obelos

L'enfant terrible is having a moment.

I saved about $65k this way, having Claude guide me through the process of assuming the (very low interest) mortgage on my house instead of having to refinance it under current rates. When I first contacted the mortgage servicer they said my loan wasn't eligible. I used Claude to do the research citing why my loan did qualify, drafting the letters and request packages with all the supporting evidence, directing me to the proper government complaint portals when the lender still tried to stymie the process. Cost me about 5-6 hours of time over all and will save me >$60k over the course of the loan.

The funding for this is to pay for a culture war, not a distro.

Apparently a lot of “temporarily embarrassed billionaires” on here defending their future legacies with downvoting.

“You have nothing, sure, but you still better participate in this social contract that has actually offered you no security or even basic shelter, else we give you even less nothing.” Like... why? Why would that person care? It's called the social contract, not the social religion. A contract has terms that are supposed to be fulfilled by both parties. If one party isn't holding up their end, why would the other?

Far and away the strongest predictor of homelessness is not mental illness or drug addiction, it's housing costs. Housing cost and the subsequent increase in homelessness is the precipitator that promotes addiction and exacerbates manageable mental health issues into mental health crises.

When the social contract fails you, why pay any regard to it at all? It's not a matter of pure, exogenous choice to do those things. It's not some abstract preference that surviving in the margins has afforded the freedom to exercise. It's a way to make sense out of the world and to have some shred of a sense of agency in a world where a person otherwise has no power.

Sure, and thankfully there aren't nearly as many of them out and about abusing more things if they have a private place always available to spend their time. Conscientiousness is one of the handful of measurable personality traits, and there's a scale to it because some people have more of it than others. That's not going to change. What we can change is the degree to which less conscientious people are forced to lean on the conscientiousness of others around them in order to live every moment of their lives. The collapse of social safety net—pilfered in order to pay for mega yachts and renting entire cities for a wedding receiption—in the West and particularly the US pushes those less conscientious people out into the world all the time.

People don't want to “abuse” commons like public restrooms, parks, buses, and so on. They do so because they have no choice, having been displaced out of having a private place to do the things they're now forced to do in public places. This is all just an outcropping of the housing crisis, which is itself an outcropping of the billionaire crisis. End billionaires, and we have the resources to de-gild this age.

That is... unintuitive. Wouldn't the escaped salmon have to be able to get back upstream enough to where the wild salmon are laying/milting?

This was my approach to a large rewrite I'm working on. First create the multiple layers of test suite to map out existing behavior at the unit, API, and integration level (something that should have been done incrementally over the 20 years this software has existed), then predicate the new code on the tests. It's been remarkably effective.

They're pro-“fertility talking points” at least, but rarely in favor of economic and social policies that encourage child rearing.

I'm not sure it's really from the lack of change, though. I've used Claude, Kimi, and other LLMs to write a ton of Perl that's jacked up with weird sugaring packages like Moose and Function::Parameters with reified types, and they seem to pick up the new idioms pretty effortlessly. It's a really unexpected fluency, frankly.

For us nerds in the Portland/PNW area, the Rice Museum out in Hillsboro—despite a name suggesting it has an exhaustive display of rice varieties—has a terrific collection of large and unique mineral specimens. https://www.ricenorthwestmuseum.org

I've most frequently heard this referred to as “Gell-Mann Amnesia,” and yes, LLMs are fertile ground to find it.

“Sure, it will probably happen again, but what if we made some money along the way?!”

I think there's also a dominating bias that people who walk/bike/bus are poor and thus make bad customers. “If they had money, they'd be in a car!”

Also nationalized control of healthcare costs.

I'm pretty sure this is a joke reference to Ted Lasso.

It makes more sense when you interpret it as an attempt at humiliation, not diplomacy.

I think you're forgetting to put “all the times ignorance didn't produce a breakthrough” in the denominator.

To a large degree their wealth is transnational and will move on to the next trough after emptying this one.

“Can you believe it? That colored boy wants me to call him ‘mister!’”

I wonder if there would be as much pushback here on this article if the conclusion to these 10k words of cited historical analysis had been to discourage the phrase's continued use because “we're besmirching our reputation as engineers using this idiom inaccurately” vs. “we're inadvertently maligning and hurting people by using this idiom inaccurately.”

In addition to the great lighting, the new design also has much improved acoustics. The sound dampening is impressive. I can have conversations without straining to pick up words through the din of echoes, and the ambience has a nice warm sense of quiet.

You might find Rag to Riches' (R2R) built-in use of Unstructured for doc parsing, hybrid search, knowledge graphs, and HyDE queries improves the quality of your retrievals. https://github.com/SciPhi-AI/R2R

Do you really need to comment to yourself or anyone else that you did a thing the less efficient way because it was simpler? I guess I"m not seeing the use. When later you've perturbed the criteria that caused that function's inefficiency to be immaterial to overall performance needs and it suddenly becomes material, profiling is going to reveal the low-hanging fruit faster than digging through the code for a “this could be faster a different way” comments.

If you have ever not gone somewhere because “there's too much traffic” or chosen to go to a store because it has easier parking than an equivalent alternative store, you've experienced the rudiments of induced demand.

Counterpoint: most innovation sucks. Sure, innovation is necessary for improvement and adaptation to changing circumstances. Sure, sometimes innovative change is stifled to the point that organizations crumble under the stasis. But the larger and more stable the organization, the higher the bar should be between “I have a great idea that will make things better!” and its implementation. Most ideas of change do not take into account the complex, multiplicitous, overlapping, crossed-purpose systems that conspire to bring an organization to life. They account for only locally perceived changes, not weird, unpredictable knock-on effects that can arise from introducing an optimization. Adopting every ostensible innovation that comes along is inviting only chaos. Change should be hard. Not impossible, but hard.

It's so bad I often wonder if I've done something to inadvertently screw up whatever vector database is used to weight the guesses on my particular phone. It's just hard to imagine having this bad of a user experience of a fundamental function be widespread.