sgentle

It's not calculated, and not personal.

It doesn't have to be either of these things to be intentional. Pretty much every large system is too complex to be calculated or personal in the way we would apply those terms to a human. However, you can still describe a system as having values and goals, still analyse it in terms of its incentives and the mechanisms it evolves to achieve them in its environment.

The incentives are continued YoY growth, the environment is a saturated market, and so the mechanisms are monopolistic and anti-consumer practices. "Go to the Xfinity retail store" doesn't prove anything except that you passed an effort gate, segmenting you away from someone working two jobs with young children at home. 1% of customers costing the company $10 is the same as 100% of customers costing them 10c, with the added benefit that your segment is more likely to hurt retention than the one with no time or energy for comparison-shopping.

Did a single person design and orchestrate this state of affairs? Unlikely, but the company as a whole is more than capable of blobbing its bureaucratic way towards more efficient digestion of your funds. Never underestimate dumb optimisation processes at scale. Given enough time, such processes have turned monkeys into Shakespeare.

Your thought experiment asks: what if the banned book library contained out-of-print white supremacist books instead of historically banned books?

The answer should be obvious: it would be a white supremacist library.

Given that the present administration includes fans of those books, their banning seems unlikely. Perhaps a refresher on the kinds of books that are presently under threat is in order? https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10

(You can find contemporary Huck Finn censorship attempts in their database here, by the way: https://airtable.com/appZthgrTU9u1Bf5d/shr4J8Mgiua2CV2Ig?mWW... )

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his net worth demands he not understand it.

More precisely, you need the idea and mechanisms to prevent competition, such as proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.

Would the National Labor Review Board's legal opinion count as an incorrect summary?

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4380791-NLRB-Advice-...

statements about immutable traits linked to sex—such as women’s heightened neuroticism and men’s prevalence at the top of the IQ distribution—were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding effort to cloak comments with “scientific” references and analysis, and notwithstanding “not all women” disclaimers.

I think that's a really fun idea and I'd love to see it if you do it :)

One thought is maybe you don't need the numbers? Like for n<=2 they're redundant anyway, and maybe it's good to discourage ratios that are more complex by making them longer lexically.

eg reddish purple is just rrb, and dark blueish-grey is bwwkkkk – I kinda like how that reads

Unfortunately this is my broad experience of medical systems across multiple countries and, weirdly, it strikes me as one of the few problems that isn't caused by rent-seeking in the healthcare industry, or at least only very distantly (minus the "don't want to remortgage my house to go to emergency" element, obviously).

Medicine has a curious form of parochial paternalism: doctors, endowed with complete responsibility for your body, bodies in general, and anything that might affect a body, will confidently make claims and assumptions far outside their expertise, and completely ignore the factors outside their purview. Their role is to be the calm and reassuring face of medicine, even at the expense of a necessary humility about the complexity of the systems outside their office.

The bulk of the actual care is done by various non-doctors with a dizzying and overlapping matrix of responsibilities, all but guaranteeing that important things get dropped or missed. But all of that is meant to be fine, because the doctor is the single responsible person who will catch whatever the patchwork misses. Only they don't, because they're doctors, not social workers, not healthcare administrators; they rarely see the full picture.

This leaves only the patient, who, while suffering and with no particular expertise, has to become their own doctor, pharmacist, technician, administrator and patient advocate if they want to receive the best care.

Of course, the best care usually isn't necessary for a good outcome, and if you have an uncomplicated problem with a standard solution, chances are the medical system works just fine for you. But when you slip off the beaten path you very quickly realise that the facade has so many cracks that it's as much cracks as facade.

At some point, every man comes face to face with the lie of his potency. We're told our willingness to turn ourselves into ruthless avatars of purpose makes us powerful. Unstoppable. We can do anything if the call is great enough. Is it suspicious that the call takes the voice of more powerful men? Pay it no mind. The world is yours for the taking.

Then, one day, the tide comes in. You learn what old men know. What women know. What every victim of circumstance knows. Sometimes the world just happens to you.

A curiously frivolous way to frame the decision to get involved with a notorious sex trafficker. Nothing to do with values, integrity or culpability, just some boys missing their mommies.

Market cap and it's not even close. Turns out financialisation is the classic you-get-what-you-asked-for-not-what-you-wanted of capitalism. We told the optimiser to make number go up, and number has certainly gone up. China's number? Not as up.

I think it could have gone differently if we gave our economic system something to optimise other than itself, but then we wouldn't have centibillionaires, so... swings and roundabouts I guess?

You know how it's considered a kind of low-effort disrespect to answer someone's question by pasting back a response from an LLM? I think equivalently if you ask a question where the best response is what you'd get from an LLM, then you're the one showing a disrespectful lack of effort. It's kind of the 2026 version of LMGTFY.

If you still want a copy-paste response to your question, just let me know – I'm happy to help!

And "picturing" is just a florid way of saying "imagining", no?

The art of language lives in its redundancy; every unforced choice is a venue for self-expression.

What I am saying is that women make bad choices [...] and later regret it

Yes, especially when those women are also children. One of the many reasons it's illegal to have sex with them and especially illegal to rent their bodies to your friends.

Only time I've ever been successfully phished was the App Store. I have an Android phone but I wanted to try the ChatGPT app on my iPad and naively clicked the first result, which was of course a scummy clone. I have since wised up and understand the App Store search results to be roughly torrent search levels of trustworthy.

I guess the bar for user trust has now dropped enough across the board to sell more off without losing customers? Pretty sorry state of affairs.

Getting strong The Scorpion and the Frog vibes from this situation. Unfortunately, this is just the nature of a profit-maximising entity. Profit is the gap between how much it can take and how little it can give. It concedes nothing without a demand. Why would it?

The playbook isn't exactly a secret. What you might describe as a "classic walled garden enshittification trap", Peter Thiel and Sam Altman would describe as "monopoly (affectionate)": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REKbaA6USy4 – "proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale", exactly by the book.

I think the bias towards optimism is commendable but I hope this is the wake-up call the community needs to treat "your love is valuable enough to build a business around" as the Faustian bargain it is and keep Core Devices on a short leash. They want to own you, not work with you. It's their nature.

DXMT has been advancing very quickly: https://github.com/3Shain/dxmt

It's been like this for decades. Remember Google+? Remember Google Talk/Chat/Hangouts/Meet/Allo/Duo etc? The company simply values internal political advantage over coherent product development or user experience.

At Google, you're not the customer, and you're not even the product; you're a metric in a promo packet. Your value in the "AI engagement" column vastly exceeds your value as a satisfied user. The system is working as intended.

Do you not think there might be a relationship between the lack of due process and the choice of terms?

Like, maybe the defining difference between arrest and abduction is whether the action is the output of an accountable system of justice, rather than whether the people doing it are the right kind of people and the people having it done to them are the wrong kind of people.

That's a very... pre-1748 kind of philosophy. Hume, Keynes, Russell, Popper and others have written at length about the limitations of prediction from past experience. You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

Even if we accept that extrapolation is the best you can do, you'd still need to justify why the domain of "past experience" is exactly wide enough to generalise across current and previous US presidencies, but not so wide as to include even one of the numerous populist strongman takeovers in non-US political history. Proof by American Exceptionalism, perhaps?

Really fun. Thanks for sharing!

Some random ideas:

It'd be cool if you could start the growth engine from manual mode. Maybe for breadth-first growth you could add all the placed characters, and for depth-first just the last cell you clicked (+ some kind of visual feedback to show what that is)?

I'd also love to play with some way of enabling/disabling the characters to create a subset and see how that behaves.

One last thing is it'd be nice to toggle the grid lines off.

Same link :)

I think you're not getting his key point, or you are but you're being coy about it. He did say skin colour, in the form of "native Brits". How do you know that? Because of the article he linked, defining the terms he was using. The article is called "Ethnic groups in London", not "Cultural groups in London". He quotes statistics about "native Brits" that match the article's demographics for "White British". There is zero ambiguity here.

If I say "I love a [sweet treat](wikipedia.org/wiki/ice_cream)! It's so refreshingly cold on a nice hot day", there's just no intellectually honest way to claim maybe I meant apple pie. Do you understand? He's not talking about Russian immigrants because they're white. He is talking about Pakistani immigrants because they're brown. He's literally telling you what he means and you're choosing to ignore it. Why?

Perhaps there are, in fact, reasons to not say skin colour even when that's what you mean.

As I said, the Wikipedia article is what the words "native Brits" links to.

Here's the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London

Here's what the article says:

In 2011, it was reported for the first time that White British people had become a minority within the city

How could you possibly come to the conclusion that it's not about race? Do you think he linked to the wrong article by accident?

To quote DHH: "when much of the media reports a story like this, it's often without citing the specific words in question"

I think you lose a lot when you abstract away someone's words as "positions that alienate". Pineapple on pizza is a position that alienates, as is forced sterilisation of criminals. So here's some specific words:

London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits [ie white, as specified by the Wikipedia article the words "native Brits" link to]

There's absolutely nothing racist or xenophobic in saying that Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes, Britain primarily a united kingdom for the Brits, and Japan primarily a set of islands for the Japanese.

He doesn't think brown people belong in the UK. His "positions" are racism. He's racist. That's the problem.

Where have all the enlightenment-values rationalist monks gone now that we so desperately need people to combine P and P -> Q?

It's a bit tricky because velocity and altitude are floored every step, and you can only burn on whole timesteps so you can't necessarily hit the target velocity and altitude in a single burn.

I'm not sure if it's optimal, but this is a 2-burn solution that does 1 burn to hit x=20 and another to hit v>=-14 right afterwards: https://gist.github.com/sgentle/d88dd6fe37e76f9167db24379dc7...

I've updated the shader – I think the issue was just that I was initialising the states to random values instead of running a proper degree calculation. The behaviour looked pretty similar to me either way, but now it matches exactly and I added colours to make that clear: https://imgur.com/a/4gZKlSg

As far as I can tell, this isn't adding any meaningful topology. The various notions of graph-connectedness basically amount to a standard finite-state CA with a slightly complex update rule.

The per-cell update mechanism, using "amazing dragons" as an example:

1. Calculate a metric for every cell based on its neighbours

   eg: metric = sum(1/degree if degree > 0)

   eg: eligible = (state > 0) ? (0.9 <= metric <= 2.6) : (1.4 <= metric <= 7.0)

   eg: state = (degree == 1 || degree == 7) ? 0 : degree

Here's an example of that approach: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/wXSyRw

I think for this to live up to the name it would need one or both of the following:

1. edges that mask or gate cells in some way (ie a dynamic neighbourhood) 2. rules that turn edges into other edges without going via cell states

The second result in your YouTube search is a PBS mini-doc called "Why Do College Campuses Have So Many Protests?"

The questions I offered were prompts to engage critically with why this compact exists. Perhaps watching that video might help you find answers beyond "playing dumb".

Careful not to fall into the "People's Democratic Republic" trap: the way something is described and its purported aims are not at all the same as its actual effects (and, often, not even its intended ones). Politics is, in many cases, the art of selling you a box of spoons with "forks" printed on the label.

Instead of asking "does this agreement sound nice?", ask what power it gives, to whom, and what might they want to do with it.

Some prompts to spark a cogent reasoning process:

Signatories commit themselves to [...] transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas

What "institutional units" might this mean? How are they identified? Who identifies them? What is the threshold for belittling conservative ideas that might trigger the "transforming or abolishing" remedy?

Universities shall be responsible for ensuring that they do not knowingly: (1) permit actions by the university, university employees, university students, or individuals external to the university community to delay or disrupt class instruction or disrupt libraries or other traditional study locations [...] signatories commit to using lawful force if necessary to prevent these violations

What do "actions by" "university students" to "delay or disrupt class instruction" refer to? What kinds of disruptive action might the people writing this document be so concerned about that they would ask universities to "commit to using lawful force" to prevent? What sort of scenario is being envisaged here?

Institutions commit to defining and otherwise interpreting "male," "female," "woman," and "man" according to reproductive function and biological processes.

Doesn't it seem oddly specific to assert a definition like this? Why can't a university decide for itself? How does this assertion square with "maintaining a vibrant marketplace of ideas" and the "empirical assessment of a broad spectrum of viewpoints"? Why only this definition and no others?

I could go on, but hopefully you get the picture. It's an important skill to practice critically reading a document the same way you might critically audit code. Don't ask what it seems like it does, ask what it might allow someone to do.

In case this doesn't seem like a particularly scary situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_entrapment#Occurrence

Half of all entrapment victims eventually become engulfed. A human body in grain takes seconds to sink, minutes to suffocate, and hours to locate and recover.