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cattenwallen

22 karma · joined July 22, 2026

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cattenwallen··on Attention is all you have
I would argue there is some recency: it used to be the case that editors were working with authors in the sense of building their careers. Not even 10 years ago it could be expected an author might not hit it big until their 3rd or 4th book (George RR Martin was like this) and editors were focused on building the skills of their authors in storytelling. Now editors are also pulled in a billion different directions and work more like project managers on way too many books at a time, and things like typos and whatnot are being introduced into traditionally published books with glossy special edition covers.
cattenwallen··on Canada welcomes EU proposal to become 'associate member'
Who is the ex and who is the best friend here? America has broken up with both Canada and EU?
cattenwallen··on We know what a world without work looks like
The nuance is it wasn't a utopia because eventually the population of mice were extremely overcrowded: that's when things circled the drain. If you trapped a bunch of humans where they had no personal space ever they would all also go insane.
cattenwallen··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
I think you're misunderstanding the point of math problems. Mathematics is as much a process as it is a result. This is why even from early on, relatively rudimentary mathematics questions you are graded by your capacity to correctly achieve the desired process to the answer than getting the answer correct. The risk here is that AI generated proofs removes the process part of mathematics, where actually interesting concepts live (because then you can apply novel concepts to other unsolved problems and then thereby unlock new concepts that way...) Sure you can kind of try to reverse-engineer it but you lose the entire intuition and "we tried applying it in X, Y, Z ways and it didn't work" intuition, because even the non-working process can teach you about how not to apply the working process to novel problem spaces.

Basically: Tasting a delicious soup doesn't tell you how to layer the flavors, but if you want to be a good chef, you better be learning flavors more than you learn dishes!

cattenwallen··on Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?
Dolly Parton's Imagination Library project had to have had some justification.

I think picture books are not the same as Scratch. Scratch is much farther along that process. An equivalent might be comic books or graphic novels, which people actually do attribute a love of either as an introduction to fulfilling careers.

cattenwallen··on Rakuten Kobo returns to U.S. retail as sales double
I mean they 100% exist. Brandon Sanderson isn't some excessively complicated fantasy world (despite what fans may say, Sanderson is very approachable). Dungeon Crawler Carl is all the rage. Hell, The Locked Tomb trilogy has tons of big swords and stuff. The reason why morning glory milking farm and other smut exists on bookshelves now is that women were finding and buying the small stuff when no one gave them the time of day. If you want your stuff back on shelves, start buying them, for they 100% exists even if it's a self-publishing sword and sorcery guy.
cattenwallen··on Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services
In my understanding when it comes to doling out benefits, it's not an overhead connected to a jobs program. The less eligible people use benefits, the less the government has to pay out benefits. It's strictly better for the government to make getting benefits as hard as possible.
cattenwallen··on I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
Feedback is a gnarly problem because a lot of people assume this means "I, the reviewer, will criticize what I think will improve this work" and "I, the receiver, will receive suggestions to improve my work" but the reviewer and the creative will never have the same idea of what the WIP's ideal state looks like. So the feedback can be actively harmful to the creator. For example, if I'm a Mexican author writing about my abuela, and a feedback is "you should replace all these words with English", that's probably actively harmful to the vision of the work. But also sometimes the creator must be actively open to feedback that "hey, your abuela isn't a person in this story, she's just a female cardboard character" because it's probably a disservice to the vision to have a cardboard character clouded by the creator's nostalgia.
cattenwallen··on Jack Dorsey launches Buzz to combine team chat, AI agents and Git hosting
I'm currently new to northern virginia, a software dev. You sound like a great mentor and I would love to meet you for coffee sometime.