OrderlyTiamat

Also in a beloved role as Alfred Bester in Babylon 5. I also just read he still did voice acting for star trek as recently as a couple years ago!

He will be missed.

SPARQL is cool, but fairly limited. For example, one cannot implement common graph operations like a BFS or a DFS in SPARQL, and SQL of course can (even though I wouldn't necessarily recommend it). I was fairly puzzled when I figured this out. This means SQL is strictly more expressive than SPARQL!

Gettier cases are in fact the refutation of the simplistic JTB conception of knowledge.

I can't blame Chainguard for breaching an embargo which was already nonexistent at the time. If the embargo is broken already, they have a duty to their customers to upload as soon as possible.

All parties have that duty, but it's better if they do that at the same time.

... That's why you have an embargo.

Thank you for this wonderful game!

I took some perverse pleasure from the wall of complexity-- as you said, "that's the point". That really came through in my play experience, and I think that adds to it.

I just played it for half an hour, it's enjoyable! My budget's tidy, the beloved raccoon still has a place in the city hall, and my mayor approval is steadily- but ever so slowly- going up. Feels like old school sim city!

I'm really impressed by the quality given that it seems heavily vibe coded, I'd assumed I would encounter many issues, but I've found only minor bugs so far.

If it's just a phone call, why involve the police at all? But if that doesn't work, and it's critical that someone is woken up and no one is near, I could see the police as a reasonable option.

I agree with GP that my first instinct would be "lawyer", but I'm imagining the police at the door saying something like "hey we're here to inform you there's an urgent xyz, we'll now be on our way" and leaving. At that point that's the police matter resolved, no?

>This is definitely projection.

Well, this person was discussing their own feelings. You're accusing them of... projecting their own feelings on themselves? This is a very strange comment.

That's a very bad look. Both of these incidents make me happy I haven't implemented Home Assistant yet, I'll look for something else.

> but it's hard to see through it when your own life revolves around "because money"

I wouldn't put it that way. There's lots of people who wish for a life that doesn't "revolve around money", but who can't afford to stop working at their current pace.

just to make this explicit, that includes all people who aren't upper middle class or more wealthy.

This doesn't include a roomba.

In general the game of necessary and sufficient conditions for any non mathematical concept will always lead to inconsistencies, there's no such prescriptive "definition" for most words. try defining "game", or "chair" in such a way!

I think AI assistance in writing is fine for what it's worth. Perhaps you'd like https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/17/how-to-write-with-an-... or https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-i-use-llms/#proofreading-fo...?

However, I'm as allergic to slop in my code as in my reading. I'd hit "request changes" on this blog post- LLM assistance is as irrelevant to that as it is in a PR.

I'll commit to the bit: here's a PR review on your blog post. Just my humble opinion and I'm no writer myself, so feel free to disregard all of it. It was written by hand, minor rewrite according to AI critique :)

---

> Instructed to answer in cablese — the telegraph operators' compressed dialect, models elicit 40–49% fewer billed output tokens on the API's meter, and models across four families still recover the information at full fidelity.

suggestion: that's a run on sentence, with a "—" signifying a new sentence, but this second sentence doesn't have a clear flow. Try vocalising this sentence, where are your breathing pauses? I can't vocalise it clearly. It's a very minor thing! Try vocalising this minor rewrite: "Instructed to answer in cablese — the telegraph operators' compressed dialect — models elicit 40-49% fewer billed output tokens. Models across four families still recover the information at full fidelity."

That's much easier to vocalise. Usually, that makes it easier to read, too.

> The Telegraph Test benchmark measures how well models compress using this technique as well as how much information they can retreive from it afterward.

nit: reword. "how well models compress" is a bit awkward here. something like "The Telegraph Benchmark measures the model's ability to compress, as well as...". To me "Telegraph Test benchmark" is a confusing term, "Telegraph Benchmark" is clearer, and still terse(er!)

praise: otherwise this is a good abstract-like introduction.

nit: You did clearly edit this by hand, because you misspelled "retreive".

> Cross-family matrix (readers = foreign models answering from GLM-5.3-Flash’s records; writers = GLM-5.3-Flash answering from theirs) :

suggestion: add a paragraph. This is not a good introductionary text, what kind of questions did you test on, what's the goal here?

> GLM-5.3-Flash itself: 48.4% savings with the lowercase instruction, in-family recovery 1.09. No comparison in the matrix favors plaintext; every ratio sits at 0.99–1.10.

question: why start with "<one of the models> itself?" It's unclear why you're talking about that one in particular here, and makes it hard to follow your point.

> The condition ladder — same questions, one variable at a time:

question: what is a condition ladder?

> The register is not a construct we invented (LLMs were handed compressed records cold and read them at parity); the capability was already in the weights, inherited from a century and a half of people writing under metered bandwidth.

suggestion: rephrase. What's "the register", as in the tone the LLMs speak in? explain your terms.

> Every model tested can do this.

suggestion: rephrase, that's not a grammatically correct sentence. e.g. "all models we tested can do this", or "every tested model can do this" if you wish terseness.

One such sentence is obviously not a problem at all! but too many, and you'll lose readers.

> Notice what this adds up to: Result:

praise: good centerpiece, that's your central thesis

> No new hardware, no training, no API change, one sentence of instruction.

nit: very AI coded language, "no <x>, no <y>, ..." is cliché. Not a problem obviously, but I thought I'd bring your attention to it.

---

That's sorta where I lost interest in this PR review bit. the point here is that it's harder to read and engage your content. Also, if it looks too AI, you'll lose readers who assume you didn't put effort in.

The lean proof being correct is easy to verify, whether it proves the thing we care about is much harder.

If your code compiles, are you sure it's bug free?

40 minutes is an eternity when you can't push to a gitops repo with a PRD issue.

and is still available on GOG for basically free!

Good times, makes me nostalgic.

Yes, this kills my usage of reddit, not my usage of RSS.

Brave took crypto donations in name of creators who didn't know about or signed up for their project. Not a lawyer, but this is straight up fraud.

"the elephant in the room" is that this is a scam company.

The idea that you'd ever trust someone with claims of "privacy" when they do that crap is ludicrous.

>You ARE taking days or weeks to go and check, yes?

I've never taken weeks to go and check bugfixes in the before times, I don't see why I'd expect it now. Once we know what the cause of the bug is, validating the fix and writing a test for it is usually trivial.

Good for you. But you introduced this statement:

> AI-developed nootropics and germline editing will saturate human intelligence across individuals.

This is a forum, not a Bayesian-updating machine. So common courtesy is for you to take up the burden of proof for your own statements. Why do you think this is the null?

Moral Crumple Zones https://ferd.ca/notes/paper-moral-crumple-zones.html

Thank you, I understand the example better now. Squashing the class of problems of using non-initialized variables by using zero-initialization causes potentially worse bugs since 0 could inadvertently be a correct value. That makes sense!

Going back to GP:

> being too good at solving one class of problems selects for other classes that are more resilient and harder to find

Rather than this being too good at solving this class of problem, it seems to me that zero-initialization is the wrong approach; if the default value were present in the program, it'd be eas(y|ier) to spot. Initializer checks can do that without introducing this issue. You're also using the fact that non-initialized values are "random" by default- we could also use fuzzer checkers for that.

I think the general lesson from the example is that the way you solve a class of problems could introduce more pernicious ones, rather than the fact that it's solved.

I'm not following your example very well. Why is it that this makes the new vulnerabilities potentially worse?

You can initialise a UID to 0 whether or not you're using a compiler or checks for initialisation. Do you have another example?

This is a enjoyable read and a fantastic blog post!

I wonder whether it's easy to discern the activity of changing your role (or mask) from the activity of changing your "authentic self". I'm not sure I'm very good at making that distinction- in fact I'm not sure what an authentic self even is! Is it anything other than the overlap between different roles? After all I play a role when I'm with friends too, in a manner of speaking- Maybe that means I'm at risk of being such a "serious man"?

> Power is an antidote to humiliation.

I'm not sure that's true! Or rather, whether it's a healthy antidote. All powerful people have others who have power over them, and even Elon Musk had to bury the hatchet with Trump. I think it's a matter of personality whether having power means you're able to weather humiliation, or whether humiliation means you can't wield power responsibly.

It's also not true, mathematicians are already saying that current AI is changing the field of mathematical research profoundly.

> Both tend to be outmoded, hostile, and constrained relative to graphical interfaces.

"Outmoded", yes, and "constrained": absolutely. But "hostile"? TUI's and CLI's are some of the most power user friendly programs I still have the pleasure of calling my tools.

Just yesterday vscode broke down for me due to the weekly update triggered during my commute- vim doesn't have this problem, it's my tool.

> almost 100% accuracy

I think it's annoying that this gets repeated without revealing the actual stats: this is for the BFI test, it's 99.5% ± 0.38, where 40 samples per person were split 80-20 in training and testset.

paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3719027.3765062

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the obvious parallels to Nietzsche's idea of the "superman", a person who will not bow to incentives but make their own value structure.

To me the analogy of the monstrous fish is also very reminiscent of Nietzsche's story in "the gay science" of the madman exclaiming in horror at the public square:

> "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?"

Realising this horrid truth opens an opportunity to defy the structure of society and follow one's own convictions.

But as augment_me says above, not everyone can bear the cost of ignoring incentives. I think all of us have stories where we had a good conception of what the right thing was, and wanted to do the right thing, but money trouble or job security meant we had to follow bad incentives- I certainly do.

relatedly, foraminifera are single cellular organisms that can grow up to 20 cm! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophyophorea

Not necessarily. I rent my house, and the housing corporation who I rent from are not rent seekers, they provide a service to me which I'm happy with, and which they invest in.

They could've bought up the land and house and not improved it at all and depend on the housing crisis deepening for increased resell profit- but they did not do so, they maintained this house I'm in and ensured me and future tenants can continue enjoying this place. That's not rent seeking.