jonahrd

What about the fact that "What is the weird band from the early 2000s in Michigan who wore colored ties?" could be a bar trivia question (challenging enough to recall to be fun), while "Who are Tally Hall?" could not

I overall agree with this article. I was mostly raised in the US but spent time from ages 7-9 in Finland, where I took the metro to school alone, so I see myself reflected in this statistic:

For example, in Finland, the majority of 7 year olds are routinely allowed to walk or bike alone. And by 8, the majority of kids cross main roads, commute to school, and navigate their neighborhoods unaccompanied.

However, I feel the need to push back against this small addition to the main point:

It's providing trigger warnings, so that people can walk out instead of face being uncomfortable in the classroom.

The article is about parents and parenting-culture _restricting_ a child's freedom, especially during important developmental stages.

Trigger warnings in a college classroom are for adults to casually and quickly let other adults know when content might trigger their PTSD (not simply discomfort) so they can make an informed decision about attending a lecture or not, given that it simply might not be worth their time if they won't be able to listen and learn in a clear-minded state. There are no restrictions to anyone's ability to make these decisions, simply a bit more information being provided up front to allow one to do so.

It feels rare to find authors online who both see the danger of raising a generation of children who are never taught that they are allowed to take care of themselves, but who also recognize the value of being kind enough to warn people when you are going to discuss sensitive topics in a lecture, harming nobody in the process.

edit: In fact, thinking a bit more about it, one of the large points the author makes is that consuming either traditional or social media, which is biased towards showing us negative content related to crime, violence, tragedy, etc, will prime parents to over-protect their children. And in the same article, claims that being warned about content that might provoke an intense emotional reaction is an overstep.

Maybe if these parents were also warned that "hey, I know you're just trying to catch up to the news, but reading about a child abduction 2 states over is actually just going to spike your cortisol and make you a worse parent", it would help a generation of parents self-select the media they consume, and help them avoid this trend?

I looked through and found one rejected video from Montreal. It's crazy to me, to reject someone with a French accent. It's how people talk here! Many consider themselves perfectly bilingual and grew up speaking both languages. Even the more Anglo-Quebecois have a very specific vocabulary and accent heavily influenced by French.

Can you explain to me what it means to try to get the traffic light to change on Bush street? I tried searching for it but couldn't find anything.

I disagree, Greta Thunberg's whole thing started in 2018, leading to larger and larger climate protests and action globally...

..until about 2020, with COVID/russia-ukraine/Oct 7/trumps re-election following and burying it below tons of other news cycles.

I'm not so sure I agree. To me it's somewhat magical that I can write even this amount of code and have this stuff just magically work on pretty much every platform via docker, the web platform, etc. Maybe this again is me having started with embedded, but I am blown away at the ratio of actual code to portability we currently have.

I agree with your comment. While reading the article, I had sympathy for the author, but also unintendedly pictured them as a mix of all of the "wizard" seniors I have worked with over the years. These are the type of people who when pair programming, constantly point out what they perceive as problems with your development setup, IDE, keyboard-macro skills, lack of tiling layout, etc etc. Not to mention what they will suggest on your actual PRs.

At the end of the day, I like the mental model of programming, and I am somewhat uninterested in shaving every millimeter of friction off of every surface I touch on my computer. Does that make me a worse programmer? Maybe? I still delivered plenty of high quality code.

I might be able to shine a little light on this.

I came from embedded, where I wasn't able to use agents very effectively for anything other than quick round trip iterative stuff. They were still really useful, but I definitely could never envision just letting an agent run unattended.

But I recently switched domains into vaguely "fullstack web" using very popular frameworks. If I spend a good portion of my day going back and forth with an agent, working on a detailed implementation plan that spawns multiple agents, there is seemingly no limit* to the scope of the work they are able to accurately produce. This is because I'm reading through the whole plan and checking for silly gotchyas and larger implementation mistakes before I let them run. It's also great because I can see how the work can be parallelized at certain parts, but blocked at others, and see how much work can be parallelized at once.

Once I'm ready, I can usually let it start with not even the latest models, because the actual implementation is so straightforwardly prompted that it gets it close to perfectly right. I usually sit next to it and validate it while it's working, but I could easily imagine someone letting it run overnight to wake up to a fresh PR in the morning.

Don't get me wrong, it's still more work that just "vibing" the whole thing, but it's _so_ much more efficient than actually implementing it, especially when it's a lot of repetitive patterns and boilerplate.

* I think the limit is how much I can actually keep in my brain and spec out in a well thought out manner that doesn't let any corner cases through, which is still a limit, but not necessarily one coming from the agents. Once I have one document implemented, I can move on to the next with my own fresh mental context which makes it a lot easier to work.

Dear author, I suggest trying out a job in a niche part of the field like firmware/embedded. Bonus if it's a company with a bunch of legacy devices to maintain. AI just hasn't quite grokked it there yet and thinking still reigns supreme :)

I think you misunderstood GP's point, that it's now the _influencers_ and social media stars who are shaping culture. Not Hollywood or its stars.

this became extremely apparent for me watching Adam Curtis's "Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone" series. The series documents what it was like to live in the USSR during the fall of communism and (cheekily added) democracy. It was released in Oct 2022, meaning it was written and edited just before the AI curve really hit hard.

But so much of the takeaway is that it's "impossible" for top-down government to actually process all of what was happening within the system they created, and to respond appropriately and timely-- thus creating problems like food shortages, corrupt industries, etc etc. So many of the problems were traced to the monolith information processing buildings owned by the state.

But honestly.. with modern LLMs all the way up the chain? I could envision a system like this working much more smoothly (while still being incredibly invasive and eroding most people's fundamental rights). And without massive food and labour shortages, where would the energy for change come from?

I found an interesting bug: https://webpiano.jcurcioconsulting.com/play/fvT2WvzCT1SybhNp...

If I'm playing a quick pattern like this and holding down some bass note, depending on where the pattern starts, the middle two notes will become "synchronized" and play/get recorded at the same time. In my example, the top 4 notes work fine, but shifting down by one note causes the bug. I also switched between holding the bass not and not for demonstration. I assure you my fingers aren't doing anything different, I messed around with this for a while.

edit: got a better recording: https://webpiano.jcurcioconsulting.com/play/b4qautCGQpQjA6wq...

2nd edit: I thought this had to do with the "groupings" of keys but even the middle 4 that are grouped together show this behavior: https://webpiano.jcurcioconsulting.com/play/5XuIskeJNQQaiC7h...

I'm a much more auditory/visual learner, so these videos work really great for me. I'm glad that reading works for you!

yeah I'm not gonna open some paid trail map or buy a paper map so I can walk across my local city park and give my friends a pin to find me...

Yes, people can and do recreationally take GHB quite often. (also commonly used in date rape cases)

The same can be said for MDMA, and others

Well.. deer, for one. It's much easier to spot animals crossing the road with bright headlights than without.

I still also agree headlights are too bright, by the way, but I'm just providing an example for your question

That would be 300 micrograms

The author lives in quite a bubble if he thinks people would be excited to fund this kind of research. People want to be able to afford the cost of living, not fund extraterrestrial research. (I'm saying this as someone who would be excited to fund this)

I found it incredibly confusing to read the following:

Once the federal government gets into the business of allowing free speech, it can define what’s allowable free speech. And you need only look at our northern neighbor or our friends across the Atlantic to see how that’s working out.

I had to scan the article for other clues that the author is, in fact, American, and was, in fact, referencing Canada and Europe as supposedly worse of in regarding to free speech than the US.

The US consistently ranks below Europe and Canada when rated on free speech metrics by third parties [1] -- and has been trending downwards.

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...

I know this is super late and nobody will likely see it, but the population of Quebec + Ottawa together is 18% of the population of Montreal + Toronto.

And the amount of track to connect the 4 cities together is double the simple Montreal-Toronto route -- on paper. In reality it's much larger, because most of the track along the Montreal-Toronto corridor is useable for HSR, but the proposed Ottawa-Toronto stretch is the one that needs a lot of new track.

There already are trains connecting to all of these cities, so HSR would still benefit people trying to get from, say, Toronto to Quebec City (the current rail service has a ~30 min stop in Montreal anyway, a transfer wouldn't add any real delay in that respect, and you'd cut down several hours of the journey with HSR service for the first leg). I'm simply saying that it would be great to just lay the damn track for HSR between the two largest Canadian cities, and deal with the smaller ones down the road.

this is actually exactly what has been happening over the past few decades, and with the current proposal, for HSR from Toronto to Montreal, two of the largest cities in terms of both population and economy in Canada.

Ottawa felt excluded, and is where the federal govt is based, so instead of going along the 401, a straight highway that follows a river valley and lake and has existing rail corridors, it has to go from Montreal to Ottawa (a short stretch also along a river) and then cut from Ottawa to Toronto via Peterborough, which requires new track, fixing old windy track to allow HSR, some sections have to be speed limited, and has to build through hills and dense forest.

Also, Quebec feels that they don't get "enough" out of the project connecting their largest city to another economic powerhub, so it of course also has to be extended the extra 250km to Quebec city (luckily along a river)

The logical method would be to build Toronto to Montreal 30 years ago, then build a branch to Ottawa one day, and an extension to Quebec another day. The Canadian economy would probably be much stronger if that was the case.

Or we can just wait 30 more years and have this project not be implemented.

This is because the T is not a "real" transit system in the way that it's simply not designed to move enough people fast enough to compete with cars.

The game truly doesn't function without stakes. With no bets, the only stakes are losing your entire stack and not being able to play, so it pushes the game very early on into all-in territory.

With small sums ($5), it's too easy to slip into the same mindset after your buddy offers you a beer (since it's basically paid for)

In high school we combatted this with a $20 buy in. Now we do a $50 buy in. Sure, it kinda sucks to lose. But the money is just going back to your friends, and a dinner + drinks out on the town is likely to cost the same. Even when you lose you still had a fun night. And when you win it's even better!

Of course, we are only playing once every few months.. so it's really not a big issue financially.

I used a string of KaiOS devices mostly as my primary device from ~2017-2023. I loved the battery life, the lack of distraction, the size and portability. I liked KaiOS because I could still chat via Facebook, Whatsapp, check email, maps, when I needed to. But it was annoying enough that I didn't spend much time in them. I loved/hated the physical T9 keys. I could text while not even looking, but it definitely was never as fast as a smartphone. If the predictive text was better it may have worked out.

The problems are 1. The camera. I had multiple devices with different levels of camera but it's truly a marvel of our world that I can carry around something that takes cinema-quality photos immediately. Dumb phones do not have good cameras. It's almost useless to even include one, I mostly just used it to remember specific posters/signs like parking.

2. The 'requirement' to use smartphone apps. Certain bank logins need an authenticator app. The Canadian border required Arrive can. Some concerts use apps for tickets. Yes, there are workarounds. Yes, it's possible to live without these.. But I can tell you from firsthand experience it's getting harder and harder, more annoying. This is actually simultaneously the reason I stuck with it so long, as a sort of protest against the direction our society is going.. but alas it didnt quite last.

3. Job changed, I needed to access discord while working at a bar. I realized I was carrying BOTH phones around for almost all of 2023, using my dumb phone for calls and texts, and my smartphone with WiFi to run discord and a few other apps. It felt stupid and was annoying so I bit the bullet and switched my sim to the smartphone.

4. I literally listen to less music. The music player apps were all garbage and it's no longer 2007 so it's not really fun to maintain a library of mp3s on a device. None of the KaiOS devices support streaming music.

If someone comes out with a small "dumb" phone with maps, Spotify, a great camera, and support for signal, Whatsapp, maybe FB messenger, and a basic browser, with good predictive typing and an OS that doesn't lag, I would pay a premium for it.

Edit: one of the most annoying side effects is when I'm in public trying to check maps or write a text and suddenly everyone around me asks "omG is that a flip phone???" and I am not a rude person so I maintain a slight conversation while they pry and ask to see it and show their other friends. Slows down the process of quickly using my phone quite a bit

I don't mean to be nitpicky, but you specified the difference between a theoretical impossibility and an engineering impossibility in your parent comment. I assume the reply is just referring to the fact that technically getting to a star system within the 10s of light-years away is an engineering feat, not a break-the-known-rules-of-the-universe feat. I don't take it that they're actually claiming it's a realistic feat that may be accomplished soon.

Wait but driving cars is pretty much the classic example of how learning to use tools can become an "extension" of our visual, motor, spacial perception.

It's why a new driver feels so uneasy while a seasoned driver can almost "feel" the amount of space their car takes up.

There's an interesting dichotomy:

As a single user, you must assume that anything you upload to the Internet will be there forever, because anyone can download a copy and maintain it. This means users need to be careful about privacy-sensitive information, controversial opinions, etc.

But on a broader level we don't actually dedicate much effort at all to maintaining the bulk of what's posted online, meaning most important things will eventually be deleted.

I absolutely understand why NVIDIA is incentivized to maintain CUDA dominance, and I absolutely understand that within these market parameters, AMD/Intel/others have dropped the ball.

However it's worth noting that in the end, it's the consumer that loses out when these technical/capability moats maintain a de facto sort of monopoly on certain use cases.

I remember reading a very well written article on stuxnet, detailing the entire way it worked. It was written in a very story-like way that built slowly until it revealed what the actual payload and impact was. Does anyone have a link to this article?

I'm not sure I fully buy this, only because how would anyone be absolutely certain that they'd make more with Sam Altman in charge? It feels like a weird thing to speculatively rally behind.

I'd imagine there's some internal political drama going on or something we're missing out on.