Happy Partially Muscled Skeleton Stands By The Perimeter Fence And Screams For Thirty Seconds Before Vanishing day for those that celebrate

At a talk about the demographic decline in Japan and the speakers are throwing around projections about what things will look like in 2100... It's a weird contrast to listening to podcasts predicting an intelligence explosion/singularity in the next 15 years. www.astralcodexten.com/p/slightly-a...

This coffee shop is just going hard through Evanescence's Fallen (2003) and I am here for it.

It begins

This gym has reached the stage in its lifecycle where they realize their original matched set of squat racks is not enough, so they start pulling in mismatched and smaller ones wherever there's free floor space.

Post elbow-surgery update: today I did 11 chin ups!

I have a number of long-running apps in pinned tabs. It's interesting seeing how many of them fail to do an SPA nav (usually with infinite loading spinners), when you come back to them after a few days. I suspect the issue is server-client version skew.

I've been upgrading graphics cards (1080 Ti → 2080 Ti → 3080) for a while, but finally my 2017 base-build has gotten behind enough in everything else that I'm doing a new one. Hello my beautiful 4090, with an AMD CPU this time! pcpartpicker.com/list/6PN3yg

"Please explain and fix this SVG path syntax" is such a perfect use case for AI. chat.openai.com/share/7f5faf...

Yes I know them, we went to Twitter together.

I found my Google Play Store rating history. I guess I have a pattern.

A well-argued counterpoint to optimism about AI progress. thegradient.pub/why-transfor... And yet... I still want to believe.

No Surface Pro 10?! I've been holding out on an upgrade for the last half-year!

Museum pro-tip: if you run out of time to see everything, just stop by the gift shop on the way out. They'll have prints and postcards of all the best stuff. If you hold them up close to your face it's subjectively just as big as the real thing!

Spain's fertility rate is ... lower than Japan's? (1.23 births/woman vs. 1.34). I guess there's some other explanation for why there are so many more ill-behaved kids in cafes/restaurants/public transit...

I feel bad for hotels, airplanes, etc. that spent effort modernizing with USB-A charging ports everywhere.

It's been 5 hours since I landed in a non-Japan country and so far I've only bowed to a stranger once!

I just finished one of my favorite podcast episodes ever, @seanmcarroll.bsky.social interviewing Katie Elliott with an introduction to metaphysics. Sean is as always a great interviewer, and Katie was one of the most engaging guests he's had to date. Highly recommended!

This must have taken so long before copilot

This is cool. Caltech (my alma mater) was worried that the requirement on high school students to take calculus/physics/chemistry was bad for DEI. So they added an alternative path: Khan Academy, or test out using AP/IB exams. Same standards upheld, but more opportunities to meet them. 👍

I spent 100 hours in Cyberpunk 2077 before I finally recognized the innuendo in this (very common throughout the game world) hotel sign.

Debugging speculation rules developer.chrome.com/blog/debuggi... by @tunetheweb.bsky.social

You might think defining min() and max() in C would be simple. But you would apparently be wrong? https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/include/linux/minmax.h

Interesting to compare: ChatGPT explaining 峰 vs. 岳 characters, both with external sources https://chat.openai.com/share/3a58f277-a283-484a-ac12-b23e20b297af and without https://chat.openai.com/share/ee73c1dc-0aff-44c1-92e8-6bebdf365b5d. The without is honestly better?

This is a work of art. Don't forget to check the release notes too.

I just fed a 3074-line FreePascal file, plus a 7-line diff, into Anthropic's Claude AI, and asked it to spot the bug. And... I think it did, using its knowledge of FreePascal string semantics. Living in the future is pretty great, isn't it?

WTF how did ai.com change hands from OpenAI to X AI?

I went under general anesthesia a few days ago. I still feel like the same person, despite the discontinuity of consciousness! It's nice to get some first-hand confirmation that uploading will preserve my identity.

Observables are to event subscriptions as promises are to callbacks: first-class objects you can transform, pass around, and build on top of. @domfarolino.com and @benlesh.bsky.social are looking to make them a standard part of the web platform, and I'm optimistic about their chances!

I now have a Pixel Fold! It seems cool! I hope I end up using it as planned!

What the heck. For two years physical therapists and general practitioners have been telling me my elbow issues were tendonitis. I finally pushed for imaging and there are FLOATING BITS OF BONE hanging out in my elbow joints! Surgery upcoming...

I wrote a personal blog post about what it's been like learning Japanese over the last 6.5 years. https://blog.domenic.me/part-time-japanese/

Absolute madness that people care about typographical rivers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography). If you are zoning out hard enough to pay attention to text shapes, stop it, go back to reading.

Android appreciation post: I love that my phone is always passively listening and identifying songs, with an easy one-tap entry point from the lockscreen. Compared to my iOS-using wife asking Siri to trigger Shazam which often fails, this experience is a joy.

My Twitter timeline is full of funny stuff, news about OpenAI and the FTC, and tech tweets. Bluesky is full of people being mad (currently about meta-platform things or some sort of strike). Disappointing...

Took the JLPT (N2 level). It felt borderline, just like the practice tests. I'm unsure if all the studying I did over the last few months did anything. It's all kind of discouraging. I wish I had more visible signs of progress in my language learning.

I appreciate that my wife tries hard to connect with my cultural background (by subscribing to various Star Wars quotes and memes Instagram accounts).

Great to see the navigation API land in the HTML spec https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/nav-history-apis.html#navigation-api with positive feedback from Mozilla. It's already in Chrome & it's so nice to use vs the history API https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/navigation-api/

I like comics movies but this Kraven the Hunter movie just seems too dark and violent and gross? But the comments section of the trailer is pretty funny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv1nfDIJ9kU

I've been really enjoying the Future of Life Institute podcast recently. Several great episodes with folks like David Chalmers, Niel Nanda, and Connor Leahy. But my favorite was this one with Joscha Bach on the nature of physics, computation, consciousness, and the human mind.

ChatGPT, c'mon, I don't need a scolding on how my code is too tricky. I'm literally using you to help me remember the trick! https://chat.openai.com/share/58bb6c55-9a6b-424c-b063-70b4d177818c

In a distant future where anti-government rebels are fighting the police in Japan... Me: ah! I know what that is!! The fire-blaze-bottle [火炎瓶]!!! I knew all that vocabulary cramming would come in handy one day!

I never actually read up on how shoe sizes worked before. And wow, this shit is very dumb. East Asia + Russia sizing is reasonable but even European sizing is based on strange 2/3 centimeter units. US sizing uses 1/3 inch increments with arbitrary zero points! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe_size

a dark fact about the trolly problem that most people don’t know: they don’t let the people go that survive. they stay tied to the tracks forever. really changes your perspective doesn’t it

I'm genuinely surprised how well our work on the Streams Standard (https://streams.spec.whatwg.org/) has held up. We envisioned and specced bring-your-own-buffer streams in 2016 (7 years ago!!) and it's only fully shipping now. Most features designed with that large of a spec/impl gap are bad.

I just realized that airline "mileage" is pretty strange given that most of the world uses kilometers. Even Japanese carriers are doing it. American hegemony strikes again!

Wow this RFC is just straight up C code? https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6234#section-8.3 I wonder what the story behind that is.

A fascinating read from Manifold Markets on the AI x-risk letter prediction market, with insight into trading strategies, obfuscation techniques, and more. https://news.manifold.markets/p/manifold-predicted-the-ai-extinction Not sure what this says about prediction market utility in general...

Just the beginning

The urge to replay Deus Ex (2000) is rising. Reading the YouTube comments on the soundtrack is fun: it's a bunch of people sharing their memories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tDjJkFyL_Q&list=PLKkxnBwFOJGKYQo3EGYjE4FhJUbBq_2U5&index=35