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txru

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I have a suspicion that Twitter laying off so much of the software staff was very influential for people with hiring abilities. The company didn't crash, and they (relatively slowly) began shipping new features again. I think that coincided with the pandemic-era overhiring, and we've been working against that combo ever since.

Every now and then, I actively try to make an LLM replace my tasks, and fully do greenfield projects I would accept- I don't see it. It's very good, no doubt. But I have or have been given the project parameters, and just like with a junior, failures in communication inevitably lead to breakdowns in execution.

Hmm, Claude Shannon was an American (the model is ostensibly named after him), so maybe how he pronounced it would be the correct pronunciation.

That said, every language on earth will adapt foreign words into its phonology. The alternative would be to adopt the phonology of every language that loaned a word into your language.

Goodhart's Law isn't a problem immediately. If you want more code to be written, and the only feasible way to write it to goals is to heavily use AI, then you might run into the problems of AI-generated code, and an infrastructure that's poorly architected and much less understood than it would've been ten years ago.

Rebasing in Magit 4 months ago

These are indicated through context menus throughout specifying what the responses should be. It's a minimal UI though, and where `git rebase` is confusing magit rebase is confusing.

I haven't found much utility in reading Russian-language sources, though I can read the language.

Unfortunately I'm not extrapolating, this fits within a very mature pattern. See 'Little Green Men' in lead-up to Ukraine invasion and the drones violating airspace that Poland has been shooting down.

Hmm, the rigorous systems of measure for GDP were only pioneered by Clark and Kuznets in the 30s and collected widely in the 40s. There were measures before then but they had much less rigor. I imagine the 1880s-mid 1920s were pretty impressive. Ditto for the 1830s-late 1850s.

What’s more, that time period includes recovery from the crashes of the early 30s, the massive war production of the 40s, and the massive boost that was having the rest of the world’s manufacturing and demand still in ruins in the 50s and 60s.

You could be right— but the data sure is confounded.

then it’s completely unsurprising it will become dominated by the party that prefers bigger government.

I think you've assumed the conclusion here. One could equally say that if one party becomes overrepresented by people with higher education, that party will become overrepresented in any administrative position.

Aaron Burr

I find myself more and more often in the position of having to look back many decades for precedent of things that are currently happening. Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing. But the variance of what to expect is wider, and I think it's fair to cast out one's net of expectations wider, and possibly darker.

Burr was a complicated man, doing complicated things, in a newly defined nation that was still defining norms. His trial was no stellar example of how to find truth and remonstrate wrongdoing. And I agree, "Lying to a federal officer" is absolutely ripe for misuse. A critical component of any subjective human system is integrity and adherence to justice. I don't think many people will look at Comey's prosecution and see it as the clear-headed and honest pursuit of justice.

There are two elements of this situation that I'm consistently trying to open-mindedly hold in balance.

One part is what I call "The Great Defederalization". In a myriad of ways, the federal state that was erected between FDR and LBJ is being torn down. That state existed on a group of decisions that allowed independent agencies outside of the direct oversight of the president: the Humphrey's Executor agencies, NLRB, FCC, FTC. The Supreme Court and Congress are very happy to work on rolling them back, and they were constructed on pretty awful jurisprudence to begin with. That can work-- we should engage in creative destruction, the administrative state did restrict economic growth, and it did create carve-outs out of the Constitution. If it made us a more reliable partner, that did come at the cost of flexibility.

But at the same time, this executive isn't defederalizing to defer power to the states-- it's doing it to grant more immediate power to the president, who is in effect weaponizing the armed forces and police forces against non-compliant localities and personal enemies. News like this happening the same week as the president sends the Army to a passive American city in order to plainly provoke a conflict, and directing his DoJ to enact a case on paper thin justification, is troubling, to say the least.

It's not impossible that there's something here, but I think this sort of presentation isn't likely to convince linguists.

I in particular am not a huge fan of the infographic[0] that uses the same image asset to refer to a spiral, box, sun, dots, etc... for entire continents, for all recorded history.

I would prefer to see pictures of these symbols, and their in-situ neighbors, and a corresponding symbol across a wide distance that's within at most 2-300 years.

We want to feel that language has commonalities, that people traveled long distances and times and kept some common bond. It might even make intuitive sense, if the people share cultural similarities. But it often results in linguists making motivated decisions without enough evidence, like happened with the "Altaic"[1] language family.

[0] https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/m... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages#Weakness_of_l...

I'm trying this with learning piano, and I see the advice in a good number of places-- if I make a mistake in a phrase, I repeat the phrase 5-7 times correctly, instead of pushing through. It's been working out well so far-- I'm not 'burning in' my mistakes.

At some point, identity relies on an official who is legally empowered to make a decision, and people stating things where lying would be fraud. We currently have very weak intermediary steps in the US-- transmitting 9 digits that last a lifetime-- that could be firmed up in similar ways to 2FA and notarization

A core economic concept is externalities, positive and negative. Positive externalities are undervalued by the market, negative ones are overvalued by the market, like cigarettes.

There aren't many ways to resolve externalities. If you pay people to quit cigarettes, people start smoking to get paid for quitting.

For negative externalities, sometimes you just really have to make the good more expensive, or we'll end up bearing the much larger societal costs down the road, like we did for lead in gasoline and widespread cigarette smoking.

23andMe's Fall 2 years ago

When people describe DNA as PII, I don't think they imagine being involuntarily cloned (yet..), I think they're imagining heritable conditions becoming public information through data leaks.

People have a right to privacy from imprecise yet correct information about themselves. Someone wouldn't want to explain an abusive parent to a prospective employer, but they could see a strong tendency to, schizophrenia, with DNA data leaks.

23andMe's Fall 2 years ago

My mom, dad and sister have all done 23andMe, so it doesn't matter if I have or not. They have an entirely complete genome for me.

I agree with your limited license idea. It's just not ok that something like that can be dischargeable in bankruptcy. We don't have the ability to refuse consent in the first place, if our family provide it.

I think it makes sense to say that all of the music genres that were on the radio in the 90's are pretty much the same genres today. Radio country music in particular has been remarkably stagnant. The names of the artists change, but with a few notable exceptions (Old Town Road front and center), the styling is remarkably unchanged.

There are certainly newer and more innovative country stylings, but radio and Nashville catering to radio hold a very strong, very conservative center.