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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • And it’s just historically ignorant and obnoxious. Basically all of the historic cities along the Gulf Coast existed before the United States. It was Spanish Florida, the Louisiana territory, and Texas when the US constitution was written. There’s a part of Louisiana called “The Florida Parishes” to this day because north of Lake Pontchartrain (which is actually a brackish estuary connected to the Gulf of Mexico) was part of Spanish Florida.

    It’s just dumb and, as you mentioned, I don’t know a single person who lives or makes their living along the Gulf Coast who was calling for this. If anything, it’s a pain in the ass for them because now it’s a culture war thing and they have to be conscious that inland morons care. Like if you’re a fisherman, how do you label your catch? Even people who run charter boats out of Venice for bachelor parties in New Orleans now have to contend with this headassery when making ads and web sites or whatever.



  • It’s probably less about making the kernel smaller and more about security and reviewing code. The less code you have to maintain, the fewer vulnerabilities even if it’s old code.

    I would doubt almost 20 year-old code is taking up a lot of space or presenting new vulnerabilities. And it’s obviously open source so if anyone needs it, they can always use an older kernel or maintain it. Sometimes, your oldest code is insane. I wish there was a budget for every company and government to pay retirees part time to go back over their oldest code that’s still in use. A lot of retired programmers would do it for fun and nostalgia. And to be horrified something they wrote 20 years ago hasn’t been updated or replaced.






  • Honestly, this is a nice feature of macOS (or at least iTerm 2; I don’t use the official terminal). I know CTRL-C is used to kill processes and we all have that muscle memory but I usually try to change that on my personal Linux installs because I’ve hit it by mistake before.

    I used to use CTRL+INSERT for copy and SHIFT+INSERT for paste but there’s usually no insert key on laptops or even small keyboards. It’s probably time to just adapt.





  • I had better than 20x20 vision when they gave us eye-tests in high school and I’ve often gotten, “Holy shit, you can read that from here?” I always chose screen space over font-size even on small laptops but I recently had to dial it back a notch for the first time. The optometrists come for us all, eventually.

    My vision still seems fine but it takes longer to adjust and focus. Like I have a digital clock I used to glance at to check the time and now I have to squint for a few seconds and wait. It’s sort of like a phone camera auto-focus where it sorts things out but it used to be immediate.



  • It’s actually pretty reliable. It’s left wing, to be sure, but during the BLM protests, for instance, they had actual reporters on the ground and were live-streaming everything. They’re transparent.

    I don’t know where to place it on the “reliable” spectrum. From what I’ve seen, their articles are sourced and edited but live streaming from a chaotic situation is sort of like being a “war correspondent” where it can be impossible to know what’s happening. So, it’s probably important to get more context later as more comes to light. But I’ve never seen them lie deliberately or anything.

    I don’t know the term for it but maybe “guerrilla journalism” or something like that. They’ll send a dude on a skateboard to the middle of a riot while other reporters are in the “press zone” and covering police press conferences or whatever.




  • I didn’t think they should use A.I. yet at all. I don’t think the shitty version of machine learning of today is ready for engineering giant explosive things. As someone else pointed out, document management for regulatory filings and stuff is (hopefully) the use case. I don’t care if it’s used in that way.

    Basically, I think today’s “A.I.” should be treated as alpha software. It has a ton of potential but there is a lot left to do, especially on things involving human or even critter life like rocket science, self-driving cars, or military applications where “edge cases” are life or death situations. (I don’t think it should be used for military applications until it’s really fucking mature tech but it’s already apparently being used for that so the cat’s out the bag there.)


  • That makes sense. Like you, I’ve generally found that LLMs are incredibly useful for certain, highly specific things but people (CEOs especially) need to understand their limitations.

    When it first came out, I purposely used ChatGPT on a trip to evaluate it. I was in a historic city on a business trip where I stayed an extra few days so I was traveling alone. It was good at being a tour guide. Obviously, I could have researched everything and read guidebooks but I was focused on my work stuff. Being able to ask follow-up questions and have a conversation was a real improvement over traditional search.

    That’s obviously a limited use case where I was asking questions that could have been answered in traditional ways but I found that to be a good consumer use case. It knew details that wouldn’t necessarily be in a Wikipedia article or Guidebook that would take me 15 Google searches to answer. Just my own little curiosity questions about an old building or whatever. I cross-checked things later and it didn’t hallucinate. Obviously, a very limited use case but it was good at it.