edbaskerville

Exact same story here. Same age kids (well, one just turned 5). I wonder how many CDs are being sold just because of parents trying to protect their kids from device addiction.

Emphasizing this response. Bayesian models can always produce simple probabilities if you ask them to. E.g., given this data, what is the probability that the next flip is heads?

The fact that the model is represented as a distribution over Bernoulli parameter p doesn't contradict this: you just integrate over the posterior.

I can't tell if you think this is a good thing or a bad thing that men use big trucks to compensate for a masculine sense of inadequacy. But I think this is a good point, and I think we need to fight against it.

I don't think it's politically impossible. These things are killing children (among many other people). "Giant trucks and SUVs are killing children" seems like a pretty powerful line.

I don't have perfect pitch—I can't name notes and chords instantly out of thin air—but I'm a musician and can immediately sense if the tuning is nonstandard. It can be trippy. I think that, yeah, it's basically a matter of personality whether it annoys you or intrigues you, perfect pitch or no...

I'm currently practicing for a show with my cello tuned down a half-step, and it strongly conflicts with my ear<->muscle memory. Similar experiences when jumping between standard tuning and the Bach 5th Suite (A string tuned down to G) or Kodaly Solo Sonata (lower two strings tuned down a half step).

I find KDE to be a bit like using Mac OS 9 with extra customization--not in a literal sense, but in terms of the ethos. It looks more like, say, late-90s Windows, but the UX is more consistent in a old Mac-like way, albeit with some rough, this-is-a-community-project edges.

GNOME seems to be trying to oversimplify and prettify like today's Apple, but yes, makes weird decisions. But Apple is definitely worse than either in terms of feature/design churn.

Hoping to use this to reboot an ancient abandoned project. At the time there wasn't a mature P2P connection layer that took care of all the realities of the modern Internet out of the box. Now there is, and it's great to see.

This isn't Tailscale because it does secure P2P connections between any pair of devices, whether or not they have Tailscale. This enables real end-user P2P for, e.g., local-first apps with no server infrastructure except relays for resilience. And even if you lose the relay servers, things keep on working the same for any hosts that don't need them.

This solution is a really great argument for Apple(/Google) just adding per-app color settings.

It's Steve Jobs cargo-culting.

Whoa, didn't realize that was Jony Ive! Good job Jony! Gave both Ferrari and EVs bad press with a single product launch!

A good lesson in not messing with a good thing. If they had just put an electric motor in a classic Ferrari body, it could have been a nice moment for the energy transition.

Indeed. Even positing an illusion seems like a contradiction. If it's illusory, doesn't there need to be a subjective entity experiencing the illusion?

I think the point is that they took our collective knowledge without asking and are selling it back to us. We should own a substantial portion of it.

(Not sure if this is the right approach, but the general idea seems rather important.)

If you read The Mac is Not a Typewriter in 1992—thus burning Option-Shift-hyphen into your typing patterns for life, along with a dogmatic love for serif body fonts—you're the real victim here.

and we will now hold you responsible!

I just visited a McDonald's for the first time in a while. The self-order kiosk UI is quite bad. I think this is evidence in favor of the idea that an incompetent AI will soon be incompetently running a McDonald's.

Thanks, that's interesting.

& that is a great website...

I'm also done with JetBrains—just tried them again (RustRover) after a hiatus. It felt much slower than I remember, even after changing away from the default theme as others have suggested.

Having just made the switch to Kubuntu, I'm going to try Kate as my primary editor for a while. It's missing features, but it sure is snappy.

The Rwanda case cannot be told without Paul Kagame, one of the rare authoritarians who is also a real nation-builder, analogous to Park Chung Hee (South Korea, 1960s-1970s). He locks up his opponents but also has leveraged aid to really help socioeconomic conditions. E.g., the very close and productive collaboration with Partners in Health/Paul Farmer.

Maybe they mean Thiel?

The road not (yet?) taken is the full flowering of the HyperCards, the Visual Basics, the Macromind Directors and Flashes...

That is, the idea that a non-expert might create interesting software in an authoring environment with good, well-thought-out building blocks and easy-to-grasp metaphors, shorn of layers of accidental or over-engineered complexity.

In this vision software still requires careful logical thinking, but it makes it much less cumbersome to translate that thinking into running code, with no tooling and build system nightmares.

Instead, we've invented such powerful models that they can regurgitate and recombine complex incantations on our behalf. The complexity is still there, though, and it's still inscrutable to non-experts.

But maybe they can help us eliminate some of it?

I think that path is still possible, and it may even nicely complement the LLM world, where LLMs help generate software that individual humans can still easily comprehend and manually modify.

An evolutionary biology professor of mine—a renowned and outspoken if often inscrutable guy—liked to say, facetiously, "everything is 50% heritable." I think he was getting at something along these lines.

I think maybe they were saying that their personal AI slop detector had produced a false positive on "whole personhood", and they felt sad about that? Or perhaps I'm missing it.

Interestingly, if you have one-dimensional observations f(t) of a k-dimensional strange attractor, the lagged vector time series [f(t); f(t - tau); f(t - 2 * tau); ...; f(t - (k - 1) * tau)] maps onto the full k-dimensional attractor. Specifically (as I check Wikipedia) it's a diffeomorphism, an isomorphism of differentiable manifolds.

Presumably the earth system isn't at anything resembling an attractor right now, but I wouldn't be surprised if people are trying to use related techniques to try to detect qualitative changes in the system dynamics (like bifurcations).

Maybe someone more knowledgeable could chime in on whether/how measurements at a single point on the earth's surface might be used to do that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takens%27s_theorem

Does anyone have good estimates of what percent of real production code is currently being written by LLMs? (& presumably this is rather different for your typical SaaS backend vs. frontend vs. device drivers vs. kernel schedulers...)

Deep cut

Solar and wind, with battery storage, can get you to say 90%, and then you only need 10% from other sources like geothermal and nuclear to fully decarbonize.

& if they live in a cool place, they're getting a small space heater as a bonus.

Can you give more details?

It wouldn't particularly surprise me if Sam Altman were racist, but I'm curious what the specific incident you observed was.

The good news is that the Trump regime is unpopular, and doing crazy things is making them more unpopular.

The bad news is they keep doing crazy things.

Political donation spam is a plague. I ran a donation website in 2018 and 2020 that split up money among many candidates, and by far the biggest complaint was the flood of email that came after using my site. In 2018 there wasn't even an opt-out button on ActBlue. In 2020 they added one, but the default was still to share your info. But it doesn't even really matter, because campaigns continue to buy and sell donor lists, so once you're in the system, you'll never get out.

It's a legal problem, in that spam laws simply don't apply to political campaigns.

But fundamentally it's a collective action problem. Excessive fundraising messages hurt the overall brand of the party and politicians in general, but for each individual politician, the advice from consultants is that each extra message has marginal value. This is actually true for out-of-district messages—they might get your money, but if they piss you off, they still don't lose your vote.

There is some movement to try to fix this.

Oath (oath.vote) is an ActBlue alternative that doesn't share your phone number or email address with campaigns. They can't erase you from the system, but at least they're trying to do the right thing.

Eventually, if groups like Oath, Crooked, Emily's List, etc. can all team up and say, hey, you won't get donations through us if you keep spamming people, we might see some change.

I assume things are also bad on the Republican side. It would be easy to say it's good if their brand suffers—but actually, I want them to start behaving more responsibly, including in this area.

Mountains Beyond Mountains was an incredible recruiting tool for health equity work, inspiring a huge number of people (including my partner) to try to follow in Paul Farmer's footsteps.

(Farmer himself died a few years ago, at only 62, of a sudden heart attack in his sleep, but he seems to have put in about 100 lifetimes worth of work. One wonders if his legendary overwork contributed to an early death.)