arjie

Just in case you're not familiar with it, the reason there's a regulation against it is that a group of kids with the belief you're espousing lobbied for that regulation. They formed the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America. I suspect if there is a norm against this here in the US it was created around the time of that law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i...

I thought this sort of thing was what CEPTIA successfully campaigned against?

Also, what is the public commons that's being eroded in this scenario? Public toilets are few and far between but also kind of don't seem like a commons. I'd imagine a commons is something like a fishery or something. Pretty easy to control access to toilets. They have doors and as most European countries have proven, you can charge for the access to those doors.

He's pretty close to that particular police chief of staff or whatever he was. So this is probably just one of those things where if you have connections, then sometimes you take someone on vacation or fly them private and it turns out they give you some documents, rule in your favour in a case, pardon you.

See https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/08/ben-horowitzs-cozy-relatio...

30 years later, and he's still got appeals to go? Fascinating. Not familiar with these processes, but when he's finally away to prison how old will he be? He's in his sixties now.

Really enjoyable read. I escaped a career in Mathematics by being sufficiently bad at it that I only have a Masters. Fortunately, I escaped to a field immune to AI: CS and then a software engineering career. Well, not really, but I did get a good 15 years out of it so thank god for that.

About half of my friends are founders of various startups and the rest are executives of and almost all of them have the view that it’s better for everything to be a failure than to be in the “it could make it” category for half a decade or more.

In that way, I am glad I found that it wasn’t for me. I had the curiosity, but not the doggedness to face difficulty (not enough curiosity perhaps?) or the ability to not encounter such difficulty. And fortunately that meant I was never in the “I could make it” category. God bless clear and present boundaries and may the devil take the grey zone.

Captchas are handed to me to solve. Because the operations are in the background I usually make the agent be a little more human with typing and navigating. The slowness isn't a concern for backgrounded jobs. It is imperfect, of course, I triggered something on Grainger. And the truth is I should be using Luminati, but it's good enough to be useful to me.

It was first, but it's like Langchain built tools first. Nowadays, everyone's got a better assistant. Grok's looks like the most exciting, though I just have a custom built one. Has a headed browser when it wants and everything that I can pop into from my phone. It's so easy to write this kind of software it's a waste to pay someone for it.

Excellent setup and I think your write up would be pretty good.

Hey, how did you iterate on it? Quite interested in your process here considering you say it’s vibe coded. The iteration loop is crucial for that.

Great work, mate. Workbench looks spectacular. I happened to find a cheap relatively-stable one for my 3d printer but I really should have tried to assemble something like the one you have. In the end it worked out because the measurements land perfectly for my wife and me to have our desks with the printer, homeserver, assistant rig, and Cricut CNC in the middle. But I think she would have enjoyed the IKEA rework more. Good photos of the process too. Thanks for sharing.

This is Derek Sivers of CD Baby, right? I think he is unusually high-agency in a way I could not imagine myself being. Definitely not one of those people who I look at and say "I could have done that. Why didn't I?"

For instance, I could simply never see myself voluntary relinquishing American citizenship: https://sive.rs/xus

Getting booted out, yes. But giving it up, no chance.

Given that his behaviour is so far from what I would do, I think there are too few shared fundamentals for me to mimic him. So I think I'm not going to do the things he did.

The failure to unite northern America has really been to our collective benefit. This permits the Western Anglo-Euro Alliance a massive advantage in the nested Matryoshka doll of coordination structures - allowing each level of governance to act independently while still steering a collective fleet in one direction. One imagines a nightmare where the United States and her allies weren't structured as so, but that all that is NATO was fused into a single legislative structure causing France to be subject to the same anti-nuclear-power rules as Germany or the US, and American and Canadian healthcare to be identical in provision and functionality.

NATO preserves the unitary alliance's single defense perimeter - and the US's reciprocal relationships with East Asia extend that border past the Pacific. What a stroke of good fortune in failure turned to strength in alignment.

One imagines that organizing human beings is about choosing the appropriate degree of coordination. Each man cannot be left to choose what is law alone. And a unitary world government will surely poorly serve us all. But perhaps this polycentric unity we have allows us experiments analogous to the US's federal structure, but practised at the size of countries. Canada is best Canada and allied with the US, and the US is best US and allied with Canada - and both with Europe and with the Easternmost of Asia and so on.

And one note about the article's tone that I have forever found annoying. Transitory administrations temporarily trouble the alliance. There is no enduring advantage to any to destroy it. This endless rumination on a past long gone by as if to imply that 4 years of governance can end our nations' collaboration is melodramatic nonsense. I think the example is best set by our shared ancestor, the UK: George Washington stands as a statue in Trafalgar Square; and Jan Smuts stands in Parliament Square. We are all allies now, and dwelling morosely on a time when we weren't does none of us any favours.

The US-Canada alliance has far too much strategic benefit to both. And this kind of separation of policymaking while retaining geopolitical unity will probably be far more durable than power centres of the past, even as the strength of its keystone, the US, wanes.

One of the things I do when I want a transcription is say something like "Transcribe this PDF into text for me please". ChatGPT once again is able to do this for me flawlessly since the text layer is entirely preserved in the PDF. But again, I'm built different.

Cunningham, I obey thy dictum without fail. Bless me for my service. I praise thee with my every act.

Behold the arcane acts at work: https://imgur.com/a/Zg0z5k4

Works of magnificence no mere mortal could achieve.

Obviously. It was so easy it took me seconds to verify before posting. But that's fine. It's Sunday morning and I will give you an alternative version that is immune to prompt-ineptness. Cunningham's Law shall not be denied today.

1. Visit the embedded google slides URL https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1XMCU2vxtxxqqQ2NY567n...

2. Click File

3. Scroll down to 'Download' and point your cursor at it and wait for the submenu to open

4. Select PDF Document

5. Upload the PDF Document to your chat agent of choice

Not everyone is able to type the following and get results, but I'm built different:

> Summarize this for me: https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/

> It’s a google slides thing but i don’t want to click through

Here. Scroll bar included so you can see it's literally the only prompt https://imgur.com/a/Qela4qt

It’s clearly a presentation. If you want a different representation, point an LLM at it and ask it to transcribe and rewrite in the form you prefer. I just tried with ChatGPT and it works fine. Retrieve the PDF link (ChatGPT will generate a working link for you - session tied I think). Then proceed to do what you must with it.

Many tools are available today to alter data representation. And frontier LLMs have high fidelity. You don’t have to wait for someone to help you. Claude helps those who help themselves.

Surprised by this. I only ever use podman (which by default, runs rootless) these days and haven’t felt the need for docker. Feels like reading about a CVE in Compiz.

There’s always been a school of thought that is in this direction. In the pre AI world people discussed whether to squash commits or to not and I was on the squash side because I think that the development artifact should be optimized for reading and just as one does not read a novel in all of its pre-edited forms to read it, one should not do so for code. The cost to grok using that method is too high.

However with LLMs you can have them analyze prior transcripts to identify bug sources and so on. I could see it being used. But all theorycrafting. And perhaps motivated reasoning. I’ve always committed early and often and used bisect to find bugs. That places me right away in the squash commits camp because of the method I use to write code.

In the sense that direction and magnitude are two things of separate importance to most, and any system must account for both. An opinion you express only when asked is far less important than an opinion you express unasked. It’s the latter that dominates interpersonal coordination.

I don’t think the UK was ever in Schengen (at least as far as my visa was concerned). That is one bright spot here. Traveling to the UK is much easier than travel to Europe for much of the world. The UK allows for paying for QoS so you can pay a large fee and get a visa soon or a much smaller fee and get one in two weeks. By comparison, Schengen visas from all participants are granted equitably by fee and the wait time is months.

Britons may choose to change their minds but this is not a single party decision. The EU will likely not readmit them on the same terms and the UK is not nearly as powerful or relevant to European interests as it once was.

As a safe far away island, the UK has much more use in a captive alliance to defend a threatened continent than it is as a participant in Europe that gets special exemptions. And Europe already has them for that.

If you had an agent in the legislature wouldn’t you prefer exactly one of this form? My ideal representative is able to command support from diverse interests and subtly damages those opposed to me while subtly advantaging the principles I believe in - making compromises necessary to move incrementally to a state more aligned with what I wish it to be.

The reality is that many people want bad laws. Without the support of those people one does not get elected.

This use of people for power while de-facto disenfranchising them is pretty widespread already. For instance, some half of California and Texas are responsible for their strength in the electoral college while simultaneously being entirely disenfranchised when electing the President. Good technique.

Fascinating. TIL. One wonders what we common folk would think of such activities. Would we treat Benjamin Franklin as some kind of modern Thiel-adjacent debauch who thinks himself far too smart?

Or would canceling old Benjy actually have created a better world? Perhaps a man moderated by a society more observant and inclined to police might have been even more influential? I suppose we will never know but it is entertaining to consider the counterfactual.

Fun post. Enjoyed it.

Haha it’s just that the things these devices enable for us are so valuable. But life is full of suboptimal things just because that’s how it is. Some other constraint causes it.

I was at Oren’s Hummus years ago with a friend and I remember thinking that there was this heat lamp outside by the window that was very close to the glass. We were halfway through our meal when we heard a loud snap and a large crack formed in the glass. Error in process, my failure to report it, and costly consequence. Bug, eh?

It’s just that the world is full of detail and things are full of interactions. And complexity is something we’re all constantly grappling with.

Every time I do the 5 finger gesture to bring up launchpad (I think that’s what it’s called) on a Mac the text field doesn’t focus fast enough for the text. Every time I type then backspace backspace backspace and type again. That’s just life. Somewhere someone shipped something that does this. It didn’t use to be this way but it is now. I can’t really change it so I just live with it.

The world of software is complexity upon complexity created from the fact that the virtual world admits arbitrary amount of interaction at much lower cost than the physical world. Yep, the world is full of bugs. But you really have to care a lot to stop them and no one really wants to pay you to do that.

That does indeed make it seem like Executive Directors of environmental NGOs are responsible for this.

Ah, but that’s not the choice. The choice is whether there exist probability p, life L, and material possession m such that the possession is worth more than p times L.

The conclusion that there is no such triad seems clearly absurd since we allow people to build things for us the construction of which offers them a non-zero chance of death.

It is reasonable to say that a precise frontier is not describable because of Sorites but to say no triad exists implies that you only participate in an economy consisting exclusively of zero risk behaviour[0] That seems improbable.

Once we’ve dealt with that, perhaps we may be able to conclude that catalytic converters exist on one side of the frontier or on the other side or perhaps we might say that they lie along the Sorites boundary.

0: we are not unreasonable. We might even choose to consider imperfect information about the risk, the risk being at a Pareto optimum, the risk being at optimum against counterfactual, etc.

3d modeling to an STL a part compatible to a visible cable raceway still fails even if I let Claude Fable use me as a robot that measures with calipers.

Certainly, but if everyone can vibe code their printer drivers then we have free software in the sense of free speech and so users would be developers and the entire need is met. That is wonderful, not awful.

If it had happened early enough, code copyright might never have even been possible and no one can deny you your machine because you can just vibe up stuff.

It would be in foreign interest, yes. But all of this is no different from 50 years of the environmentalist movement. The snail darter was an invented species decades ago. So if it’s propaganda, it’s not invented so much as amplifying what we invented here.

You guys have heard the Seinfeld Isn't Funny trope thing? Where Seinfeld had a style of humour on the show that became such a widespread cultural sensation that people who watch the show after became immersed in comedy derivative from it think it's not funny because all the jokes are boring? McSweeney's is from the turn of the century, other side, and so should be classic.

But this feels like a mashup of the Twitter snowclone "I'm the guy who was in charge of sending the HBO email / writing the GCP AI announcement / etc" with the classic goes-on-too-long Reddit bit. I know, I sound like a guy ranting about a satirical piece but it just sounds like a Reddit copypasta snowclone. And not because of it, I'm sure, but because that style is pervasive.

Ah well, it's my fault for ruining my brain on reams of Reddit content. Mostly I'm just commenting to see if anyone else has burned their neurons on garbage like I have (DAE? See, the reddit is everywhere).

They blocked geothermal drilling in the desert. After multiple years of blocking it with use of environmental law they finally managed to preserve it as a conservation area for sustainable tourism:

> Organizers of the Burning Man festival in northwest Nevada have reached a settlement with a geothermal energy developer that cancels an exploratory drilling project that some feared would ruin the ambiance of the counter-culture event.

https://www.eenews.net/articles/burning-man-to-buy-back-geot...