thwarted

made the bread cheap enough

The circus is distracting from the price of bread, apparently.

You don't have an on-call rotation but do have people dedicated to vendor relationships, and that guy works on the weekend? I'm not sure how you completely avoid getting alerts on the weekend for third-party payment processor issues, which can happen anytime, if you actually want to transact business on the weekend.

Open-source projects often have this problem where you can have dozens of thousands of man-hours poured into a project without a single end-user opinion taken into account.

How is this "a problem"? The reason there are dozens of thousands of hours on an open source project is because the end-users are working on it. Some projects exist solely for someone to work on it (that is, the "working on it" is the "use case"). Open source does not expect or need to make money or get "users", so how people discover or source what they build and how to proceed isn't really a "problem".

The industry couldn't decide what it wanted for a long time (and maybe still hasn't settled). Pages needed to be consistent visually no matter which platform and browser the page was displayed on (which is odd, few people used the same sites on multiple platforms at the time). Oh, but then it was visually jarring because it didn't match the rest of the platform and you couldn't leverage your knowledge and experience of the platform's UI (the way multi-select worked in drop downs, accessibility). But then you couldn't style the widgets on the page to make your site distinct (styling OSX "lickable candy" widgets didn't work so well since they were so visually unique). And then you had mobile where space is a premium and scrollbars were sometimes visually hidden and the entire application took up the whole screen, so differences from other sites and the platforms as a whole were not as prominent. So all widgets had to be stylable (IIRC, you could style buttons but not scrollbars for a while, which made things inconsistent within a given page itself). And complete control of the "experience" became desirable, the scrollbar was seen as part of the page, not part of the container that holds and displays the page.

Ultimately the browser was recognized as its own platform and had to support all the customizations and accessibility concerns. User stylesheets are a thing, but few used that for much more than hiding annoying elements, and today the most likely user customizable thing is being able to switch between light and dark modes.

tricking people into believing that a ML model can have experiences, feelings…

… or that sentences like "You're secrets are safe with me" is at all legitimate, meaningful, or legally binding.

The bank is trying to authenticate you, while you're trying to authenticate the bank. The bank calls and tries to authenticate themselves to the callee by saying "is your birthday such and such?", they're risking sharing PII with an unauthorized third-party. The solutions are a non-trivial amount of effort that no one really wants to put up with, unfortunately.

I used to have a residential mortgage with two other people and my name was stuffed into some ancillary field as a co-holder and they refused to give me any information or transact over the phone. I eventually figured out I needed to tell them to look in some extended info field, and the whole endeavor was annoying but ultimately I was appreciative of the strictness (that the entire mortgage data model—at the time (25 years ago), I don't know what it's like today—seems to assume that it will only ever be two people of opposite gender who are married will be on a mortgage was much more disappointing. The other two people were assumed to be married and the woman was seemingly by default listed as the non-primary).

Containers are often used with user namespaces, which is literally another (set of) user account(s).

Leap days, February 29th, are not at the level of time zones. Different time zones do not disagree as to when March 1st will occurs immediately after February 28th.

"What's your favorite sarcopterygian?"

Am I reading your post correctly, this question is the prompt given to an LLM? What is anyone expecting by asking an LLM what its favorite anything is? This is a conversational prompt, so accuracy and rigor is barely applicable or expected, so downgrading to a lesser model should be acceptable. If you really want to attribute preference to an LLM, consider the downgrade to be a "this conversation is beneath my advanced n-billion parameter training".

extra capabilities you get from an ActiveRecord framework such as full-stack admin pages

The naive "here's a row-level view of the database records" that things like ActiveRecord/ActiveAdmin give you by default are entirely inappropriate for any line of business administrative interaction. Line of business admin sites should be workflow based and focused on surfacing specific information needed for processes outside of the admin site itself. Non-developer staff should not be expected to interpret the state of rows and relationships among the tables.

"We have this thing that's awesome that we can convince people to buy" eventually becomes "We can convince people to buy". It's unfortunate that "convince people to buy" can be successfully used independently of the quality or appropriateness of the item being sold.

younger folks don't fully adjust for important factors: plane hijackings used to be much more common

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings

(I can not say how comprehensive that wikipedia list is).

There's more in the 70s and 80s than I was expecting (having lived through the 80s), but given how many flights there are, hijackings have been and are exceedingly rare; and most of these are not even US flights. These are "driving is orders of magnitude more dangerous than flying" and "10x a very small number is still a very small number" numbers.

https://businesstats.com/global-air-traffic-number-of-flight...

https://easbcn.com/en/how-many-planes-fly-per-day-around-the...

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/world-air-pas...

These numbers only serve to re-enforce that the response of giving up liberty for (the feeling of) security due to terrorist action in the US was probably outsized. General population awareness in general was probably more of a deterrent after 9/11 than any of the first order 9/11 response actions, especially considering that the US gave countries in the middle east further reason to hate Americans and US foreign policy after 9/11. Obviously, terrorist attacks get a lot of air time and column inches, which feeds the perception of the risk.

It's rich that the cohort that sees identity verification and real names policies as necessary and meaningful also doesn't seem to understand the first thing about identity and names.

It's safer in the same sense as if you're paranoid about your date being a serial killer, you meet them in a public venue. It doesn't mean your date isn't a serial killer, but the risk profile is different because other people can be involved/witness/have context.

You didn't use the word "safe", you used the relative term "safer", and on average, it is harder to hide ill intent in open source software, there's a greater chance it will eventually be discovered. The blast radius is larger for open source (because the barrier to using it is lower), which increases the number of people impacted, but an increase in the number of people impacted also increases the chance of discovery and motivation to address it once discovered.

"I need you to turn your key and enable the missile silo's MCP server, sir".

~ the opening scene from a reboot of War Games, probably.

A few years ago there was consternation over the US's missile launch system using 8" floppy disks, that it was needless archaic and had never been updated. Can't say that if the launch is mediated by the latest hotness LLM.

Reducing buffer size puts back pressure on the whole system, which can be valuable to manage load (but often throttles faster stages and that throttling makes people uncomfortable). A meaningful metric is how much of the buffer is used at any given time and the throughout. If the buffer is backed up, that says there's a bottle neck on the consumption side of the buffer and more bandwidth is needed there. For whatever reason, adjusting buffer sizes is the more common action taken. A buffer provides throughput management but it also provides info/metrics about the operation of the system.

I remember a book I read as a pre-teen, 40 or so years ago, about a kid who wanted to be "perfect". A wear a tree of broccoli on a string around your neck to learn how to overcome embarrassment. A perfect person never makes mistakes, and the best way to not make mistakes is to not do anything. Similar "requirements" of perfection and their expression are presented. The kid eventually finds himself in an empty room, by himself, doing nothing, wearing broccoli. Perfection was achieved, but at the cost of an extremely boring life.

Having a key isn't a distinguishing aspect, it's the position in the "web of trust" network that is important.

Interesting, TIL. That makes the conversion to @2001 even stranger.

"[IPv6:2001:etc:etc::192.etc.etc]"

I'm trusting this is a throwaway example and that you used a real IPv6 address literal in this test, without the "IPv6" and with only colons and no dots (unless you mean to use v4 mapped address with dots)? Because this IPv6 literal is so malformed that I'm hardly expecting it to do something sane and changing that to "@2001" is nasal-demons quality undefined behavior. I tried with this exact literal and it let me send it but then there was a tiny red pop-up at the top of the gmail interface that said "could not be delivered, check your network connection" (which is odd; the same kind of pop-up that appears in gray when you legitimately are not connected to the internet) and it ended up in my drafts with the To: field empty.

I just tried to send a message to a "test@[" my current IPv6 address "]", and gmail told me

    Error
    The address "test@[«redacted»]" in the "To" field was not recognized.
    Please make sure that all addresses are properly formed.

There are very principled reasons why LLMs do not know how many letters are in words, and it says nothing about their facility for understanding meaning. … Tokens are the most basic input unit of an LLM. But tokens don't generally correspond to words or letters, rather sub-word sequences. So Strawberry might be broken up into two tokens 'straw' and 'berry'.

This sounds like a description of a child who has not learned to read yet. You ask a child who is not aware of the alphabet and of "words" how many r's are in strawberry you'd get a non-sense answer too. So what you're really pointing out is that the LLMs have not been trained on "the english language" and how words are constructed and what they are composed of. That they operate by tokens that don't correspond to words or letters is irrelevant as an answer to why they can't count the letters in a word. It's not that I know how many r's are in strawberry because of how I'm understanding the word "strawberry", I know how many r's are in strawberry because I know how to spell strawberry. The LLM needs to be trained on this the same way someone who is learning to read would be trained on it. No one should be surprised that an LLM can't "read" in the same way no one should be surprised that a child can't "read".

This "common sense" you refer to, is it the same common sense Babbage was subject to?

"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

~ Charles Babbage

it turned out that predicting elections is still very hard

So maybe we shouldn't be doing it. The value of predicting an election in the large out in public seems kind of dubious, and it's more like gambling than actually being useful. A candidate only runs, and continues running, if they think they can win. All predictions like these do is confuse voters leading up to election day and while they are voting. It keep candidates from making strong cases for their platform, keeps the voters from listening to the candidates' platforms, and encourages team-based partisan politics.

When the default "search" results are AI, it's difficult, if not impossible, to "choose", since Google is pushing the AI so hard.

Sometimes a given presentation is called biased but it's not that the reporting is biased but that the actual event is or the source material is biased or lacking. "Dog bites man" is not biased against the dog if they don't or can't get the dog's take. And if they do get the dog's take and the dog wastes everyone's time by ranting/barking about cats and they don't print it, it's not the reporting that's biased, the dog squandered its chance to offer its perspective on the topic at hand.

Sometimes there is no "other side" or the other side offers meaningless contribution. The trend to present oneself as unbiased have often given platforms to voices that are not worthy of having a platform, for whatever reason, and someone needs to make a call, and they should be transparent about it. Are they not giving time because they choose to ignore legitimate and useful information or because giving someone a platform to rehash all the bogus reasons that the moon landing was faked again isn't worth it (to use an extreme example). Moon landing deniers can set up their own web site to push their faked moon landing agenda, they don't need to clutter up everyone else's content with their nonsense in the name of "unbiased reporting".

Isn't a "centi-millionaire" someone who has $10,000? Exactly what order of magnitude of millionaire was this person?

Recognizing someone's "fist" and other patterns in their communication is part of traffic analysis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis

Hundreds of job search extensions are in the scan list. LinkedIn knows which of its users are quietly looking for work before they've told their employer. … Extensions tied to political content, religious practice

Why are these even extensions to begin with? A legit job finding service can be a website, no extension required. If they are nefarious extensions that fake ad clicks or mine cryptocurrency, that they are job search, or political, or religious in name/nature only serves to get rubes to install them. This entire ecosystem is goofed up.

To be serious, we need to talk about what cuts are to be made to SS/Medicare/Medicaid and the military. But no one wants to have that discussion

The military-industrialist complex is a socialist jobs program.

being specific is the essence of lawmaking and the whole difference between having a Congress and having a mom

~ P. J. O'Rourke, "Parliament of Whores"