ikesau

You got me excited, because I've wanted something like this for a while. Obviously without the actual extortion, but everything up to that point. White hat scamming, to teach our parents what it's actually like before it happens.

I'm real xutopia. I'm real.

Beyond the OP's AI-written or AI assisted distinction, I'm also noticing people mimicking LLM's speech patterns. I've read blogs from people who I'm quite sure are above pasting AI output directly into their words who nevertheless are sounding more and more like AI as the sum of all their conversations with Claude begins to rub off on them (myself included, probably)

I'm sorry that happened to you. Sincerely. That sounds incredibly frustrating, painful, and scary.

I think your maximalist conclusion of "drugs should be legalized" might have some second-order effects that might be net worse for society, though. Addiction, misuse, MRSA, overdoses, etc.

Ah yeah, that makes sense, but I still feel like there's room for a little more discretion.

https://tonsky.me/blog/every-frame-perfect/toolbar@2x.mp4, for example

I don't think I would have to rescan the entire page to figure out where things were afterwards. Everything's shifted to the right, just like when I open my browser bookmarks.

I'm sure a UI that had none of these imperfect frames would feel better, but now I really want someone to edit each of these clips to show what it would actually look like.

At the same time, why does everything need motion? My understanding is that motion should be used if an action subtly changes the UI in a region that's different from where the action was triggered (e.g. toasts)

I think many of these transitions are unnecessary and would feel just as good if they snapped immediately with instantaneous reflow.

Interesting explanation of a subject I had no knowledge of! I'm familiar with browser accessibility trees, but I've never thought about how operating systems do it themselves.

From the outside view, I still wouldn't make any bets with 100% certainty about the future of anything to do with computers.

If you grant that there is some chance that the trends of programming models' capabilities will continue for another few years, then there is some chance that software and its bottlenecks will be completely transformed. A rapidly overhauled accessibility tree for linux? A good-enough computer use model that doesn't require accessibility trees at all? A world of bespoke, personalized operating systems? All of these things (and many more) seem like outcomes with non-zero probabilities.

Ah yeah, you're right, that's a misrepresentation on my part - it's based on lines, not the file:

[absorb] splits changes in the source revision and moves each change to the closest mutable ancestor where the corresponding lines were modified last. If the destination revision cannot be determined unambiguously, the change will be left in the source revision.

I use absorb fairly often, fwiw. It's great for when I want to make a patch to a commit that will easily absorb into its right place. And I also, sometimes, prefer the more intentional approach where I decide exactly where each hunk will go.

I appreciate the pushback, but I wasn't actually saying people shouldn't do this. If a neighbourhood is being neglected because of some incentive structure they're powerless to affect, then yeah, take some action.

I'm just compulsive in pointing out trade-offs, and this blog post (understandably) doesn't have an interview with the civil servant on the other side presenting their perspective, so I wanted to raise the question here in case someone knew how it worked.

I see road workers repairing potholes, and otherwise notice that potholes get repaired over time.

Presumably there is an intelligent process that leads to this. What alternative is there?

My model of municipal maintenance is that a city's road maintenance workers have a long list of known potholes to fix which is triaged with some formula and dealt with day-by-day.

Spraypainting the pothole distorts the triage process and makes a pothole jump the queue, putting it ahead of more severe or older issues than it otherwise would have been.

It might not be zero sum, if it causes the agency to act with more haste to avoid embarrassment, but it seems like it could be close? Plus it probably takes more resources to clean up the spraypaint afterwards.

Most road maintenance crews probably aren't sitting around with abundant materials and machinery neglecting their duties, so I guess I just have some questions about what the real cost of this tactic is. What's giving.

Wow, awesome.

There's also a few on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash_unsorted?t...

(In case the OP also made you think of Teen Titans Battle Blitz for the first time in 20 years)

Oh nice, this is way better.

On finnicky engines, I think if I were to seriously implement this for a project that needed to support arbitrary images, I'd do the dithering server side (assuming it's possible to develop some heuristics to select the correct transformation based on image type (text, low contrast, blurry, etc)), serve those to users, and allow them to customize the colouring filters. That way the dithering looks as good as it can per image, but it can then still be stylized to a user's preferences.

Wow, my first post that's frontpaged and it's the one I put the least effort into. I've at least fixed the noise colour bleed now.

This technique does not do any file compression as it's a transformation applied to the image in the browser (though screenshots of the output would be smaller than the source)

For a post on CSS-based noise dithering that I actually polished, there's also https://ikesau.co/blog/making-a-grainy-spotlight-effect-with...

Years of digestive issues resolved by a single massage? I've never heard of an outcome like that before. Could you explain more about how it worked and what this lady's approach purported to do? Who was she? Genuinely curious!

You cannot require age verification on IRC, XMPP, ActivityPub, Nostr, or Matrix, because there is no single entity to compel. Each server operator makes their own decisions. A government would need to individually pressure thousands of independent operators across dozens of jurisdictions, which is a legislative and enforcement impossibility.

I'm very much sympathetic to the post's argument, but I think it should be acknowledged that this kind of claim has an implicit "(for now)" at the end.

The legal system doesn't have good mechanisms for dealing with problems that it hasn't needed to deal with yet, but if most people moved to encrypted & decentralized protocols for communication, it doesn't follow that laws couldn't be amended to give governments powers to legislate or police it at scale if deemed necessary by some sufficiently powerful group (an autocracy, a voting bloc, a national security service, etc)

So I guess the other implicit piece is that one hopes the technological change comes with cultural change to our political expectations - once people get used to privacy and autonomy, they resist efforts to erode those rights again.

Best of luck to everyone advocating for this! Really hoping to see a lot of thriving communities post-Discord in the coming years.

After finding out that the city council was considering a housing element that would have bowed to NIMBY pressure, we sent two letters to the city, reminding it of its legal obligations under state law to approve the upzoning — and that a failure to do so would open the city up to a lawsuit.

This seems entirely reasonable to me, and I'm grateful that a group like this exists.

But I'm a YIMBY, so of course. If lobbyists were influencing my municipality from afar on the basis of laws that I disagreed with, I can imagine feeling frustrated, conspiratorial, or disenfranchised.

Maintaining a consistent commitment to liberal democracy, the legal system and due process is one of life's great challenges!

Right, but I suppose one issue is that, depending on how concentrated the AI agent market becomes, the rent seeking could eventually potentially just shift to these agents instead.

Nilay Patel is calling this "the DoorDash problem" and has written an essay on it here: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/823909/the-doordash-problem...

i have blogged and posted sometimes-inscrutable things on this for the last 7 years https://ikesau.co

My brother's got an instance for canadian urbanism and fediverse engineering: https://video.canadiancivil.com

I'm not sure about the utility/non-utility mix, but according to IRENA it was actually ~500GW of added capacity in 2023 and 2024.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

Ah, this might be exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

I love this.

Maybe these are incompatible desires, but I would really like some kind of system that allows me to own and present my own music listening data while also allowing me to interoperate with a broader music listening culture.

Newsletters and blogs are great for discovery, but I also really value the way my last.fm has allowed me to recall a band I used to listen to a decade ago because I can remember a few of their contemporaries that are neighbours in the Similar Artists graph.

Yeah, mostly anonymous commenting tyranny-of-the-nitpickers is really unfulfilling.

I miss phpBB as the dominant mode of internet socialization. Communities with norms, in-jokes, reputation. Take me back!

If I were to spend $10,000 on cleaning, I think I'd prefer to have 100 weeks of a human cleaner that can vacuum, scrub, climb stairs, etc.

But, I take the point that more and more of these tasks will be automated more effectively in the coming decade.

I hadn't seen these before, but they're working because of the limitations of the technology.

The format of the shows are mostly clip-based - man on the street, news hour, etc - and obviously the jokes are all written by someone with a good sense of humour.

Not to discount that this is, as you say, an example of someone using AI to successfully create characters and stories that resonate with people. it's just still very much because of a creative human's talent and good taste that it's working.

what's unclear to me is how you identify the Real Units.

needing-to-breathe-ness is (probably) a gimme, but what are the units that will explain which route i take on my walk today? and how do you avoid defining units that aren't impressionistic once you need to rely on language and testimony to understand your research subject's mental state?

my understanding of psychological constructs is that they're earnest attempts to try and resolve this problem, even if they've led us to the tautological confusion we're in now.

Also to pay taxes, you have to type "CRA" into your bank's "Add Payee" searchbox and hope you pick the right result out of 5 different options that all have CRA in the title.

It's mind-boggling that this is the solution we've settled on.

I have no strong feelings on motorbikes one way or the other, but also try to avoid downvoting posts when I disagree with them. It's a harder urge to suppress when I feel strongly about the subject though, and so it's possible that this is just a minority of people who are disproportionately represented because the rest of us don't care enough to make generic pro-motorbike posts in response.