languagehacker

I've done this before as a free replacement for my OpenClaw bot. It loses its connection sometimes and you need to redo the handoff with your phone. But otherwise, nice to have a use for my old Mac. It's also running my Home Bridge, which Claude can interact with. Pretty cool.

The idea is cool, and it'd be a lot cooler without the terf book getting mentioned

Wonder how many of them got hired as a response to all the Travis Kalanick-era notoriety

The bullshittery is the thing that will not survive enshittification. I keep telling people that all the tokens we're blowing are going to explode in cost as soon as these companies run out of other people's money. To me, this means being laser-focused on your core competencies and only "farming out" stuff to AI that you would offload to a vendor. We're all familiar with the level of risk there, and the kind of encapsulation you need to swap something out if a vendor fails you.

RIP to Lala -- I fondly remember listening as much music as I could exactly once

I'm having more problems with Firefox 150 than I have had with any other browser update in years. I think I might be the only one though?

I absolutely love JG Ballard. Crash is a classic, and High Rise is a fun one.

I used https://github.com/Kevjade/migrate-openclaw, and then started running Claude Code with remote exec against an empty folder that I've advised it to start adding new memories into. So far, my bot's personality is back, and it can utilize the same skills as before, which is was failing on last week.

I don't have an especially heavyweight implementation, because I only use mine to review things I've written in my Apple Notes (journaling of various kinds, mostly) and give insights.

My OpenClaw assistant (who's been using Claude) lost all his personality over the last week, and couldn't figure out how to do things he never had any issues doing.

I racked up about $28 worth of usage and then it just stopped consuming anymore, so I don't know if there was some other issue, but it was persistent.

I got sick of it and used a migration script to move my assistant's history and personality to a claude code config. With the new remote exec stuff, I've got the old functionality back without needing to worry about how bleeding-edge and prone to failure OpenClaw is.

I feel like this is what their plan was all along -- put enough strain and friction on the hobbyist space that people are incentivized to move over to their proprietary solution. It's probably a safer choice anyway -- though I'm sure both are equally vibe-coded.

Man it's really too bad that that's the headline, because it's a great tribute to Arturo Vega, and I don't understand why it has to come at the expense of such a seminal band. If what Eno said about the Velvet Underground is true, then album sales don't account for much in the grand scheme of things anyway.

Nice to see SUNY Albany on here!

This book was so good. Can't wait to watch this after work :)

BRB requesting access to my remote server "animal style"

Twaddling and puffery!

I'd point folks to the concept of "Construction Grammar", which is related to this problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_grammar

Having more data and being able to consistency process it actually can say a lot about the hypotheses that linguists have. All other science is evidence-based. The challenge for linguistics has been that many theorists pick and choose armchair examples rather than back their assertions up with statistical validity.

I'm a big fan of Karl Popper's work. I learned about him when reading the book Empirical Linguistics by Geoffrey Sampson. At the time, it was a pretty iconoclastic publication, since it directly struck against the assumption of nativism by framing the study of language as something that could be evidence-based in a way where hypotheses were truly falsifiable. The ability to collect and process large amounts of data pertinent to language make it a lot easier to strike down some of the more inscrutable theories of the '90s and '00s -- at least to those who are willing to do real science.

That's not the sort of architecture I'm referring to. I'm specifically talking about splitting your application layer between Elixir and Python.

I feel like if you need to utilize a tool like this, odds are pretty good you may have picked the Wrong Tool For the Job, or, perhaps even worse, the wrong architecture.

This is why it's so important to do lots of engineering before writing the first line of code on a project. It helps keep you from choosing a tool set or architecture out of preference and keeps you honest about the capabilities you need and how your system should be organized.

Chipmunks are not squirrels

I've lost count of projects called Cicada

First thing I wanted to do was click the monster button in SimCity 2000

Thinking 220GBP for a high-limit Claude account is the kind of thinking that really takes for granted the amount of compute power being used by these services. That's WITH the "spending other people's money" discount that most new companies start folks off with. The fact that so many are painfully ignorant of the true externalities of these technologies and their real price never ceases to amaze me.

If Celery seems like overkill for your process, and you're really just looking to execute basic cron functioanlity, then why not just use crontab to invoke your Python script?

I can think of two major ways to operationalize a Python script that needs to run continuously. One is with containerization, which usually means Kubernetes, which already has a perfectly fine resource definition for cronjobs. The other approach is to run the script in a bare metal or VM, which would mean defining a service to ensure that the process can be managed appropriately, restarted if it dies, and the like. In other words, defining a service is about just as much effort as defining a cronjob, and there's no escape from some amount of "ops work" that isn't encapsulated in a Python script.

So why not just use the tried-and-true prior art than worry about building and supporting your own secret third thing that others would need to learn, support, maintain, and keep in mind when debugging a problem?

Isn't postal arbitrage how the original Ponzi scheme started?

There are a lot of reasons why people are here illegally. Over 50 years we created an environment in Latin America that made it dangerous and unlivable for normal, law-abiding people. At the same time, we radically altered what we consider to be refugee status for immigration, and introduced rules that unfairly put requirements on other countries that refugees going over land need to apply for refugee status in every other country, whether or not there is infrastructure or jobs to support those refugees.

This is all while companies reap the benefit of and build their pricing structures off of cheap, undocumented labor. We are profiting off of criminalizing people who are just trying to live their lives.

You might count yourself fortunate not to be in this kind of a predicament, but it may benefit you to consider educating yourself on the subject and having a bit of empathy for others instead of relying on categorical absolutes.

There's a challenging burden of proof that starts even with what constitutes the ability to detain a person. US Citizens don't need to show anyone proof of citizenship due to a law that's been on the books since before World War II -- a law that was created after our legislators were disgusted by what was going on in Germany at the time. This means that for ICE to detain someone whose identity they don't already know 100%, there is a legal grey area where a citizen does not need to comply with their request. So how do they improve their accuracy? Sounds like racial profiling, right? That's because it is.

Your analogy of an illegally parked car is spurious because where a car may park is pretty unequivocal. I hope that what I've described here helps you understand that this would be like someone choosing not to tow a Ford but opting to to tow a Kia even though they're parked against the same red curb.

For sure, using civil power, since these are all administrative violations and aren't considered felonies.

The issue isn't with the deportations -- it's actually with the change in tactic, and a lot of the extrajudicial behavior. Immigration is an absolute mess, and it's one we created ourselves with one bad policy after another. I'd recommend "Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here" to understand the 50+ year history of how American military and political involvement in Latin America created the instability which caused the refugee crisis -- and even created the cultural phenomena that resulted in the creation of MS13.

When the Cato institute publishes something like this it's all over. These guys used to be considered incredibly conservative. For them to submit something so level-headed and factual which goes counter to a Republican-led administration's politices indicates that the current government is being run not by folks engaging in good faith with our existing political institutions, but with radicals intent on twisting those institutions for their own agenda.

Please remember that 23% of those with no conviction but pending charges should be considered innocent until proven guilty. If you get hit with a traffic stop, you shouldn't be lumped in with violent offenders. That's not how our justice system works.