✻ Gallivanting… (3,154,393,470s · ↓ 3.15x10^8k tokens · esc to interrupt)

I'm reminded of the early days of Agile where all the old folks said they'd tried it and it didn't and couldn't work.

There are two things that really bother me in tech commentary these days. First thing is the constant calling everyone else stupid, second is the saying because everyone else is stupid no positive change is possible

A little searching shows that the "meet violence with violence" rhetoric is popular right now on bsky. Maybe I'm stupid, but I just don't see how this makes the world a better place.

Even if the justification for attempted assassination could stabilise in my favour I wouldn't want it.

The mistake here is that you're not establishing an exception. You're establishing a rule, and the other side gets to use it too.

Why did men ever stop wearing full-brimmed hats? They look good.

Postponing recovery so revenge may be all the sweeter.

At this point it seems like AI companies could install real spyware and it would go unnoticed amongst all the crying wolf out there.

for tim curry's birthday, you should watch him in the excellent 1975 BBC version of Jerome K. Jerome's THREE MEN IN A BOAT www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgwk...

people are furious the site where they propose direct action to destroy data centers is ever down

I'm as much a product of the software development mainstream as anyone, but I'm fairly sanguine about all this. It has to do with breaking path dependencies and the hope of a new Cambrian explosion.

Presumably I'm not the only one finding adversarial reviews surface N issues for every issue you address?

If the path to acceptance of high level languages is a guide, you should pace yourselves. Thirty years after FORTRAN came out, when I started programming professionally, the HLL skepticism was still in the air. I'm reminded of that line that science doesn't progress by convincing its opponents...

For years @firefox.com on Linux has started with an error, "Sorry, we're having trouble getting your pages back" together with a "Restore" button that gets your pages back without any trouble. I mean, it works. But why would you have your application appear broken for, like, ten years.

Heard about a spot in Alexandria where they think it's cool to outsource all your thinking. Might know how to slow things down a bit.

Jet airplanes are a proxy for human jumping. The creators of the 747 vastly misunderstood the exquisite and messy nature of human locomotion.

Trying my app out at the summer house, and one thing that sticks out is that the neighbour has a Wikipedia page.

This is tricky. If readers really can't distinguish careful LLM-assisted work from generated slop they will discount all of it. The people who would produce high-quality work with LLM assistance will either stop sharing, or feel it necessary to participate in a sort of laundering.

Possibly. I really don't know. We've traditionally been bullish about automating other people's jobs, and the appropriate response is Stoicism when automation comes for us.

This won't be news to people here but I'm learning that when you hit a brick wall with coding agents, it's a signal similar to when writing unit tests becomes painful. The friction is telling you there are deeper structural, design or process issues. The agent will likely tell you which if you ask.

Foggy and icy and rainy in Stockholm right now

People are really shocked by the politics of pluralism as though it's this evil ridiculous thing instead of a clear foundation for radically different people to be able to live together

didn’t watch the video but this “we’re all one species” line pisses me off bc it’s preemptive surrender SO WHAT if we *were* different species! that’s still not sufficient basis to create legal categories for different legal rights if a being rocks up and says it can feel hope, it’s my peer

This got me thinking about what I would accept as grounds for human exceptionalism, and I don't have an answer to that, but it's quite possible that human fallibilism is what will keep us epistemically relevant: bsky.app/profile/alic...

As it stands, the GitHub repo name (github.com/ChrisSteinba...) doesn't match the domain name for the app (wikiradar.org) which doesn't match the app icon.

WikiRadar: a PWA that finds nearby Wikipedia articles using spherical Delaunay triangulation (3D convex hull on a unit sphere) for O(√n) nearest-neighbor queries. No server, no database. Just pre-computed binary tile files served from GitHub Pages and triangle walks in the browser.

Working on a little thing: turning Wikipedia into a real life tour guide: wikiradar.org

Tap

It’s a heuristic, hiding its complexity behind a facade. As a literal justification it would be circular.

transgenderism *is* transhumanism eyeglasses *are* a perversion of the natural order appeal to nature fallacies are dumb, stop letting "tech bros" negatively polarize you against genuinely good and cool things

Was feeling nostalgic and recreated a little fractal toy I made more than 30 years ago: bronze-elke-18.tiiny.site

People will be like "my opponents are mud-smeared simpletons swayed by the crudest rhetoric and emotional appeal" and then not win over their opponents with the crudest rhetoric and emotional appeal

Publishing on Hacker News is endurance art. You choose to subject yourself to the whim of the public, like in a Marina Abramovic performance. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythm_0

Some thoughts on William Gillis’s "Did the Science Wars Take Place?" Gillis champions a “radical realism" built on the success of science in compressing vast phenomena into compact theories. He uses the compressive power of theories as evidence of an underlying reality that they latch onto. [1/22]

MTV music channels are shutting down today...an end of an era...though I gotta admit the last time I saw a music video on MTV was around 2008 or so. Still sad to see something that defined a generation and youth culture (mostly gen X) go out with a whimper like that

The “AI alignment problem” is that •humans• do not agree with each other about values

about half the people on this website act like the first time anyone lied on the internet is when we managed to teach linear algebra to do it. like separating truth from fiction is somehow a new demand that this talking magic box imposes on us.

May have found the source of this, presumably misattributed, quote. From 2012 southernlandlogus.blogspot.com/2012/03/hann...

If we play our cards right, we could yet build an earthly paradise of mutual shame and self-loathing.

My spirits are always lifted by finding people who don't pursue a fight-fire-with-fire, tooth-for-a-tooth politics. You have to work for the symmetries you want to see in society.

Glad to see people talking about Penn Jillette. The 2024 interview was done by me. I found him to be a refreshingly reflective, self-critical individual who has remained curious and willing to evolve.

This also exemplifies a more general trend, with no single political home, where a symmetry of hate is nurtured. A common theme is that punishment is promoted to an end in itself.

We're at the point where it's tacitly acknowledged that this is a vendetta. It's not about claiming some moral high ground, but savouring someone else's trauma.

The burden of proof for "kids these days are cooked" is *incredibly* high because, like, literally every generation as far back as we have written records has believed that so our prior should be extreme skepticism. And instead people on here are like "a professor wrote a blog post! It's proven!"

Some nice Stoppard plays online On The Razzle youtu.be/I_aRC0YaL6o?... Professional Foul youtu.be/D5MYDrWGobg?... R&G youtu.be/-f6gON_OMcQ?... Every Good Boy Deserves Favour youtu.be/pQmbJn-DkBU?...

RIP the greatest British playwright of our time on.ft.com/4anfEQJ

I have a soft spot for Feyerabend...

Well, that Charli xcx John Cale collaboration has just wiped everything else off the 2025 table. They should do an entire album.