picafrost

One reason I switched to the cheapest notebooks and cheapest (reasonable) pens is a feeling that I was attempting to live a simulacrum of productivity bathed in nostalgia for an era I never lived in, and which probably never existed.

There's a vision I am still somewhat attracted to of illuminating notes into a handcrafted moleskin (or whatever) journal and in doing so, creating an artifact that has value across all dimensions. This intention, whether it sits on the surface of my subconscious or just below it, detracts from the thing of value: what's being written.

What really changed my perspective was attempting to write seriously. The first draft of a long form work is the bare minimum to begin writing. Writing does not really begin until it exists. When I tried to adopt this into the notes I made in my professional life what I found is that, in general, I didn't really need much of the notes anyway.

Hong Wang will become the third female mathematician in history to receive the Fields Medal

Interestingly, if true, it will also be the first time an MIT PhD graduate has won the Fields Medal.

As I understand it many of the very wealthy do not "own" properties directly but control LLCs that do. The chain of trust/LLC ownership can be complex. Also as I understand it, this legislation does not really answer that call effectively -- though I have, of course, not read the full legal text myself.

I suppose in Ken Griffin's case, even if his residence is owned by an LLC he controls, he is known to reside in it. But how effective is this legislation when the purpose of LLC ownership is expressly anonymity and accounting convenience?

All wildlife populations are in a severe decline [1][2]. More should be done about this, but I guess as a species we will have to learn the hard way.

A small way to help is to replace some or all of your lawn with native species. A lawn should be a throw rug, not wall to wall carpet that is functionally a desert. If you won't get fined for doing so.

[1] https://www.worldwildlife.org/news/press-releases/catastroph...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...

Life on this planet will be OK. Throughout geologic time countless species have gone extinct. The Anthropocene might be tragic for the natural world but not terminal.

But: what are we trading it for? Higher living standards for more people is a noble and good but I don't think there's evidence it requires this rate of ecological destruction. Have we ever seriously tried to decouple growth from extraction?

I'm not convinced a solar punk future exists where technology will eventually close that gap in time. Maybe it will. So far it seems that every efficiency gain gets swallowed by expanded consumption. What seems most probable now is that we don't get a better world but the same dirty one plus a Starbucks on Mars.

Anthropic has also been in ongoing discussions with US government officials about Claude Mythos Preview and its offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. [...] We are ready to work with local, state, and federal representatives to assist in these tasks.

As Iran engages in a cyber attack campaign [1] today the timing of this release seems poignant. A direct challenge to their supply chain risk designation.

[1] https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa...

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The air in Manhattan got better because people rejected resignation and demanded that we must do better.

By "scars" you mean the permanent destruction of coral reefs, old-growth forests, and the species that depend on them? These cannot be rebuilt on any timescale meaningful to civilization. What exactly are you defending?

Survival is the floor, not a metric of success.

This is all we've got. We need to do a better job of preserving it.

Nature's finest achievement. A hyper-efficient "mind" built on a pyre of fossil fuels and rare minerals so it can help us burn the rest faster. Surely the Neanderthals stand envious that millions will be able to confide their unemployment woes to ChatGPT after GPS-navigating to the Dollar General in the nearest bleak strip mall in search of affordable goods.

I love watching magpies. I have seen them tease cats by "foraging" just out of sprint and leap distance. They quickly fly up to a tree when the cat moves, always keeping an eye on it, and resume when the cat resets, as other magpies in the group watch from above. I've seen them harass a hawk try to eat a fresh hunt, six magpies surrounding it, taking turns pecking at the hawk's tail until it leaves.

They have interesting interactions with the hooded crows, tolerant of each other but still competitive over food. If a white tailed eagle enters they area they will together team up and attempt to chase it away.

They have complex social interactions with each. I've seen a younger magpie in a group get pinned down by a dominant one while several in the group pecked at its belly, because it ate out of order. They acknowledge even me, their neighbor, who occasionally leaves some winter food out for them.

Anyone who is fortunate to spend real time in or at the edge of nature, and takes the time to observe, should be humbled by the complexity and intelligence of the world around us. Some species stand out, of course, like the magpies.

Most of what we have created as the human race is best characterized as complication rather than complexity, when compared to the utter complexity of the natural world. In the era of AI I find it amusing that we believe we're approaching being able to construct a kind of real intelligence when so many can barely recognize, let alone understand, the "lesser" forms of intelligence around us.

Looking at the website of the organization [1] of the author, linked at the bottom of the submitted link, I get serious Time Cube [2] vibes.

I'm both fascinated and worried about what the internet will look like in five years.

[1] https://www.faf.one/

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20150506055228/http://www.timecu...

Of course. But LLMs may subtract the need for top talent to be working on them.

So much of society's intellectual talent has been allocated toward software. Many of our smartest are working on ad-tech, surveillance, or squeezing as much attention out of our neighbors as possible.

Maybe the current allocation of technical talent is a market failure and disruption to coding could be a forcing function for reallocation.

I am increasingly feeling okay with the idea of being left out. The worst parts of working professionally in a software development team have been amplified by LLMs. Ridiculously large PRs, strong opinions doubled down due to being LLM-"confirmed", bigger expectations coming from above, exceptionally unwarranted confidence in the change or approach the LLM has come up with.

I am dying inside when I make a comment and receive a response that has clearly been prompted toward my comment and possibly filtered in the voice of the responder if not copied and pasted directly. Particularly when it's wrong. And it often is wrong because the human using them doesn't know how to ask the right questions.

Fortunately, most of the fundamental technological infrastructure is well in place at this point (networking, operating systems, ...). Low skilled engineers vibe coding features for some fundamentally pointless SaaS is OK with me.

I think this is good to highlight for non-Scandinavians.

Scandinavian countries are extremely open and transparent in a way that might be shocking for Americans. For example, in Norway, I can check nearly anyone's brokerage account holdings, addresses, phone numbers, etc. on public websites. I can in theory look up anyone's tax filings.

Personal identification numbers do not tend to be considered private in the same way that social security numbers in the US are.

I find this narrative in some corners of American politics fascinating because of how completely it misunderstands US power.

Hegemony isn't charity. It's expensive. What the US gains is an invitation to exert power all over the world from bases and ports within countries playing a willing role in the US position. It gains the US dollar as the reserve currency and petro-currency of the world. In particular, without the world accepting the US dollar as the reserve currency, the US's ability to maintain a large budget deficit evaporates.

To gain this sort of power without invitation and strong alliances built on shared understanding and trust will cost the US much, much more in the longer term.

Totally bizarre to watch the US transform from the endearingly crazy and rich friend to the one who holds you at gunpoint and robs you.

This will make much more sense when the US announces its move away from Arabic numerals (too diverse) back to Roman numerals.

The US is a GDP ponzi scheme disguised as an economy. The silly prices exist to shuffle money between pharmaceutical companies, PBMs, insurers, pharmacies, hospitals, and who knows what other intermediaries. Everyone takes a cut and can put large revenues on their balance sheet.

The US today is structurally dependent on this sort of cash migration. If all Americans suddenly began to save 10%+ of their income every month (also structurally impossible for most), GDP would dramatically contract.

These things aren't broken. They are by design.

Excellent. I hope to see more of it.

Another social issue on GitHub: you cannot use the "good first issue" tag on a public repository without being subjected to low quality drive-by PRs or AI slop automatically submitted by someone's bot.

I think the issue with centralization is still understated. I know developers who seem to struggle reading code if it's not presented by VS Code or a GitHub page. And then, why not totally capture everyone into developing just with GitHub Codespaces?

This is exactly what well-intentioned folk like to see: it's solving everyone's problems! Batteries included, nothing else is needed! Why use your own machine or software that doesn't ping into a telemetry hell-hole of data collection on a regular basis?

Every industry building at scale makes the same tradeoffs. Manufacturers that create physical products use thinner metal, cheaper fasteners, and not-top-quality plastics. That's not because their engineers are bad but because good enough ships and is profitable, while perfect doesn't ship and isn't profitable.

A $20 IKEA chair is not "bad furniture". It's just optimized for different constraints than a Herman Miller. Most consumers are totally happy with the $20 IKEA chair.

An underrated part of engineering skill is knowing what corners to cut. I think large tech companies have structures that impose this on engineers who view this as dereliction of duty.

That's a weird take-away from the post, where the only time ICE is mentioned is

Putting aside GitHub’s relationship with ICE,

and the rest of the article provides technical reasons.

Cool. This concept is useful for adult language learners also. Depending on the language you are learning it can be very difficult to find reading material in the age 5 - 10 range to practice with.

So I urge that community, at COP30 and beyond, to make a strategic pivot: prioritize the things that have the greatest impact on human welfare.

Like addressing the exponential growth of income inequality? Unsurprisingly not mentioned at all. Might mean that billionaires have to give up their carbon credit purchases and then how could they be dismissive about their own emissions?

Bill is one of the better ones with his personal capital allocation. He could've just tried to create the fastest sailboat racing team or something. But I find it extremely difficult to take the wealthy seriously when they speak about carbon emissions and climate change. It’s like hearing an arsonist lecture on fire safety.

Thirty years ago, when I was running Microsoft, I wrote a long memo to employees about a major strategic pivot we had to make: embracing the internet in every product we made.

Is this the one that lead to the term "embrace, extend, extinguish"?

Excellent way to stay busy producing revised editions over the next few years.

I really enjoy writing Zig and I think it's going to be an important language in the future. I do not enjoy porting my code between versions of the language. But early adopters are important for exploring the problem space, and I would have loved to find a canonical source (aside from the docs, which are mostly nice) for learning the language when I did. A text that evolves with the language has a better chance of becoming that canonical onboarding source.

My experience adding types to un-typed Python code has convinced me that static typing should be required for anything more complicated than a single purpose script. Even in old and battle tested code bases so many tiny bugs and false assumptions are revealed and then wiped out.

It's not perfect in Python, and I see some developers introduce unnecessary patterns trying to make type-"perfect" `class Foo(Generic[T, V])` (or whatever) abstractions where they are not really necessary. But if the industry is really going all-in on Python for more than scripting, so should we for typed Python.

I fully agree the narrative is nonsense, the ways, means, and timing of the story is suspect, but I don't buy the "don't trust those experts, trust me, I'm the expert" vibe of this article. Criminal enterprises and nation states aren't mutually exclusive.

Designing tools is designing behavior. It shouldn't be surprising that the behavior of a society changes when the primary form of discourse shifts from communication among peers to maximizing the engagement of strangers due to the financial needs of the platform.

There is something so fundamentally gross about Microsoft's vision of what role an operating system should serve. That there is an aftermarket of software that attempts to disable (but cannot remove!) the invasive dark patterns is alarming enough, but Microsoft may simply just... undo that, with the next unstoppable update.

Then again, this is the company that answered complaints about Windows being bad for development by embedding an OS that is good for development and calling that an innovation rather than an acknowledgement that Windows is bad.