japhyr

Where are you located? Around 2020 I put together a landslide risk monitoring site that's entirely based on stream gauges:

https://khmpsitka.org

It's an interesting approach that's way simpler than relying on soil moisture sensors placed high up on mountainsides. It's not as widely applicable as measuring soil moisture directly, but it's been running steadily for over 5 years now.

I didn't see this until this morning, and the continuing through for the whole 18 words was a really good experience. I got 14/18, and that was much more satisfying than ending at my first failure.

Growing up in the 80s, I've known (and sung) this song all my life. But I just saw this flowchart for the first time today:

https://jeannr.tumblr.com/post/165291081/i-made-a-flow-chart...

I believe that's the original source, but it looks cut off. Here's a full version:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b1/82/dc/b182dcc291495c013c98...

When vehicles were starting to get noticeably bigger about 20 years ago, I asked some family members why they were buying vehicles they had to climb up into.

"On the highway, I'd rather kill someone than be killed in a wreck."

They would not recognize that while that might work for a while, it wasn't going to lead anywhere good for our society. A generation of people thinking like that has filled our roads with vehicles that protect their occupants while making it more dangerous for everyone else.

In fact, I think Guido himself resigned due to the experience he had trying to get a PEP through the committee.

If you're referring to the steering council, that group was created in response to Guido stepping down.

He stepped down partly in response to the changing nature of online discussions around changes to the language. He just didn't want to be at the center of every polarizing discussion anymore. I think he also recognized that the transition needed to happen at some point, and that was as good a time as any.

But adoption is the starting line, not the scoreboard.

Yes yes, shout it from the rooftops! Over the next few years I think we're going to see that companies that get this point will keep doing meaningful things, and stand a chance of weathering this transition period.

I think we're going to see a bunch of companies that went all in on AI for AI's sake go under because they've lost their mission, lost their implementation, and won't have a way to get those back in a reasonable timeframe and at a reasonable cost.

It depends on your definition of "threaten", but the short answer is yes. I live in a mountainous area that's a destination for road bikers and mountain bikers. There's lots of sources of tension between cyclists and drivers.

On a regular basis I see people racing past cyclists, rolling coal at cyclists (I can't believe that's even a term now), blaring horns, and a number of other behaviors that fall under "threatening".

US vehicles, especially pickups, have outgrown a lot of rural roads that had their origins as footpaths and horse paths. Even with well-intentioned cyclists and drivers, it's often times a setup for conflict.

So many areas in the US are much less walkable and bikeable than they used to be. I say that as someone who bicycle commuted for years. When I rode my bike to school as a kid I dealt with 25-35 mph traffic. The traffic was much lighter, the vehicles were much smaller, the drivers weren't perfect but they were way less distracted, and the shoulders were in better shape.

We can try to raise our kids with values that are consistent with the ones we grew up with. But trying to give them the same conditions because "it's what we did" doesn't always match up with reality.

This is great, but it's also easy to go too far in this direction. This can work through elementary school and into middle school, but I don't think it works in high school.

It's really hard to be a high school student without your own phone. I know some people who have kept their kids from having phones into high school. It avoids some of the addictive and distracting issues that come from having phones at a young age, but it's way more isolating than people realize. You might have a landline, but if no other high school age people are making voice calls to communicate, no one's going to call that landline. And the landline at home doesn't help you coordinate pickups and drop-offs as people start to do a wider variety of activities.

We have plenty of conflict in our home around devices, so I don't criticize any particular approaches. I'd just say that if you're taking this approach, it's probably a good idea to figure out how you're going to transition to kids having devices as they get into their high school years.

Have you ever met Chad? I have no doubt this is sincere.

I met Chad during the gittip years, and one of my life goals now is to go find him in the offline world some day and sit around an open fire at night to share stories. :)

I wish I still had my gittip penny, but I seem to have lost it in several moves since that time.

Anecdotal data point: My son is finishing 9th grade, and he's taking 10th grade math because he got ahead a year when he was younger. At his school, you're exempted from having to take the final exam if you're passing with a reasonable grade at the end of the semester. He said there are about four students who don't have to take the final exam.

Math has always been hard to teach well, because issues with earlier math classes compound so much. With all the societal interruptions to education, and the impact of addictive tech on young people's minds, it's only gotten more difficult.

I'm partway through Anthony Shaw's NDC talk, "Are LLMs good software engineers?" One of the realizations he shares is that he found himself treating AI assistants like junior engineers. Then he realized they're like junior engineers in how they work and behave, but they don't learn like juniors do.

I thought that was an interesting thing to point out.

People are talking about Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, and AI. No one has mentioned defunding public education yet.

In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go up, and funding is flat, something gets cut. You can't cut education for a decade straight without impacting student learning.

I don't think Alaska is that much of an outlier in this regard.

With most parks the crowds quickly disappear once you are 2 miles in.

And those crowds just aren't present in the early morning. Nobody gets up early enough to be out at sunrise. I'm not worried about saying this out loud and spoiling it either, because most people just don't like to get up that early.

I've been to gorgeous places all over the US that are absolutely packed by 10am or noon. Those same places are completely empty, and even more beautiful at sunrise. I live near one of the best mountain biking places in the southeast US, and regularly do 20-30 mile rides starting at sunrise, and only occasionally see a runner or another cyclist. There's just nobody out in the early mornings.

From my understanding there are a lot of companies that need their own package repositories, for a variety of reasons. I listened to a couple podcasts where Charlie Marsh outlined their plans for pyx, and why they felt their entry into that market would be profitable. My guess is that OpenAI just dangled way more money in their faces than what they were likely to get from pyx.

Having a private package index gives you a central place where all employees can install from, without having to screen what each person is installing. Also, if I remember right, there are some large AI and ML focused packages that benefit from an index that's tuned to your specific hardware and workflows.

This has me thinking about VS Code and VS Codium. I've used VS Code for a while now, but recently grew annoyed at the increasingly prevalent prompts to subscribe to various Microsoft AI tools. I know you can make them go away, but if you bounce between different systems, and particularly deal with installing VS Code on a regular basis, it becomes annoying.

I started using VS Codium, and it feels like using VS Code before the AI hype era. I wonder if we're going to see a commercial version of uv bloated with the things OpenAI wants us all to use, and a community version that's more like the uv we're using right now.

Astral was building a private package hosting system for enterprise customers. That was their stated approach to becoming profitable, while continuing to fund their open source work.

The last section focuses on how to use LLMs to make contributions:

Use an LLM to develop your comprehension.

I really like that, because it gets past the simpler version that we usually see, "You need to understand your PR." It's basically saying you need to understand the PR you're making, and the context of that PR within the wider project.

One of the main issues is that pointing to your GitHub contributions and activity is now part of the hiring process.

If I were hiring at this moment, I'd look at the ratio of accepted to rejected PRs from any potential candidate. As an open source maintainer, I look at the GitHub account that's opening a PR. If they've made a long string of identical PRs across a wide swath of unrelated repos, and most of those are being rejected, that's a strong indicator of slop.

Hopefully there will be a swing back towards quality contributions being the real signal, not just volume of contributions.

I'd be curious to know what portion of that 40% makes any meaningful income from their open source work. I would guess that most of those people are being paid a small appreciation amount for the work they're doing, not something resembling a living wage.

I have a friend who's fond of saying, "GitHub stars are great for measuring the number of GitHub stars a project has."

That's part of why they are trying to take control of elections, which have (I believe) historically been the responsibility of each state.

I think you are right. I'll edit my comment to point to this.

You're absolutely right that some individuals will be able to sign up for this program, and remember to cancel at the end of the six months. However, when companies choose to implement a policy like this they're acting on well-established statistics. They know that a meaningful percentage of people will forget to cancel, and the company will end up with increased revenue. There might be a bit of good will here, but in the end a program like this with these clearly-spelled-out terms is not much more than marketing.

This feels especially ugly to me because maintainers of large open source projects will feel pressure to keep using tools that let them work in an AI-assisted world. This really feels like it will make life harder for open source maintainers in the end, rather than easier. That's the opposite of what a meaningful open source campaign should look like.

At the very least, it puts maintainers right back in the position of having to beg giant companies for handouts.

At first I thought people here were being pretty unsympathetic to an early version of a beneficial program. I could see a company setting a 6-month timeline initially, so they can reevaluate the program and choose how to evolve their support for open source. I expected to see something along the lines of, "at the end of the 6 months we'll evaluate whether to continue your free plan."

But no, they're quite explicit about this being nothing more than a way to try to get paid subscriptions from open source maintainers:

Your complimentary subscription will expire at the end of the Benefit Period. After expiration, any existing subscription will continue unless you cancel. You may independently choose to purchase a paid Claude subscription at the then-current price through Anthropic’s standard signup process.

So anyone who participates in this will need to remember to opt out six months from now, or suddenly find themselves with invoices at the max 20x level.

That's pretty ugly.

Edit: I believe I misread the terms. As mwigdahl points out below: "If you have an existing subscription, it pauses while the free period is active. After that free period, your existing subscription resumes. As I read it, there is no "auto-subscribe" after the free period ends -- you just revert back to whatever you had before (or nothing, if you weren't a subscriber before)."

https://www.anthropic.com/claude-for-oss-terms

As someone who earned "passion" money for a long time before ever earning anything remotely close to tech-adjacent money, passion does not pay bills anywhere near as well as money does. And struggling to pay bills, such as paying someone to fix a leaking roof, is not an enjoyable life for very long.

the real culprit could simply be boiled down to a failure in classroom management and lack of enforcement against cell phones in class

I was a middle school and high school math and science teacher from 1994 through 2019. I watched the advent of internet in schools, then desktop computers in classrooms, and finally smartphones in students' hands.

I've lived a life of watching teachers and schools get blamed for not dealing better with society's issues. "Just teach kids how to use technology", "just ban phones", and "lock down irrelevant websites" is a pretty big ask when the entire industry is focused on getting kids to use these devices, apps, and sites as much as they possibly can.

I'm a firm believer that taking on something new every decade or so of life is an entirely good thing. I've watched so many people stop living in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. My heroes are people who keep doing what they love into their 80s and 90s, and keep finding new challenges along the way.

Yes, that's exactly what I was trying to get at.