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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • A candidate that expressed nuanced understanding of economic principles would have been less likely to win the election.

    A candidate that instead promises answers that intuitively sound right. If imports are expensive, then obviously the big business owners will build domestic and give us more money. If you get rid of immigrants, then the business owners will have to pay more for citizen workers. Simple answers that are easier for people to believe in.

    Attempts to explain nuance? That ranges from nerds overcomplicating things and/or those darned liberal elites trying to truck them.

    This cuts both ways. In 2020 Biden won not due to a more sophisticated understanding of things, but simply because things were bad, and the other guy therefore was the obvious choice. So to overcome an incumbent, you just have to have people believe stuff is bad, and provide some believable explanation that you could fix it.



  • I don’t know what the final turnout figures will be, but if it is a lower turnout, I can think of a few:

    • 2020 was the easiest year to mail in a ballot ever, and it got harder again as states reinstated various difficulties with mail in ballots.
    • So many people didn’t have to go into work in 2020, they had more flexibility to vote however they needed to do it.



  • There are signs of three distinct interpretations in the result:

    • On topic, the concept of cleaning a wild bird you are trying to save
    • Preparing a store bought Turkey (removing a label)
    • Preparing a wild bird that is caught

    It’s actually a pretty good illustration of how AI assembles “information shaped text” and how smooth it can look and yet how dumb it can be about it. Unfortunately advocates will just say “I can’t get this specific thing wrong when I ask it or another LLM, so there’s no problem”, even as it gets other stuff wrong. It’s weird as you better be able to second guess the result, meaning you can never be confident in an answer you didn’t already know, but when that’s the case, it’s not that great for factual stuff.

    For “doesn’t matter” content, it may do fine (generated alternatives to stock photography, silly meme pictures, random prattle from background NPCs in a game), but for “stuff that matters”, Generative AI is frequently more of a headache than a help.


  • I mean, not one a human would ever make.

    First off, the word “rescued” would have immediately made the context of “protect the pigeon” clear.

    Second, a “rescued pigeon” wouldn’t have a label on it, so it’s clearly mixing in something from likely a store bought turkey, but then the other steps don’t make sense either as those don’t apply either.

    A traditional search approach would not have made the mistake either. It would either have failed to find anything or found actual on topic results. It’s “clever” enough to genericize “pigeon” to “birds” and hit upon text related to birds from a grocery store and birds that you hunted and mix all that together in a coherent language but with content that is nonsense.

    In this case, hilarious, in other day to day situations, it’s maddening, as some professional colleague gets the same sort of nonsense but lacks knowledge to correct it and relays it as fact. Then when called out on the data was in fact so bad it wasted time, they just say ‘oh, lol, AI’ (they wanted to take credit for it if it worked, but can hide behind AI when it doesn’t).





  • Problem is in practice, I suspect something is pretty wrong in most teams.

    Some common examples come to my mind:

    • Management hears “talk about what you’ve done and what you will do” so great time to sit in and take notes for performance review, and it becomes a “make sure management knows you spent all your time and did really impressive stuff” meeting. Also throws a kink in “things I need help with” as there’s always the risk that management decides you aren’t self sufficient enough if they hear you got stuck, so you also need to defend why you got stuck and how it isn’t your fault.
    • The people who feel like everyone needs to know the minutia of their trials and tribulations including all the intermediate dead ends they went down on the way to their final result. Related to the above, but there are people who think to do this even without the need to impress management.
    • The people who cannot stand to “take it offline” and will stop everything to fully work a problem while everyone is still ostensibly supposed to stay in the meeting despite having nothing to do with the two people talking (sometimes even just one, a guy starts talking to himself as he tries to do something live).
    • Groups that are organized but have very little common ground. An “everything must be scrum” company sticks a guy who does stuff like shipping and receiving into a development team and there’s no ‘scrum-like’ interaction to be had and yet, there he is wasting his time and having to talk about stuff no one else on that meeting has a need to hear either.




  • As I said, I’ve dealt with logging where the variable length text was kept as plain text, with external metadata/index as binary. You have best of both worlds here. Plus it’s easier to have very predictable entry alignment, as the messy variable data is kept outside the binary file, and the binary file can have more fixed record sizes. You may have some duplicate data (e.g. the text file has a text version of a timestamp duplicated with the metadata binary timestamp), but overall not too bad.


  • I still have weird glitches where applications don’t seem to update on screen (chrome and firefox, both natively doing wayland).

    Lack of any solution for programmatic geometry interaction. This one has been afflicted with ‘perfect is enemy of good’, as the X way of allowing manual coordinates be specified is seen as potentially too limiting (reconciling geometry with scaling, non-traditional displays), so they do nothing instead of proposing an alternative.

    The different security choices also curtail functionality. Great, better security for input, uh oh, less flexibility in input solutions. The ‘share your screen’ was a mess for a long time (and might be for some others still). Good the share your screen has a better security model, but frustrating when it happened.

    Inconsistent experience between Wayland implementations. Since Wayland is a reference rather than a singular server, Plasma, Gnome, and others can act a little different. Like one supporting server side decorations and another being so philosophically opposed to the concept that they refuse to cater to it. While a compositing window manager effectively owned much of the hard work even in X, the X behavior between compositors were fairly consistent.

    I’ve been using Plasma as a Wayland compositor after many failed attempts, and it still has papercuts.


  • Thing is that they could have preserved the textual nature and had some sort of external metadata to facilitate the ‘fanciness’. I have worked in other logging systems that did that, with the ability to consume the plaintext logs in an ‘old fashioned’ way but a utility being able to do all the nice filtering, search, and special event marking that journalctl provides without compromising the existence of the plain text.


  • Uh… Sounds like it’s not really system’s fault, your setup is just terrible.

    I don’t know his specific issue, but the general behavior of systemd going completely nuts when something is a bit ‘off’ in some fashion that is supremely confusing. Sure, there’s a ‘mistake’, but good luck figuring out what that mistake is. It’s just systemd code tends to be awfully picky in obscure ways.

    Then when someone comes along with a change to tolerate or at least provide a more informative error when some “mistake” has been made is frequently met with “no, there’s no sane world where a user should be in that position, so we aren’t going to help them out of that” or “that application does not comply with standard X”, where X is some standard the application developer would have no reason to know exists, and is just something the systemd guys latched onto.

    See the magical privilege escalation where a user beginning with a number got auto-privileges, and Pottering fought fixing it because “usernames should never begin with a number anyway”.



  • There’s some difference.

    So you have the slang that’s akin to “Rad”. Words used with sincerity to communicate. “Rizz” and “Sus” fall into this category and seem pretty ‘mundane’, shortening Charisma and Suspicious.

    Skibidi is a bit different. It’s more like that generations “Wazzzzzzzuuuuuuuup?” It’s something they themselves consider “just stupid to say”.