layman51

I have always hated infinite scroll because it becomes way more difficult to understand the index of a search result or piece of content. For example, if I know that each page of results contains 25 hits, then it is easy for me to see which one is the 25th hit, and then which one is the 26th one (first one on the next page).

I don't mind that the order of search results might be shifted around over time, and I understand that there is some profit motive to inserting tangentially relevant or sponsored hits, but I really wish that there were an easy way of knowing what index each result has.

This grew out of a funny little habit I sometimes have where I like to pick a random number and see what search hit that corresponds to. It becomes too tedious with infinite scroll.

Well LLMs also spout a lot of bullshit sometimes. I had a conversation with one just recently where it couldn’t do arithmetic too well with a challenge involving coins of a foreign currency. I think maybe it got tripped up because the convo got a bit too long or maybe it didn’t like that I was using the dollar sign.

You can also make LLMs agree with your own biases for some reason. For example, the people who use them to plan shady stuff.

Overdoing it is a real risk, I learned recently. If you work out too hard, you actually produce free radicals. The tricky thing is that some people can get used to higher heart rate so it doesn’t matter if they are working out hard consistently because they are used to it.

I have actually thought something similar but more in terms of divination. There’s some people who might compare LLMs to something like Tarot or automatic writing (think Ouija) because there’s a sense of randomness with LLMs too.

Both LLMs and divination methods also have the danger that someone could kind of drive themselves into madness with it. I don’t know too much about what how or why people can drive themselves crazy by chatting with an LLM, but with divination, I heard it can cause distress to ask the same questions about yourself many too frequently and also they ask about outcomes instead of methods.

There’s also UV exposure stickers. I haven’t used them, but the idea is that you put a small sticker on your skin, and apply sunscreen normally and over the sticker. Then when the sticker on you turns purple, you know that you have to reapply.

I have heard that some Asian or European sunscreens have some UV blockers that are much more stable than the ones that are mainly used in sunscreens available in the USA. So if you’re using one of these, the need to reapply isn’t as much of a concern. The only thing is that they aren’t FDA approved.

Some examples I have heard of are “ethylhexyl triazone”, “diethylamino hydroxybenzoyl hexyl benzoate”, and “bemotrizinol”.

EDIT: The last chemical on my list was actually approved by the FDA this month (June 2026).

Those drivers don't even need to have the window rolled down as far as I know. That's because most door auto glass lets UVA rays through and that's what causes premature aging. If you want to block those UVA rays, you would need to apply some kind of additional film to the side window.

Does anyone know whether UVA or UVB is more conducive to producing vitamin D naturally? A quick search shows me that it is mainly UVB that's responsible for that, but unfortunately, this is what gets blocked out by glass windows and sunscreen. On the other hand, UVA is what causes early aging.

So this is just an unfortunate situation because I don't think there's a way of just getting UVB into you in a safe way.

The chart in the original post is also throwing me off because it shows Barack Obama as a reference point in the libertarian and left quadrant. But if you look at the official Political Compass site, Obama was in the upper right quadrant (though closer to the origin than others).

The Political Compass person even explained it as something about how in the USA, the Democratic Party is seen as “left-wing” but it is actually “right-wing” if you analyze their positions and actions from the lens of a neutral observer who is able to consider the political environment of many different countries.

You can see for yourself: https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2008

And: https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2012

Any for-profit initiative (ed-tech) will not be incentivized to improve learning outcomes. There's no money in it.

I think a point to keep in mind is that even if some team cracked the ed-tech challenge and created a software that was wildly effective at getting students to learn, it would actually still be very difficult to get public schools to actually adopt it, unless they have some incentives like it being heavily subsidized, or free. And even then, it might not be free forever. That's part of the reason why ed-tech (even when it is proven to work) doesn't really make money.

It might have worked in the very distant past. I learned that there was once a monitorial system of education where a single teacher might be in charge of many students, but only because the teacher would get a lot of help from skilled students who would teach what they had learned to other students in their charge.

I have some athletic shoes that come undone so easily and I think this knot will help me out a lot.

I also remember reading a long time ago someone who wrote that they wanted to be polite to an LLM because after they prompted it to learn about whether politeness was good for improving accuracy of responses, they got a message that led them to conclude that politeness could probably help. It seems a bit odd then because I have heard so much about how people use LLMs' responses about themselves to learn about LLMs themselves, but that seems like it is a suspicious approach.

To me, it kind of reminds me of a Lucid Motors car.

I remember losing sense of smell, and one thing that was interesting was being able to perhaps train it back by sniffing different essential oils, and writing a note about what I was able to smell.

I think part of this is important too because online news articles might have corrections, or certain paragraphs might get deleted in some rare situations. It's good to have a way of tracking those. Sometimes, the edits made to an article are very irrelevant to the actual message. I'm thinking stuff like typos, or even embarrassing gaffes like the recent time that a headline implied that the NATO acronym had the word "American" in it.

I read online that it has to do with their "Free-For-Teachers accounts" which I assume is a way for teachers to get access to Canvas services for free when their school doesn't subscribe to it.

I don't know for sure, but I think it probably had to do with some kind of misconfiguration on an Salesforce Experience Cloud site. I have heard that ShinyHunters often exploits this type of service and that it is very easy for companies to forget to set the right permissions to data and they end up throwing a bunch of different data into Salesforce.

I thought it was illegal to pay ransom to hackers. I guess it is legal or maybe it isn't very clear? I thought that there were certain conditions that the company had to check together with law enforcement so that at least the ransom money doesn't go to a hacker group that is on a government payments sanctions list.

Also, does anyone know the root cause of the attack? I read a rumor online (but it's not really confirmed anywhere) that it may have had to do with the common pattern of ShinyHunters where they use a vulnerability in a Salesforce Experience Cloud site. What is confirmed for sure is that the vulnterability involved the feature of Canvas called "Free-For-Teacher accounts".

I think it can sort of make sense for some people who sort of listen to music as a background noise. But for me, when I am listening to a new song, I get curious about who the artist(s) is/are. Do they sound better in a live performance? What other music or artists inspired them? What other artists sound like them?

I don’t think it would be easy for a “AI” artist to not be suspicious to me unless they were like some kind of character that is made up by a record label or another artist.

Yes, this was it. Thanks! Looks like it was part of a book called Living Proof.

You reminded me of a post I had read on a math-related website. I think it was a math association where different authors could post articles, but it was one about a series of advice columns by people pursuing PhDs or graduate studies in math.

Anyway, the article I'm thinking of was about a guy who had advice along the lines of "keeping up your hygiene" or "maintaining your cleanliness habits" and his anecdote was about being stuck for a while in making progress on a problem, but he would have a habit of taking a daily shower. There was a detail he shared about getting an insight and then being able to write some ideas on the window with the condensation.

I wonder if I can find it again.

Question: I have heard that at some tech companies that use internal chat software, the general practice is for IT to set it so that the messages are automatically deleted at the end of the day. In Google Chat this is a feature called "turn off history", and the idea behind it is that it can reduce a paper trail when there are investigations into the company doing something that's potentially monopolistic or otherwise shady.

If keystrokes are captured, isn't this a double-edged sword where maybe the company might be inadvertently collecting evidence against itself if there's an investigation and the investigators want to collect keystrokes?

Also, it seems like some police dogs in the USA that were probably trained in Germany use these German dog commands too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlntC-WAbd0

Is this related to the exam that some college graduates could take to become professional engineers?

I am not a lawyer, but yeah I think there seems to be like a distinction in the United States between copying a "protected DVD" versus an unprotected one.

It's still sort of confusing to me because would that mean then that if you are making a personal backup in the United States, would it technically be allowed if you pointed a video camera at your own TV screen?

This is kind of timely for me because very recently I had heard of the film "Synecdoche, New York", but in this film, the scale model is more life-size.

This is tangential, but what you wrote about nature reminded me of a biology professor once saying how at least in nature it seems like other animals generally kill in a quick, efficient way where hopefully the prey won’t suffer too much.

How might this tool work in terms of “archiving” a site? This is just something I was wondering given the recent change and controversy about archiving service sites on Wikipedia.

I had a couple of experiences where I suspected I was hearing LLM-generated/edited text being read aloud. It was at two different webinars about that were about roadmaps or case studies about some products that I use. It was a bit uncanny because I could detect the stylistic patterns ("It's not X, it's Y" and "No X, no Y, just Z"), but it was kind of jarring to see them spoken by a person on a video call. It makes me think this kind of pattern might be engaging, but for a lot of people, it now sticks out for the wrong reasons.

Once LLM generated speech or content start getting into the live answers of Q&A sessions, that would be sad. I know some people try to get through interviews, but I think that might be a bit harder to not detect.

Floaters are very annoying. One solution for me has been to turn my brightness down as much as possible, but of course this might make it difficult to see what's on your monitor if there's too much ambient light around you.