alex_young

  The Library, or part of its collection, was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how much was actually destroyed

Did it not burn? Was it not the most extensive library of human writing at that time? Please help us all understand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

Perhaps the burning of the library at Alexandria would qualify. How intentional that was is somewhat in question, but the world certainly turned its back on the only collection of written knowledge and let it turn to ash.

The 4th amendment protects people from unreasonable searches by the government. It does not require businesses to do anything special. There are plenty of great reasons to, and even other legal requirements to, protect and limit information gathered by businesses about individuals, but the 4th isn’t one of them.

I worked for one such employer long ago that would “accidentally” bounce paychecks.

This happened with such regularity that people would take their checks to said employer’s bank on payday and stand in line to cash them before heading to the office. You’d see a couple of coworkers in line to do this.

Maintaining a list like this is probably not super useful. Any company that does this kind of stuff as a routine will not continue the routine of employing people for long.

A reverse centaur is just a person with a horse head right? I don’t get the analogy. I understand he’s talking about getting pushed around by an LLM, but would a normal centaur push an LLM around? It doesn’t even have any hands right? Seems like a reverse centaur is more capable of typing.

Does this not work with HomePod? How is an AI voice assistant not compatible with the smart speaker?

Conservation easements are a thing. Many people support protecting natural spaces and the law is composed of such general understandings.

  The U.S. Treasury publishes a daily total of the national debt, which as of May 2026 was $39 trillion.

  a little less than half of the total national debt is owed to the "Federal Reserve and intragovernmental holdings"

  In December 2020, foreigners held 33% ($7 trillion out of $21.6 trillion) of publicly held U.S. debt

  a flight attendant told passengers over the PA system that they "must turn off Bluetooth immediately," or else the aircraft would have to turn around.

How would turning bluetooth off convince anyone that there isn't a bomb on board? It seems like the bluetooth offering is the least of our worries in the insane case that this is how a threat was delivered.

I read it, but I don't think it's compelling. "the short run can be a lifetime" is kind of a throw away phrase not backed by evidence.

We've seen rapid growth of knowledge work at the same time as increased productivity, and there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason that greater productivity will reverse this persistent trend.

The small town constraint is a bit artificial to this problem isn't it?

If you operate a machine shop in a large urban area, have competitors, and access to much improved low cost tooling, would you:

a) lay off a bunch of workers, or b) lower your prices and capture more orders?

Same thing with accounting firms or marketers or business consultants.

Why is this time different?

Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?

If company A decides they just want the same slice of the market they have now and can fire half of their employees and pocket $$$, can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder with these new extra productive workers they hired? Won't the company B tend to capture more of the market and thus survive longer?

In nature we say there are no unfilled niches, meaning that if there were space for something to come compete for resources, it would quickly be 'solved' by the motivating factors involved. Not a precise thing, but a good heuristic.

US knowledge-worker compensation is around $10T / year. Anthropic and OpenAI have raised (not spent yet, just raised) $317B. That's ~3% of knowledge worker spending in one year alone. What business wouldn't pay 3, 5 or 10% more a year to make their worker productivity increase by larger factors?

  Someone replied. It was the exact same text the AI had given me.

You would also need vehicle miles traveled and pedestrian miles traveled. The overall numbers are up, and there is ample evidence that US cities are both less walkable and more dangerous to walk in than our counterparts in Europe. Just because people don’t let their kids walk places doesn’t indicate that vehicles don’t hit kids.

Pedestrian vehicle fatalities are up over 40 years, have increased significantly recently, and are a very real problem. https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...

I want to let my kids walk wherever they want to. It’s great for them.

My 5 year old bikes to school, accompanied by an adult. It’s a bit more than half a mile away from the house.

I’d like to tell him he can do this on his own next year, but there’s a single intersection he has to cross that makes this difficult.

I’m not worried about him getting lost, abducted by a stranger or any host of movie plot scenarios. I’m worried about vehicles. Specifically pickup trucks and SUVs.

40 years ago a 5 or 6 year old mostly had to contend with sedans with hoods lower than 30 inches. Today there are large numbers of vehicles twice that high, where even an adult can’t look the driver in the eye at close distances.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says:

  Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities.

I’ll probably let him bike alone anyway. But it’s a different equation because of the cars.

I live in a town of fewer than 8k people. Our local toy store is not only thriving, it’s central to the community.

People would rather shop there than go online. Why? Because they are a part of the community.

At every farmer’s market or community event they have a booth giving out free glitter tattoos to children, and they employ several teenagers part time to wrap gifts (of course this is free too), apply tattoos, and help out in the store.

This isn’t a unique concept. Going the extra mile and doing seemingly unreasonably nice things wins you customers and loyalty.

This is the second time Fisker has burned car owners and gone out of business. How many more times will it happen? Shouldn’t stuff be allowed to die?

Clusters are almost never the right answer for most problems: https://yourdatafitsinram.net/

Doesn’t say one way or the other, but probably suspended with pay. That’s typical. It’s like a free vacation day.

Isn't this really about "protecting" minors using Instagram?

If they allow E2E encryption, they can't scan for CSAM or do other monitoring stuff effectively, so they can't provide a "safe" place for minors.

Obviously the right answer is kids shouldn't be exposed to social media at all, but more eyeballs is more important than our kids.

I think that’s what we used to call a program. Things like vi and wordstar seem like they’d qualify.

CLI. Wtf is a TUI? LLMs say it has some to do with interactivity in a menu or something, but believe me, we had this all in the 80’s. Nothing new here, but the truth is the CLI is better faster and cheaper. Pick all three.

I think I got my hands on Hack when I was 8, so I've been doing the same for, uh, 39 years. Damn. At least I was learning VI keys unintentionally, so it was somewhat educational. :)

Does half of something have a limit? Not by its definition. Same thing with addition or multiplication. All of these only work with some concept of infinity.

We could redefine "half" to mean "half of whatever you're talking about until you get to some arbitrary limit", but doing that to all of arithmetic is going to wind up in a very odd place.

Create an infinity? What does that mean? Why would you need to do that?

Is there a limit to how many times something can be logically divided? If not, then there’s your infinity. It doesn’t require you to continue brute forcing it, just reason about it.

Time has nothing to do with it. There are an infinite number of ways to divide anything. You don’t need time to prove that. Whatever number you think of you can divide by a larger number.

And no discussion of Zeno? Pish.

The idea that nothing is demonstrative of infinity is clearly incorrect.

Take the screen you're reading this on. One pixel is composed of a bunch of different atoms, and once you get down to one of them, that atom subdivides into a bunch of subatomic particles, some of which even have mass. Let's take one of those for argument's sake. Split that, and you get some quarks.

Now let's imagine that's the smallest you can go. We can still talk about half of a down quark, or half of that, etc. Say, uh, infinitely so. There you go, everything is infinite. That wasn't so hard was it?