menssen

I had a CalDigit TB dock -- maybe 2021-ish? -- that every time I unplugged my MacBook would take my internet offline. I thought I was insane. How is that even possible? But I finally gave up and returned it.

Thanks for finally answering this mystery for me.

Off-topic rant: to read this article, I:

1. Clicked on the link.

2. Got pay-walled.

3. Remembered that I had access to the Atlantic through Apple News+.

4. Opened the News App on my phone.

5. Went to Magazines.

6. Found the latest issue of The Atlantic.

7. Found the hidden link to go to the magazine's "channel," since this article was not actually in the magazine.

8. Thankfully, this article was the most recent thing posted.

9. Read the article hunched over my phone while the still-paywalled version was looming over my head on my computer screen.

Somebody has to figure out how to fix this.

For what it's worth, I don't take that framing of intelligence seriously either. It's useful to have a word to describe the far-future state of the increasing capabilities of Computers.

I'm just saying that I don't think there's any point on that line where we will be comfortable admitting that the machine is "intelligent" or "conscious" or "AGI," or whatever, and that I appreciate attempts to quantify (or at least qualify) what we MEAN when we say that, rather than just goalpost-moving.

I appreciate this paper for relatively clearly stating what "human-like" might entail, which in this case involves "reasoning about the causes behind other people's behavior" which is "critical to navigate the social world" as outlined in this citation:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00100...

I get frustrated often when people argue "well, it isn't really intelligent" and then give examples that are clearly dependent on our brain's chemical state and our bodies' existence in-the-physical-world.

I get the feeling that when/if we are all enslaved by a super-intelligent AI that we do not understand its motives, we will still argue that it is not intelligent because it doesn't get hungry and it can't prove to us that it has Qualia.

This paper argues that gpts are bad at understanding human risk/reward functions, which seems like a much more explicit way to talk about this, and also casts it in a way that could help reframe the debate about how human evolution and our physical beings might be significantly responsible for the structure of our rational minds.

There is always space for options for "fast and easy" vs "robust and maintainable."

Nothing will ever beat the following as tech demo for how easy it is to make interactive UIs, but anybody who ever tried to reason through a large Angular 1 application would seriously hesitate to want to use it for something much more complicated.

<script src="angular.js" /> <input ng-model="inputValue"> <div>{{ inputValue }}</div>

It is possible with React to write an application where components have no internal state, every component is "read only," and all UI changes are state transitions in (something like) a redux store.

This is rarely done, because there are pragmatic reasons (e.g., animations) not to, but it is possible.

The other mistake alternatives make is to try to make components having internal state "easier." It should not be easier! Every single useX() is a statement that "I am violating the proper design pattern of this application," and it's a feature not a bug of React that you have to be obvious and intentional about it.

"Lots of people are still using it, but nobody can quite remember why."

I can remember why. This, and every other article I've ever read arguing to replace React with Web Components, completely misunderstands the point of React. It isn't about JSX. It isn't about encapsulation. It isn't about reusability.

It is about enabling a design pattern where *the user interface is a pure functional transformation of the application state.*

I kind of feel like people get tripped up by the fact that "virtual DOM" and "shadow DOM" sort of sound similar. They have literally nothing to do with each other. The React "virtual DOM" allows you to *completely re-output the entire user interface* on every state change, which is not possible with any other design pattern, and is not possible without a framework, because actually re-rendering the entire tree on every state change isn't performative (or usable).

Anybody who is advocating an alternative to React needs to do one of two things:

(A) Make a convincing argument that a different design pattern is better. Some things we've tried, which most people think are worse:

1. Using the DOM as your data model (jQuery)

2. Manually writing virtual representations of every view (Backbone)

3. Auto-magically two-way binding some data structure with the DOM (Angular 1)

4. Observables (Ember, maybe Angular 2+?)

(B) Advocate a framework other than React that uses the same pattern as React, but improves the usability. I think the two places there is the most room for improvements are:

1. Animations

2. useEffect() in general

I have not seen anybody successfully do either A or B.

Recommended reading: https://acko.net/blog/get-in-zoomer-we-re-saving-react/

Just take the whole compressed, square, package-shaped "patty" of ground meat from the plastic and drop it into a ripping hot pan intact, and don't touch it until it browns pretty darkly on the bottom, then proceed to break it up and cook as normal. This gets you quite a lot of Maillard flavor without having to cook crumbled meat within an inch of its life. (As with most good ideas, this one came from Kenji.)

This relates to my biggest objection to this article, which is that the best cooking tip for ground meat (blind or not) is that it's really easy to hear the difference between the "hiss" of water evaporating as steam and the "sizzle" of it frying/browning, and the two things do not happen at the same time. Alternative title: "how to slowly steam ground meat flavorlessly without vision."

Ted's booklist/review websites have been my go-to for "I need something to read" for years now. He appears to not be maintaining them and some of the domains have expired, but here's "The New Canon" (fiction since 1985):

https://www.thenewcanon.com

And here's an archive snapshot of the Conceptual Fiction (sci fi) one, which is now dead:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160305124258/http://conceptual...

The top comment here is about him giving the impression of being "massively up his own arse." Maybe -- but I think his attempts to create something useful for others, which I have found genuinely useful, outweighs that. What does it say that he's letting those attempts link-rot and writing on substack instead now?

I don't know. I just know he has good taste in literature.

I thought this was going to be about "Moose Boulder," whose existence was (rather unconvincingly, I think) "disproven" a couple years ago, and which begs the interesting question about how we define "Largest Lake."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/moose-boulder-debunked

Sports, shows, movies, and games are all essentially free (or already paid for via a handful of subscription services).

Travel, concert tickets, expensive restaurants, and wine are not free, and are all currently cancelled.

Most high-income millennials I know (including myself) spend a lot more on airline tickets than movie tickets.

So it may not be an entertainment vacuum but it is an entertainment spending vacuum.

Your point that most investors still are not individuals is fair, but that doesn't explain Robinhood's growth specifically.

Finance YouTuber Graham Stephen recently made a big deal out of moving from Los Angeles to Vegas because the tax savings more-or-less paid for a giant mansion in Vegas. (And because of some slightly cringey comments about not wanting to see so many homeless people, but that's not the editorial comment I'm trying to make right now.)

But, he's keeping his house in CA (for "weekends and vacations"), and he's building his studio in Vegas to be an exact replica of the old one.

So, yeah, charitably, "moving" for the highly wealthy does not really look anything like "moving" for anybody else.

Less charitably, it seems like a scam. In GS' case, nobody can tell where he's doing his work from, so "oh we spent too long at the beach on this 'vacation day,'" better stay here and film tomorrow's episode from CA, nobody will ever know." In EM's case, I suspect he spends more time business-traveling than at home anyway, so it would be pretty difficult to prove which of his houses he "lives" in.

And if anybody balks, there's a huge amount of PR content proving that they "moved."

This wouldn't bug me so much if it weren't for the arrogant, selfish, hubristic political comments they always make on the way out.

Well, but we are all philosophers -- lovers of wisdom -- or at least all who begin to ask about it are. Sure, it would be idiotic to say that such a book is the end of philosophy, but actually such a book as the beginning of philosophy seems pretty valuable. You need a comprehensive starting point to tell you give you some Wikipedia (or SEP) rabbit holes to go down.

Here is one very specific recommendation for a place to start: Richard Rorty, and in particular, his book "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature."

I've suffered through the tension between the Continental and Anglican worlds, and I think that Rorty is extremely valuable as a bridge between the two, and potentially an entry point to the one you're not familiar with (or both if you're familiar with neither).

Given the original question (about "mental models"), the Philosophy of the Mind is one of the more universal topics, that tends to be less controversial across the different schools of Philosophy. That Rorty book is a decent entry point to it, which will lead to things like...

A debate between Rorty and John Searle about consciousness (Searle is a mind-is-not-the-brain person):

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/425883

Correspondence between Searle and Dan Dennet about the mind (Dennet is a brain-is-a-computer person):

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/12/21/the-mystery-of-c...

It's almost impressive that Docker-on-macOS works so seamlessly that people are downvoting this comment. Yes, Docker containers run in a Linux VM on macOS. It's just one though, and generally seems fine on low resource workstations, unlike Vagrant setups from a few years ago that tried to run a VM for every application.

It's okay... to advocate for a major economic recession to make flying more comfortable for those of us with somewhat recession-proof skills?

Nothing. I self-host nothing. My entire home networking infrastructure consists of a more powerful WiFi router than the one built into the modem that the cable company provides so that it reaches to the back of my apartment. I pay money for GitHub, Dropbox, iCloud, Apple Music, Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Amazon Prime, a VPN to spoof my location occasionally, and Google Apps (or I would, if I were not grandfathered into the free tier). When I want to spin up a personal project, I do it on Heroku.

I live in a stable first-world democracy. Or, since it seems to be getting less stable recently, maybe a better way to put it is: I participate in a stable global economy. If "the cloud" catastrophically fails to the point where I lose all of the above without warning, I will likely have bigger problems than never being able to watch a favorite tv show again.

I wonder if this exposes two kinds of people: those who value mobility, and are more comfortable limiting the things that are important to them to a laptop and a bug-out bag, and those who value stability, and are inclined to build self-sufficient infrastructure in their castles.

"Kid who has eschewed the internet gets exploited by mom for vogue.com clicks"

I don't know the answer to this, but I've always been genuinely curious: how accurate is the Date object?

setInterval's minimum interval is ~15ms [1], so shouldn't something like...

setInterval(() => (new Date()).valueOf() % DESIRED_TICK_INTERVAL < 15 && tickTheMetronome(), 15)

...get you within 15ms accuracy, and it can probably be reduced in Chrome et al?

[1] http://www.adequatelygood.com/Minimum-Timer-Intervals-in-Jav...

BetterTouchTool is well worth the money.

Recommended setup (mine):

One giant button in the left corner that says "escape escape escape escape escape" (what it does should be obvious), and one tiny button in the right corner that brings back the normal touch bar. (And nothing else.)

Also, make those buttons white text on black. At least it's an OLED display, so parts of it you want "off" are actually dark.

Even just the lack of a bunch of distracting flashes as it changes when you switch apps is a relief.

> you just need to parse incoming sql to sanitize it and make sure there is no role escalation

"Just"? I guess I'm skeptical of a statement that begins "you just have to parse sql".

Is this actually easier than I'm imagining it? I'd be curious to hear more about the security and authorization model of this approach.

Do you work for the Minneapolis tourism association?

You are correct, and it's kind of insane to me how much of a "baseline" there is to what "tolerable temperatures" feel like. You start to notice this a lot living in a place with radical temperature swings. If gets up to 35F in February, I can wear a T-shirt. When it first drops to 45F in October, it feels like the arctic.

I think you're being down-voted because you are sort of wrong about the distances. We could probably get some people to another star. Why we would do that, or what we would tell them (with a five year communication delay) after they got there, is unclear.

For the record, I think your questioning of "what black holes really are" is prudent. The OP article is not prudent, firstly because any of its implications won't be realized for at least 3,000 years. Secondly because our challenge as a society is very much not speculating about this thing Hawking wrote about, and very much is trying to make any of these scenarios useful to us.

Which leads to my fringe opinion that we should try really hard to build a black hole, even if we're worried about it ending us.

"Fuckin' magnets. HOW DO THEY WORK?"

It’s too bad that “sales driven” is code for “information hiding.” But it’s true.

Anecdotally, I’ve been able to solve the information assymetry problem by drinking recruiters under the table. This is pretty much a prerequisite for me working with you.

Your mileage may vary.

Yeah. This is littered with stuff like:

"This is, be it said forthwith, apposite as a castigation of historiographic diagnostics..."

I don't know Polish, but it seems suspect that all of "forthwith," "apposite," "castigation," "historiographic," and "diagnostics" have direct 1:1 equivalents, leading me to believe that we're getting more of the translator's voice than Lem's.

See also the (controversial?) retranslation of Solaris a few years ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/15/first-direct-t...

Or Frida Kahlo. It’s pretty easy to become an idol of art or health when you’re born into money.

All those traditional mid-century Marxist “class is the only thing that matters” people don’t sound so bad now, huh.

“Could a computer scientist understand a brain?”

Is the Apple/consumer thing still true? Not questioning your general business-model assumptions, but anecdotally all the “consumers” I know with Macs are holding onto them for six years, while every dev shop I’ve worked in in this decade goes through new MBPs like commodity office supplies. I’m just curious if there are recent stats on who Apple is selling computers to (I haven’t seen any for a while.)

Strip malls, factories, and suburban office parks are all associated with dense, vibrant, walkable cities, so, yeah, this makes sense.

Arguably it works better. Minnesota Public Radio has 127,000 members [wikipedia], which is a bit over 2% of the population of MN. They do a far better job covering stuff like city politics than any other news organization in town.

The Guardian has 300,000 members [this article], which is 0.4% of the population of the UK. (And arguably, the better denominator would be the entire anglophone world.)

Recently, after some corporate IT crap required handing over my laptop for a weekend, it came back with a post-it note attached that said "your caps lock key is broken, let us know if you want a new computer."