system and the Nanoda (plugin ? library ?) into thinking that he found a counterexample to the famous Collatz Conjecture [0]. It sounds like Kumar or someone extended the Lean software to postulate that a certain style of proof is true and Kumar's larger proof hallucinated a class of numbers that enter a cycle in the Collatz sequence.

[0] https://github.com/xrchz/CollatzLean Paulson (mercifully?) did not link to Kumar's repository or paper [1]

[1] https://websim.com/@BookwormKevin/collatz-conjecture-simulat... this is a visualization of the Collatz sequence of numbers that is conjectured - but not proven - to always terminate at 1.

Paulson laments this as there are ways of building up the rules from axioms (program objects?), but it is really tedious. He recounts crafting a "system of combinators" (in 1986) that one could build on to express recursive functions.

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074771718... DOI 10.1016/S0747-7171(86)80002-5

This is a pretty short post observing that some art has achieved celebrity. Consider the Mona Lisa, you probably can imagine it just from the title. When I went to the Louvre, there was a mob around the (quite small) painting of people who - like me - came to finally see what we'd already seen dozens of times before. This post ends on the idea that celebrity is not always a measure of quality, given that many great works existed (and exist) without the marketing to vault them into larger social awareness.

I am of the impression that the mission is defined by having the pin ball hit the places where the blue arrow points within a set amount of time.

It's a bit of a shame that Microsoft only licensed Space Cadet Pinball from Cinematronics for Windows 95 and XP [0].

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20181221-00/?p=10...

Wikipedia is written by various people, but likely someone with interest in a given topic. One or more realtors probably wrote or edited this post.

Actually, the history of edits shows that this is contested territory where people regularly remove what they term as spam links. So, while a disinterested editor might remove a link to a listicle about how to stage your home, they might leave in the breathless tone as harmless. The drive by editors probably feel that they have no more time to rewrite it than we do, given that they watch over many articles, not just this one.

In 2022 [0], Jan David Nose (jdno) released a game / programming challenge called _Auto Traffic Control_ [1]. Rather than controlling airplanes with UI interactions, the simulation is a GRPC server that expects the player to construct a game client that issues flight paths.

I tried to make a game client for jdno's ATC [2]. My client was deficient, as I tried to treat the movement as a fixed interval, by only submitting flight plans that moved in cartesian directions. Only by cheating, modifying the simulator, could my greedy algorithm land any planes [3]. I suspect I was supposed to continuously model and poll the future positions of airplanes when developing a flight plan.

I suspect that I won't have much competition on the leaderboard, despite the asterisk, as jdno eventually archived the project [4]. Originally, the project was self-publication while looking for work. The Rust Foundation hired him a little while afterward.

[0] https://jdno.dev/auto-traffic-control/

[1] https://auto-traffic-control.com/

[2] https://github.com/Nzen/hircine-anise-okkoz

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czsSjy1Uqyk 1.5 minutes

[4] https://github.com/jdno/auto-traffic-control/commit/b5972dfb...

Thank you [0]. I searched and all I could find was Virgin Media's Daisy [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_(chatbot)

[1] https://news.virginmediao2.co.uk/o2-unveils-daisy-the-ai-gra...

It feels like this list, if it focuses on individual authors is - if successful - overwhelming in scope. There are, what, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of authors ? If 1%, for argument's sake, this list would have thousands of links.

Nonetheless, I'll promote an author of both non- and fiction ebooks I've bought from, Michael W Lucas [0].

[0] https://www.tiltedwindmillpress.com/

I think that this is a plugin library for teams that want to offer a platform for the public (or an LLM-AI) to submit code to. If your team writes some code, you don't generally sandbox it from yourself, you just amend your program: you don't need a sandbox. But, if you want to run code that you don't trust, you should run it in a way that prevents it from causing problems if it is actually dangerous (like a virus or accidentally overwrites your files with blank files). That's what a sandbox like kyushu promises to do.

So, with a sandbox library like this, you could - say - write a website that hosts games (like itch.io or newgrounds) that hosts games on the world wide web. The sandbox part can give you confidence that, if a villain's programmer henchmen uploads a virus instead of a game, it can't infect your platform or other games on the website. Or, if a LLM-AI written game is accidentally tries to take up all the memory of the computer, it can't ask the operating system for more than is in the sandbox.

I don't know what an ovulatory cycle feels like; but, I trust Lindsay Doe's account [0] of how she feels across a given period.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLXxxHVOeec 11 minutes

If I am to believe the creator of the _History in Taberna_ youtube channel, communal beds were a medieval to early modern practice in inns [0].

[0] https://youtu.be/5IPQIl-FiCY?si=drUMJuR5tLLppWqD&t=738 relevant section is 13:00 - 14:00 of a 30 minute video about various inn / tavern aspects.

tl;dr Peter Steinberger shared a product demo for CodexBar [0] with a graph of OpenAI token usage. This graph shows one million spent, prefers gpt-5.5 and spent twenty thousand today.

[0] https://github.com/steipete/CodexBar

However, I do not see a strong reason to believe that this is his actual, personal usage. It could be all openclaw usage or some subset of openai usage, given that he is inside them. I suspect it is far more likely to be fake data [1] that exercises the graph library in a visually satisfying way. Notice that it has no usage for a 'week' after April 15 (a Wednesday), but picks up a bunch later. As marketing copy it needn't have any basis in reality [2]. I should hope openai would put a procedure in front of their entrepreneur acquisition that prevents accidentally exposing trade secrets [3].

[1] https://github.com/faker-js/faker

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/comments/lf2n4...

[3] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PostingWhatYouSh...

tl;dr Quasicrystals are aperiodic structures. The author notes that the conditions for creating them are rare, given the need for instantaneous high temperature. They recount that these can happen during space debris impact and when lightning hits sand. They close out by describing some of the chemical 'formulas' for these materials, given that characterizing a prototypical section is difficult without repeating elements.

I don't have anything to say about quasicrystals, other than it seems right up this blog's alley, as the other most recent articles are about math and materials (like feldspars [0]).

[0] https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Fam...

tl;dr The author [0] describes a simple ticketing system that his very busy coworker, Peter Högfeldt, created in 1986. Basically, it checked in numbered files to their version control (CVS, at the time) that could produce reports with grep. This system's simplicity lead to its longevity, as people could learn it easily and trust that its bugs had been ironed out long ago. This is in contrast to some OS software that tries to be everything to everyone and changes all the time [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Armstrong_(programmer) Joe Armstrong, of Erlang fame, so his blog posts have been discussed in the past.

[1] https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2023/01/01/state-of-the-windo...

I find this a helpful example. When I've heard the unix philosophy in the past, I didn't feel super convinced. Like, sure tar can do one thing, because it is a library (ignore that it can use gzip). But, where do you draw the line with a program like gnucash (financial tracking software) ? The core of the domain will involve keeping a ledger of transactions and converting them to relevant units. But, typing credit card charges in by hand is tedious [2], the kind of tedious that a computer should be good at. I would much rather that the program connect to my bank [3], to get the transactions directly.

[2] https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/Inventorie...

[3] https://beanhub.io/blog/2024/06/24/introduction-of-beanhub-c...

tl;dr Eels have a long lifecycle with several stages. They do not develop sexual organs until late in their life, when they migrate back to the Saragossa Sea. This meant earlier autopsies of eels revealed no sexual organs, even though scientists could provoke them with hormone therapy. So, a team lead by Jose Azevedo tagged female eels in the Azores in 2018, and tracked them via satellite [0].

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-19248-8

I sometimes think about the selection pressures that lead to complex life cycles, like fig wasps. I find myself thinking about it naively, like one existed and the other grew into the niche. But, realistically, everything is changing (slowly) all the time. I just notice it for, say, influenza because their cycle time is so short.

You could add an appendix with printed, scannable, binary data. You could create a page with a bunch of QR codes. Martin Monperrus vouched [0] for Twibright Optar [1].

[0] https://www.monperrus.net/martin/store-data-paper

[1] https://ronja.twibright.com/optar/

tl;dr This is a project page describing a small hand woven loom. Small, means a little wider than a palm and maybe half the length of a forearm (depending on which you buy). Basically, you will run a string between two circular combs along the length of the stand and weave a separate thread or yarn horizontally many times to make a piece of fabric. These seem to cost at least 100$.

I recommend listening to DJ Earworm's mashup of the top song across the world [0] to hear a greater variety of countries, albeit for this or last year.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDZ78RbAdxU 11 minutes

In fairness to this post, they probably posted as much as they could get easily and consistently. I feel like the same situation reigns for country history in book shops. When I go to a used book store in Queens, New York, I'm not apt to find any books about Jaipur, India. But, if I were to go to Mumbai, India, I could probably find something. So, maybe we should prevail upon or sponsor people in Africa to volunteer their lists.

It looks like Mark Thomas maintained a phone number database up until 2007 or 2023 for many areas in the USA. I guess that could be a basis for starting 'my own' instance of payphone-go, maybe with twilio (or equivalent) to receive the calls.

[0] https://www.payphone-project.com/numbers/usa/ going through the state map feature only shows a subset compared to navigating through the links on this page.

This sounds a lot like Jason Rohrer's project with an LLM, Sammy Jankis [0]. There, the posts are generally about the continual deaths when the LLM's context window fills up. The posts do not disclose an overt goal, as they do here, so the LLM has supposedly created a bunch of games and simulations.

[0] https://sammyjankis.com/

In this case, I think that 100$ as a starting budget (while probably appropriate for the initiating person) is not enough for a substantive business. I guess the server that runs the LLM is a subsidized asset, so this situation doesn't require renting one. I guess, as a hypothetical LLM, I could try to sell customized fan fiction to fetish communities. Most of the mainstream LLM hosts reputedly have guardrails to discourage such output. On the other hand, selling in those communities largely requires trust [1], but that might take time that this scenario doesn't permit.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emdki5B_O7Q . (60+ minute video by Matthew Colville largely directed at fledgling authors)

For targeting advertising expendatures at the site level. If most of my traffic, as revealed by referrer links, comes from social-media-platform-foo and only a little from social-media-platform-bar, then I am likely to spend more on ads from foo than from bar. I'll grant that it is a noisy measure, but doesn't need to be about tracking a particular individual.

Did you expect some answer that decried world peace as impossible ? It's just repeating what people say [0] when asked the same question. That's all that a large language model can do (other than putting it to rhyme or 'in the style of Charles Dickens').

[0] https://newint.org/features/2018/09/18/10-steps-world-peace

If you are looking for a vision of general AI that confirms a Hobbsian worldview, you might enjoy Lars Doucet's short story, _Four Magic Words_.

[1] https://www.fortressofdoors.com/four-magic-words/

If you want to see examples of this in practice, I recommend reading Randall Monroe's Thing Explainer [0] or some simple wikipedia articles [1].

[0] https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/

[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit (versus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit)