cpfohl

I think more than you think? I like to believe that pretty much any career can have moments of “I’m proud to be part of this organization.” And “I can’t be part of this anymore.”

We’re not special in that regard. Our challenge lies in the sheer breadth of options available to us; but even that’s not unique: managing non profits, janitors, HR professionals, and lawyers also can work with a breathtaking array of companies.

Really the only folks who don’t have that issue to the same extent are tradespeople: carpenters, electricians, plumbers; but even they can say no to a job for a person or company they don’t want to support.

Someone figured out how to create a glider that starts and ends as a long string of cells on a single line. Gliders are figures in the game of life that move themselves in a direction by repeated patterns that result in movement. For more game of life/glider context you can read the pretty decent Wikipedia articles:

Conway's game of life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

Gliders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(Conway%27s_Game_of_Lif...

Sorry, my phrasing was off. I should have said, “you can opt out”

Class actions like this are opt in; by accepting the settlement you accepted the terms and lost your right to sue for a different (more appropriate to you) value.

Planet money did a a great segment on how these work and why America is set up this way. I learned a lot about it. You should definitely take a listen[1]. If you aren’t on Apple then search “What to do when you’re in a class action?” And find the podcast (not the summary article).

1: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/planet-money/id2907834...

Yep. But it's twice as expensive as the ones mentioned in the article.

https://www.northshoreymca.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/28/2...

I'm pretty sure the Y in my city (Beverly, MA) actually still has SROs. It certainly needs more options like this...

No call for talking down at people. No one has ever been convinced by being belittled.

This seemed so obvious to me…

As it's my son's health issues, not my own, I'm going to preserve his privacy until he can consent to sharing in...8 years.

This was before I started using it as anything but a toy. I had definitely not spoken about medical issues; it was on a whim.

Yes, I’m also on a Mac (for now), and I do make fairly minimal use of my mouse. My problem is defeating years of muscle memory

Ah, like my eMacs pinky and thumb? ;)

I literally went to an orthopedic specialist recently for overuse of the left alt key causing me pretty notable pain in my thumb.

Yeah, my son's issue was rare and congenital. I wish I still had the conversation, but I can't remember which LLM it was and it's not in either my Claude or GPT history. It got it in two shots.

1. I described the symptoms the same way we described it to the ER the first time we brought it in. It suggested all the same things that the ER tested for. 2. I gave it the lab results for each of the suggestions it made (since the ER had in fact done all the tests they suggested).

After that back and forth it gave back a list of 3-4 more possibilities and the 2nd item was the exact issue that was revealed by radiology (and corrected with surgery).

We had the diagnosis before I started with the LLM. The radiology showed the problem and the surgeries worked. Down to an ultrasound a year now!

We took him to our local ER, they ran tests. I gave the LLM just the symptom list that I gave to the ER initially. It replied with all the things they tested for. I gave the test results, and it suggested a short list with diagnostics that included his actual Dx and the correct way to test for it.

I’m saying that is a great tool for people who can see through the idiotic nonsense they so often make up. A professional _has_ the context to see through it.

It should empower and enable informed decisions not make them.

Tricky…my son had a really rare congenital issue that no one could solve for a long time. After it was diagnosed I walked an older version of chat gpt through our experience and it suggested my son’s issue as a possibility along with the correct diagnostic tool in just one back and forth.

I’m not saying we should be getting AI advice without a professional, but I’m my case it could have saved my kid a LOT of physical pain.

I was responding to the claim in the article:

> Like Japan’s kanji alphabet, the oldest writing system in the world is syllabic.

Memorizing thousands of characters is a lot more work, but the memorization isn’t the main part of learning a language…

6 years to master a syllabic alphabet seems like a stretch...They seem to be crossing learning the language and learning the writing system.

I studied Greek and Hebrew in college, Latin in high school. In each the very first night's homework was to memorize the characters and their pronunciation.

Multiple ANE cultures used cuneiform (Ugaritic, Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite, and so on). The time to master each depends on your native language, the target language, and exposure to similar languages. The writing system is not the hard part.

Yep!! It’s fantastic

My custom prompt instructs GPT to output changes to code as a diff/git-patch. I don’t use agents because it makes it hard to see what’s happening and I don’t trust them yet.

Yeah, there was definitely a communication gaffe on the part of the person trying to address OP's behavior. Some people (OP included it appears) need very direct communication that would be rude if directed at _other_ people.

Unfortunately the indirection ("be more empathetic") is the safe/polite/un-hurtful bet for a huge percentage of the population. The majority of people hear that and pick up on the implied request to be more sensitive.

Saying/hearing is not the same. Parent struggles to hear the differences and says they can pronounce them.

Polish has a retroflex and palatalized “sh” pair of sounds (Sz vs ś) that I can pronounce perfectly but not clearly distinguish as a listener.

I learned Polish when I was 5, moved back to the states when I was 11, barely used it for 7 years, and relearned it when I was 18. I don’t know if (at 5) I ever distinguished between the two. But I certainly struggle now.

So this is terrifying for all the reasons mentioned below, but the _core_ setup where it is not connected to the utility and acts (basically) like a solar powered UPS is really attractive to me.

All the commercial solar setups out there spend a lot of effort pushing power back to the grid, when all I really want is this configuration to all my outlets.

Does anyone know of a setup like this? Basically a power bank that charges primarily from solar, secondarily from the grid, and provides my normal panel with power through an inverter (or panels/inverters, I actually expect). Feeding back to the grid seems more trouble than its worth...

Wow. I've moved away from places because of constant grey skies. The photos are beautiful, but while I'd visit I'd never be able to live there.

I'd be really interested to see these costs averaged (like parent post) but then re-distributed by average income...

This is responding to Food Lab.

I hear your point on formalization, but I do find that understanding the science behind various techniques has helped my ability to Freeform in the kitchen significantly.

This is how I lasagna. Warm water soak to rehydrate (I do use my kettle to speed things up).

I realize baked ziti (your link) and lasagna are basically the same thing, but it felt worth calling out. It makes for a much faster prep stage. I do the prep work after my family leaves for the day in the morning, then dinner is just preheating and popping it in the oven

Boy my experience with small chunks of translation between languages I know well is not the same at all. When prompted properly the translation quality is unbelievable and can absolutely catch nuances, puns, and add footnotes.

That said, I use it with pretty direct prompting, and I strongly prefer the "AI Partners with a Human" model.

“An h*” is regional. Had a professor who said “an historic…” all the time, never stopped noticing it, though.