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I once published a method for finding the closest distance between an ellipse and a point on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g...

I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations.

People used to reach out to me all the time with uses they had found for it, it was cited in a PhD and apparently lives in some collision plugin for unity. Haven't heard from anyone in a long time.

It's also my test question for LLMs, and I've yet to see my solution regurgitated. Instead they generate some variant of Newtons method, ChatGPT 5.2 gave me an LM implementation and acknowledged that Newtons method is unstable (it is, which is why I went down the rabbit hole in the first place.)

Today I don't know where I would publish such a gem. It's not something I'd bother writing up in a paper, and SO was the obvious place were people who wanted an answer to this question would look. Now there is no central repository, instead everyone individually summons the ghosts of those passed in loneliness.

This is how rooftop solar water heaters circulate water as well. Though these days you'd be better off with PEV plus a small electric heater.

Try running ipython inside a vim terminal (:below term). Being able to yank and paste between buffers and the terminal (which is itself backed by a vim buffer), and vice versa, is a big multiplier

I've seen a similar setup with an llm loop integrated with clojure. In clojure, code is data, so the llm can query, execute, and modify the program directly

Waaay back when in Japan, sekigaisen (infrared) was a verb meaning to transfer contact details or photos or whatever between phones via infrared. It was amazing how fast the iPhone took over Japan and killed off their quirky phone ecosystem.

Edit: want to emphasize that it was totally ubiquitous. Every phone has it

To any Linux users, I recently bought a fully loaded M4 MacBook pro to replace my aging Lenovo and strongly regret it. I thought I would use it for playing with LLMs, but local dev on a Mac is not fun and I still don't have it fully set up. I'll probably replace it with a framework at some point in the near future.

Edit: okay, that garnered more attention than I expected, I guess I owe a qualification.

1. Everything is just slightly different. I had to split all my dot files into common/Linux/Mac specific sections. Don't expect to be able to clone and build any random C++ project unless someone in the project is specifically targeting Mac.

2. Not everything is supported natively on arm64. I had an idea and wanted to spin up a project using DynamoRIO, but wasn't supported. Others have mentioned the docker quirks.

3. The window manager. I'm not a fan of all the animations and needing to gester between screens (and yes, I've been down the hotkeys rabbit hole). To install a 3rd party window manager you need to disable some security setting because appearantly they work by injecting into the display manager and calling private APIs.

So my person takeaway was that I took the openness of the Linux ecosystem for granted (I've always had a local checkout of the kernel so I can grep an error message if needed). Losing that for me felt like wearing a straightjacket. Ironically I have a MBP at work, but spend my day ssh'd into a Linux box. It's a great machine for running a web browser and terminal emulator.

I also learned to program in the era of Internet and then early SO. I didn't learn to just RTFM until much later, and when I did it was an epiphany.

The Danish word for hoarding is "hamstering". Perhaps the most adorable thing about the language. (P.S. the pronunciation of hygge is anything but hyggelig)

One difference is that the investors expect their money to be matched by some grant, so you have to do the work twice. The grants take into consideration investments, so it's basically part of the system.

My experience in Europe is that investors look for teams of three: a CEO, a CTO, and one more person whose full-time job for the first two years will be filling out funding applications. That's a 50% overhead from day one.

It's a joint distribution :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_probability_distributi...

Just a tidbit for remembering bayes rule:

P(A|B)P(B) = P(A,B) = P(B|A)P(A)

The familiar forms

P(A|B) = P(A,B)/P(B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B)

immediately follow

If I'm trying to transfer a public ssh key for the first time I sometimes use netcat ;)

(Never nc >> .ssh/authorized_keys. Write to another file first can't check is your key first just to be sure)

Seriously, in the EU only something like 10% of the money (citation needed) actually makes it to the researchers. A lottery or even a giant pinata would be more efficient. And that's not even accounting the wasted researcher hours.

What's it like in Sweden? When I lived in Denmark the government had its own e-boks system for mail. I only ever accessed it via web, but I'm sure there's an app as well. Back then everything was authenticated via NemID which defaulted to the option of using codes printed on physical cards sent in the mail. I know they've moved to MitID now. Does anyone know if MitID can be installed on a de-googled device? Apparently there are a couple other options https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/get-started-with-mitid/how-to-use...

This reminds me of the phenomenon of competence being inversely correlated with confidence until some inflection point is reached on the journey to mastery.

I think the argument being put forward here is that writing that boring code is part of the journey to mastery. If you haven't crossed the inflection point, a backwards slide in skills will result in less competence and more confidence, which is a scary thought given how software runs the world.

Same, I have a Mac at work and can suffer the horrible window management by just having more physical monitors (3 + the built in screen).

I bought one for home use because I liked the hardware and the idea of running local llms. Long story short I'm still using my 6 year old Thinkpad running arch.

Would you be comfortable sharing a brief description of what the issue was?

This is me seeing co-workers PRs :(

The rich generally derive their wealth from the labours of a healthy and educated population. In most Western countries, these are proceeded at least in part paid by taxes and amount to a massive subsidy to those who need labour. Arguably this includes the "free childcare" mentioned above.

My reading is that the statement wasn't an opinion either way, rather it was questioning whether survivorship bias needs to be accounted for.

To your point though, I think it doesn't matter so long as you've learned to deliver business value. Application of broad and diverse skills may deliver value at a start-up for example, but wouldn't get too far at a ticket shop.

This reminds me of auto-generated got commit messages. I can't fathom that someone would go to the effort of authoring a PR,and then not bothering to describe what they did. Unless of course they didn't actually go through the effort of authoring the PR, and may not even be fully aware of what's in there. I've stopped giving thorough code reviews to coworkers who can't use code generation responsibility, and often times they haven't reviewed the code themselves. Heck, I've been giving my PRs self-reviews since long before AI.

It seems, though I have no way of knowing, that these clips were conceived by a human and realized using AI tools.

How would you feel if these were presented amongst a sea of other clips that were prompted by "create a short video that captures the attention of a 25-30yo male", presumably in the hope of syphoning a few cents from Instagram?

I recently bought a book to read on a flight, and it was the first time it occured to me there was no way to verify the thing was written by a human other than to check that it was published before ~2023. Part of what I, at least, feel when reading a book is a connection to another human and our shared experience that lead them to tell their story. For me this experience is steeply cheapened by the thought that that connection might not be with a human.

I feel similarly about the Ghibli style transfer craze. AI generated images may be "cool", but you no longer know if you're connecting to an artist. At least in the case of Ghibli, their work is well known so it's possible to tell. Where's the room for human creatives to create new original art styles? The rightful default assumption is that anything post 2023 came out of a model as some mash-up of inputs stolen from anonymous no-names.

FWIW, this is coming from a non-creative atheist who has long belived humans are nothing more than probabilistic biological machines.

There are straightforward immigration paths to most of the desirable countries within Europe if you can land a job that pays a standard deviation above the mean, which most tech workers can. However, you're still looking at 1/4 of a silicon valley salary.

The game plan should really be more centered around making your money in the US and then moving for the better quality of life or to do something that aligns with your values. I'd say it's the moving wealth part where people are more likely to fall into traps (ever heard of an exit tax?), but even then you're probably still better off hiring a local account (cost me 2k when I first moved to Denmark, and another 2k when I left :facepalm:).

At work we've licensed cursor, but as a vim holdout it's a nogo and we're otherwise somewhat restricted on what we can install.

I have 3 vim commands:

ZB $n: paste the buffer $n inside backticks along with the file path.

Z: Run the current buffer through our llm and append the output

ZI: Run the yank register through our llm and insert the output at the cursor.

The commands also pass along my AGENTS.md

Basically I'm manually building the context. One thing I really like is that when it outputs something stupid, I can just edit that part. E.g. if I ask for a plan to do something, and I don't like step 5, I can just delete it.

One humorous side effect is that without the clear chat structure, it sometimes has difficulty figuring out the end-of-stream. It can end with a question like "would you like me to ...?", answer itself yes, and keep going.

I am unqualified to answer but ran this question through an AI.

The rough number is that apparently 10% of CO2 equivalent comes from meat farming, but don’t trust this.

What did surprise me though is that a much larger benefit would result from repurposing the feed stock and grazing land, together comprising ~25% of the earths habitable land. Land and ecosystem restoration would likely result in feedback loops in the opposite direction.

I have a friend in Denmark that used to run a small carbon neutral farm, where the carbon offsets were all generated by other activities on his land. His all in cost for a kilo of pork was 700kr, or over $100 dollars. Meanwhile, you can but a kilo of port at a supermarket for ~$20. He could only sustain this because he ran a farm restaurant selling the best burgers in town, and even these were probably a loss leader for his best-in-town fries and mayonnaise making up the difference.

Looks like https://maps.app.goo.gl/sa5JdGPMoZKiUiUP7 in Osaka is still going, though I remembered it being called "spacebar", a fantastic male for a retro gaming bar.

Last time I was in Prague my friend brought me straight to the local pub, and without even ordering beer came out. Everyone knew each other and each other's dogs (Prague is very dog friendly, in fact one of the dogs was in the kitchen begging scraps). I have vague memories of similar scenes growing up in Australia, and have seen similar in Ireland. I don't know if anywhere like it in US cities, but maybe it's still like that out in the country.

The actual cost to retire a 1 ton co2e carbon credit should be $70-$80. A lot of these $10 programs do not actually retire the credit and sell it to somebody else, so you are in effect subsidizing the credit.

https://carboncredits.com/carbon-prices-today/

TBF, this may still enable a legitimate project that is viable at $80-90 that is not at $70-80. So if you want to support a particular tree planting effort go for it.

Understood as 18 year olds who were told everything would be okay so long as they just did what they were told.

I was lucky enough to grow up and go to university in another country. The magnitude of the financial decisions I was making at the time were < 1k and I remembered how much money that felt like.

IMHO blaming people for 100k bad financial decisions made under duress just as they entered adulthood is victim blaming.