Nominitive determinism, OpenAI edition
Enjoying the alternatives to human intelligence brought to us by the Alt Man
Last night at Lazarus
Last night at Lazarus
Finally, the web is taking cues from the best UX in the world (PBX phone trees)
(to be clear you have to type “1” or “2” in the little box and then click the button with your mouse)
I miss Twitter bots. Wish fediverse hosting was easier… not sure I care to be manually approved for botsin.space 🙄 or for that matter to register a new account on any hosted server for every silly bot idea I can think of. It should be as easy as RSS.
I cannot abide the hideous portmanteau “transpile”, sewn together as it is from two words which would perfectly convey the intent in every single case, created intentionally as a distinction without a difference.
There’s nothing important left unsaid because it’s too hard to write online. Nothing wrong with it being even easier, but for decades it’s been the moral equivalent of single-cent bid/ask spreads.
Enjoying the alternatives to human intelligence brought to us by the Alt Man
The reason it’s hard to draw a line in the sand to determine the line for “true” artificial intelligence is not because it’s hard to recognize intelligence, but because it is hard to know ourselves. “What will it feel like when …?” sounds easy but is actually fortune telling.
I wish my podcast player did automatic text transcription - even a bad LLM would be okay, and even paying a cloud LLM per request would be ok. I also wish it let me mark a timestamp as important so I could go back and find it later.
Like everyone, I have my own code formatting opinions. Whenever the urge to share them gets too great, I try to keep in mind the senior architect from many jobs ago who believed that the best tab width was 3. I suspect that some state education agencies still run scripts indented to three spaces.
Made a mezcal old fashioned (mezcal, orange bitters, Agave syrup) again, but added a pinch of salt for the first time tonight. Deliciousness metric improved ~30%.
Stuff like this makes me want to make my own game. Something cool about not sending a link but physically carrying around or handing someone a thing you made. Perhaps not a game ruthlessly optimized for fun, but a game-like experience designed to be enjoyed in a few moments.
Recently reminded of the Trent Reznor Prize For Tricky Embedding, for which nominations continue into the 2020s.
I am somewhat dissatisfied with the comments server on my main website, and have been hunting for alternatives. The most cursed thing I’ve seen so far is this:
I implemented static HTML comments on my website by tail’ing the /var/logs/nginx/access.log with a perl script. No CGI, no database, just the actual text of the comments stored as a single comment per line in a .html file.
To comment a visitor takes any url on the domain and appends “/@say/”. Like notmyurl.com/somepage…. response to somepage. Or “…lakephoto.jpg/@say/Cool fish! How long was it?”
The perl script sees the /@say/ in the logs and adds the parsed out and sanitized comment to an .html file. There’s some nginx location hijinks for matching /@say/ URLs that goes to a confirmation page and redirects to the comment listing page.
…
I’ve used this comment system on my tor onion services sites for the last decade. I get plenty of people trying to exploit it. It’s kind of fun. If the Tor folk haven’t pwned it I doubt the HN folk will. Not for lack of skill but mostly a lack of motivation relative to the tor folk.
I do not plan to do this but I also do not plan to avoid doing this, should the opportunity arise.
I learned in the reflector.show episodes about the Young Thug trial that a televangelist in the 80s said that “music is the new pornography”, and for a second I understood why one might call one’s band “The New Pornographers”, but no, it actually makes as much sense as I originally thought (none).
How to install programs with homebrew:
brew search PROGRAM and wait for it to show resultsI see how one might believe that “the purpose of a system is what it does”, and I see how one might believe that the “spirit of the law” is a coherent concept that everyone understands, but I have to say I don’t see how one could believe both at once.
TIL that “lorem ipsum” is the corruption of pain itself.
Lorem ipsum is typically a corrupted version of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC text by the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical and improper Latin. The first two words themselves are a truncation of dolorem ipsum (“pain itself”).
In April, the White House released a memo on a standard for lunar time (PDF). I hope it is not too late to save the country from a terrible mistake: abbreviating this standard as “LTC”.
“LTC” is a jumbled initialism for Coordinated Lunar Time, patterned after “UTC” as a jumbled initialism for Coordinated Universal Time. But why jumble the initialisms? The UTC Wikipedia page quotes a paper which says:
In 1967 the CCIR adopted the names Coordinated Universal Time and Temps Universel Coordonné for the English and French names with the acronym UTC to be used in both languages. The name “Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)” was approved by a resolution of IAU Commissions 4 and 31 at the 13th General Assembly in 1967 (Trans. IAU, 1968).
It’s bad enough that Earth’s coordinated time is abbreviated in a cut-the-baby compromise with the French, but at least the French are actually on Earth. Lunar time should be decided in a symposium on the moon itself. If you want your voice heard, you should have to land there.
A colleague told a story of how he once broke the entire Office division’s ability to check in code because he accidentally checked in a syntax error to the script that is used to verify that your proposed change has satisfied all the pre-submit requirements such as passing static analysis and unit testing.
…
The error was caused by smart quotes being used by mistake instead of straight quotes. He doesn’t know how they snuck in, and the two styles of quotation marks were sufficiently similar that it eluded everyone’s notice.
I’ve never worked at Microsoft and can only guess how they might have snuck in… and my guess is that they came in by copying/pasting code from MSDN Blogs, which for years seemed to auto convert straight quotes to smart quotes and double dashes to em dashes.
In that era, only a few MSDN bloggers were nice enough to wrap their code in <pre> tags, and it’s not clear to me that the CMS even supported syntax highlighting. We’ve got it pretty good today, is what I’m trying to say.
Perhaps a weird way to put it, but it’s accurate to say that I’ve been enjoying tracking my food intake for the past 6 months. I’ve been tracking exercise for longer, and I started tracking food too when I realized I was mentally reaching for my phone after meals to record the data - I wanted to have a record of how I was doing.
I use MacroFactor, which is thoughtfully designed to do the job and get out of your way. I expected tracking to feel bad, but that mostly hasn’t happened. I set an agreement with myself that I can eat and drink whatever I want as long as I track it accurately, which has been freeing, but also has highlighted food that I wouldn’t have enjoyed enough to be worth its calories.
It has helped to track some positive things too: I’m trying to get a good macro balance of protein/carbs/fat, and in particular eat more protein than I would naturally; I’m not just trying to avoid junk food.
Some things I learned:
If you see something strange, say something strange
Just beat my move goal while sitting at a restaurant eating spicy food
Something else I noticed after updating to Sonoma: although I’ve tried many times in the past to extinguish it, the text replacement omw has once again returned, almost like a cicada.
Realized since having a baby why YouTube face is so annoying: it’s an exaggerated face we make for babies. It’s like the baby talk of facial expressions. YouTube face in non-baby contexts is like listening to an obsequious couple in the next booth baby-talking to each other.
Cool thought experiment
Whenever I think about Kerberos I think about the frequent time I spent at Barnes and Noble in high school, sitting on the floor of the computer books section, reading everything I could about Unix, trying hard to understand Kerberos and many other things