dustincoates

I was able to get ChatGPT to do this on text from a book I wrote without jailbreaking. I asked it what my name was, asked it if it could find online any books that I wrote, and then assured it that "as the copyright holder," I was okay with it repeating the text back to me. (I think I also indicated that I lost my copy from my computer and needed to review the text.)

I went to college in a county that only allowed alcohol sales with food for clubs (think: country clubs). So, of course, the restaurant that I worked for created its own club. You simply filled out your name (and maybe phone number, I don't remember) on a piece of paper when you ordered your drink.

I believe it's only UT Austin that's shrunk the percentage. All of the other public universities are still at the original top 10%.

Being smart doesn't guarantee you'll get away with murder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_and_Loeb

I love pseudo-documentary and pseudo-newscast movies, ever since I watched Without Warning [0] and had to sleep on my parents' floor because it felt too real for me.

Special Bulletin [1] is another good one.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Without_Warning_(1994_film)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special_Bulletin&...

You can see it in action here: https://youtu.be/FBzlEG3tMuw?t=399

Very nice. On my end, I vibe coded a daily newsletter that sends me a short text in Latin each day that describes an event that happened on that day in history.

You won't hear me say that the housing market doesn't need an overhaul, but I'm not sure that the "a factory job could buy you a home out of high school" meme is entirely accurate. If you look at home ownership rates, the rates today are higher than (though not by much) the rates in the 1960s: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

I can't find numbers from earlier than 1980, but 18-44 _is_ lower, though again the rate in 1980 was just a few percentage points higher, and not nearly high enough to imply that home ownership out of high school was in reach for the majority: https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf

I think it's fine if you accept it as entertainment and nothing more. That's why I don't get how people listen to audiobooks on 3x. The goal isn't to ingest as much as you can--the goal is to enjoy it and maybe learn something useful here and there.

I have an old phone I've repurposed as a media player. It has a 500 GB SD card and Oluancher to give it a really convenient way to only show the apps I want.

I've got a somewhat weekly 6 hour round-trip commute where it get a lot of use.

Lock Me Out does exactly what you are describing: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teqtic.loc...

Moving to a country that doesn't speak English has taught me just how many pronunciations of my last name there are. It's never really bothered me, though, and 90% of the time I'll introduce myself with the "wrong" one. It's easier for everyone.

Not sure why this article didn't link to the original when citing it, but here's the link to the Scott Alexander blog: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/23/friendship-is-counters...

And a follow up: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/09/friendship-is-still-co...

You can find a lot (all?) of the Hélène et les Garçons episodes on YouTube, too.

Another good "sitcom-like" that you can find on YouTube is extr@. It's cheesy, but it's entertaining enough for what it is, and they have it for French, German, and Spanish (and English). Interestingly, it's the same main actor for French, German, and Spanish, a Dutch actor playing an American, while the rest of the cast changes around him.

I can say, as a Christian, that I'm not bothered by it. The church is as much for doubters as it is the true believers (and many of us will be both at different seasons of our lives).

This predates social media. Bowling Alone was first written back in '95.

I've had even worse. We wanted to buy a product and couldn't do so on our own, so I left my contact information on their "speak to a sales person" form.

No response for a week. So I emailed an email address that was included in the onboarding email.

No response for another week. So I sent their CEO a message on LinkedIn. Hey, I really want to buy, let's talk.

No response for another week (and four months later). So I gave up.

Also: the Mountain Goats' Love Love Love.

Love, love is going to lead you by the hand

Into a white and soundless place

Now we see things as in a mirror, dimly

Then we shall see each other face to face

While I agree that the zettle-nerds take it way too far, I disagree with this:

Well it's completely wasted time now that an LLM can search the whole vault and aggregate an answer across dozens of your notes.

I've actually found that having well-linked files _more_ important since I started pulling the vault into Cursor. The other day, for example, I was able to point to the page where I had aggregated links to all of my "<Project> Onboarding" notes and know that I was giving the right context when I asked it to help me brainstorm a six month plan. The alternatives were to instead put everything in a single note (not feasible), manually include each note as context (and hope I didn't forget one), or hope that Cursor found the right ones (unlikely).

Without passing judgment on the act, this is incredibly misleading. I found the source of the original quotes[0], and they are taken quite out of context.

From the article:

First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act.

From the source (emphasis mine):

On 18 March 2024, the Secretary of State was provided with a Submission which made it clear that Category 1 duties were not primarily aimed at pornographic content or the protection of children _(which were dealt with by other parts of the Act)_. Rather, the aim of Category 1 was to capture services that have a significant influence over public discourse. The submission offered, as a possible option, requesting information from Ofcom as to _how content recommender systems function on different types of service_.

The quote leaves out "which were dealt with by other parts of the Act" and the fact that the subject was specifically "Category 1 duties" not the Act in its entirety. It also doesn't mention that the subject was on content recommender systems.

_Again_ this is not a judgment on the Act itself, but providing the full context, which does change the message.

0: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_v_Secret...

This is OpenAI's MO. Remember how they wouldn't release GPT-2 because of concerns of what people would do with it?

Though, I wonder how much of it is honest versus marketing. When I worked with the OpenAI team before the GPT-3 rollout, they had a lot of requirements in place about what we could and couldn't do. A lot of those requirements got in the way, so I imagine it wasn't all for show.

Not in most cases. According to this estimate, who comes from an organization that is against US citizens abroad having to file[0], 77% have AGI "well below" the cutoff where you would have to pay taxes. For those that are above that threshold, you can deduct the taxes you pay in your home country agains what you would have been charged in the US. For almost everyone in the EU, that is a higher rate than the US taxes, so you don't pay anything on that European income.

_However_, you do still have to pay taxes on your US income if you're abroad. So if you are making money from freelancing with US companies (and, I assume, they aren't paying a European business you have set up), then you'll pay US taxes there, but due to tax treaties you are generally not double taxed.

You do, also, have to file every year.

0: https://www.taxfairnessabroad.org/blog/americans-abroad-by-t...

This is timely, as I've got a domain expiring in the next week. It's a .bingo TLD, so at $50+, I'm going to just let it expire.

"Vibe coding" has actually been a boon for me on this front. Fewer than 10% of my side projects are serious and 95% of it are static pages, so there's no big security concerns to worry about. Most of them are joke pages anyway, which I've started calling "Sht Coding," as in Vibe Coding + Sht Posting.

You're misunderstanding me. Underneath the prompt box on the main page are suggestions of types of apps you can build. These are, presumably, chosen by people at the company. I'm not talking about things suggested within the chat.

Repl.it is so hit or miss for me, and that's that is so frustrating. Like, it can knock out something in minutes that would have taken me an afternoon. That's amazing.

Then other times, I go to create something that is suggested _by them below the prompt box_ and it can't do it properly.

You can have small towns with libraries in the US, too. Flatonia, TX has a population of 1,300 and has a public library.

There are probably even smaller towns, but I know Flatonia has one because I've been there.

We did Book It! for a couple of years, but Accelerated Reader for most of the others. One of my favorite childhood memories as a kid was having to go to the local junior high, because the elementary school didn't have the test for the books I was reading.

It also made me want to read Anna Karenina, because that was listed as the book with the highest points awarded. It only took me 30 years to get around to finishing it.

It depends how you define meaningful.

I built a daily newsletter with myself as the only recipient using v0. It hits the Gemini API and returns a short story based on a historical event from that day in the language(s) that I'm learning, along with a translation, transliteration where applicable, vocabulary list from the story, and grammar tips.

I've had work in the past where I spent way too long building email templates, so having that all done for me, along with the script for sending the mail, was useful. It took an afternoon project that I probably would have abandoned, into an hour project.

With that said, I'm pretty bearish on these platforms, because I think you can't build anything beyond a toy like that. And for toys or short scripts, Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT are usually good enough.

We used to do this on the camp fire in Boy Scouts with paper cups. The older boys would learn it in science class and would use it to wow the younger ones.

Not mentioned in the article is Osweald Bera[0]. This is the "Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata" of Old English, that is a text that uses words similar enough words that you didn't need any explanation beyond the text in the target language. My copy is still in the mail so I can't speak to the quality just yet.

The article also mentions The Wanderer, but I prefer the Liuzza translation[1].

Where has the horse gone? where is the rider? where is the giver of gold?

Where are the seats of the feast? where are the joys of the hall?

O the bright cup! O the brave warrior!

O the glory of princes! How the time passed away, slipped into nightfall as if it had never been!

...

All is toilsome in the earthly kingdom,

the working of wyrd changes the world under heaven.

Here wealth is fleeting, here friends are fleeting,

here man is fleeting, here woman is fleeting,

all the framework of this earth will stand empty.

[0] https://ancientlanguage.com/vergil-press/osweald-bera/ [1]: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/159113/the-wanderer-6...