criddell

I'm halfway through Stoner right now and think about it quite a bit when I'm not reading it. I really don't know what to think about William Stoner (or Edith!).

On a thread like this a long time ago, somebody recommended The Dog Stars to me and I read it and then a year later re-read it (it's one of three books I've ever read a second time).

For some reason I never read anything else by Heller until this year. Over the summer I read Burn, Celine, and The Orchard. All excellent. I think Heller is my favorite active writer and it surprises me because all of his books (that I've read) have a strong outdoorsman-type vibe and that's not me at all.

Of the four books, The Orchard really hooked me. I wish it was twice as long.

I just added Station Eleven to my to-read list yesterday. I read the first chapter online and it starts out great.

In the 80's many schools subjected kids to the Myers-Briggs test and introvert or extrovert was one of the categories it sorted people into. I was found to be introverted which was a bit of a surprise to me. The rest of it felt right to me (I was either INTP or ISTP, I forget which).

Hasn't your need for socializing changed over time? It sure has for me.

> It's too much fun to be home alone

This reminded me of the insurance company TV ad:

https://www.ispot.tv/ad/S7KX/geico-cancelled-plans

> Americans are unhappier than ever

For a slightly different take, the great Experimental History blog wrote about this (in a way...) too:

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/there-is-no-epidemic-...

> More recent data suggests that teenage loneliness might have ticked back up to where it was in the 1980s, and the evidence here is mixed overall, depending on which data sets and cohorts you look at. We don’t yet have enough data to be sure which way the effects go on average, but we do have enough to be sure that those effects are neither large nor universal.

I think smoking is going through a mini-resurgence right now.

I think back to my childhood and smoking was everywhere. My high school (graduated in 1989) had a smoking area for students. Cigarette smoke wafted out of the teacher's lounge. Kids would light up as soon as they got off the bus on a field trip. I don't have many specific memories of it, but people must have reeked.

Alcohol was also huge. We had a fifth year of high school (grade 13) and so there were plenty of 19 year old students and the drinking age was 19. Students would buy beer on their lunch period for the weekend and store it in their locker and nobody thought anything of it.

WKRP in Cincinnati

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WKRP_in_Cincinnati#Music_licen...

The app store gatekeepers have so much power that it would be nice to see some legal requirements for operators of those stores put in place.

If your app is rejected, there should be a real appeal process. Maybe developers should be able to demand arbitration for some non-trivial fee?

The first step of the appeal would be for the store to disclose to the arbitrator precisely what rule was violated and in what way. The arbitrator can uphold the rejection and you lose your fee or can force the app store to accept the submission and you are refunded.

Microsoft support used to work something like this. There was a fee to get them on the phone but if the problem turned out to be an actual bug, the fee was refunded.

The biggest node in the fediverse is run by Meta.

I'll pretend for a minute that you are right and it's a parenting issue.

Now what? Apparently most parents are bad so what do you do?

Sure, but there are political considerations as well. It's a lot harder to sell sending a 30 year old to die in five years on Mars than it is to sell a 60 year old doing the same.

I suppose any day now OpenAI will be charged for violating the computer fraud and abuse act for their unauthorized accessing of hugging face servers.

There are plenty of people who would trade twenty or thirty years of their Earth life for a final five or ten as a pioneer on (or in) Mars. I probably wouldn’t volunteer yet, but once I’m in my 60’s? Maybe… It’s one way of eliminating anxiety around living too long with dementia.

If you have that specific of an instruction, probably.

What would happen though if the AI learned that you were a Seinfeld fan and it went out and downloaded it all as a surprise present for you?

In this case, you’re right - LLMs did not pirate the books but will that always be the case?

I could imagine taking an existing LLM and telling it “I want to build my own LLM and need as much training data as possible. Go find whatever you can on the internet and store it on SMS://192.168.0.1”. If it downloads TBs of books, did I pirate it?

She’s a great writer.

A lot of people owe this family an apology. Here’s a sampling of some of the vile comments left on Reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1wpll52/clip_of_a_...

> You can “compress all of the three-dimensional world into two dimensions.”

That sounds a little like the sophons in the novel Three Body Problem. IIRC, aliens took a photon, unfolded it to a flat surface to etch circuitry on, then folded it back up and fired the photon at earth where it unfolded again and did the bidding of the aliens.

> you can decipher the entire contents of the box just by repeatedly measuring points on the surface

So if the box is both inside and outside of a black hole, is that a path for information to leave a black hole?

You'd have the accused prove their innocence rather than the state prove their guilt?

It does fit the context of this discussion but, like I said, not every jurisdiction has those definitions of murder.

> that's not murder?

Well, that depends on the legal definition of murder where you live.

In lots of places, intent matters. You said the pill was added with the intent to make more money. If there was no intent to kill, then in lots of places that isn't murder but might be some other kind of criminal homicide.

For example, people at Ford made the decision to sell the Pinto with a dangerous defect to make more money and people died as a direct consequence of that product decision. The people who made that decision were not charged with murder (or anything as far as I recall).

I'd like to try a low dose GLP-1 for inflammation benefits but I'm not overweight (5'-9" 162 lbs) so I don't think I could buy it.

That said, a little appetite suppression would be nice. I spend too much of my day thinking about food and that's annoying... For the past couple of years (I'm 56) my cravings for food have skyrocketed and if I ate as often or as much as I want to, I'd pack on weight fast.

A few years ago I did start taking 300 mg of nicotinamide riboside daily and that has helped quite a bit with inflammation.

This review seems to equate parallelism and concurrency as the same thing and they are not.

As I understand it, the parallelism is about task execution and concurrency is about task structure. Or, as Rob Pike said:

"Concurrency is about dealing with lots of things at once. Parallelism is about doing lots of things at once."

He said that in his Concurrency is not Parallelism talk.

I assume your metrics are great coffee and excellent ambiance.

The best coffee I've ever had was from The Library Specialty Coffee in Toronto. The location though is so minimal and uninviting that I couldn't rank it very highly as a coffeeshop.

Where I live (Austin) some of the best coffee I've had is from a trailer, so that obviously wouldn't rank either.

I'm not sure I've been to any coffeeshops I would rank very highly... Sadly, the best is probably the Starbucks near where I live. The people who work there are extraordinarily nice and the place is very clean, quiet, and comfortable. Too bad the coffee isn't better.

I never thought about it before, but I guess the place is more important to me than the drink when determining where I want to go for a cup of coffee.

Did you ever use OS/2? It wins the crown IMHO because of the object-oriented nature of the Workplace shell. Things like the icons were functional objects that had code and data (and state) owned by them. Also, using Rexx as the scripting engine was a bold and great choice.

Hot Dog Stand is mostly a reminder of how important a good name is.

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/windows/windows-3-1-include...

I think the OS/2 Workplace Shell was probably the pinnacle. Everything since then has been a functional downgrade with nicer aesthetics (which matter!).

Is easily and quickly a requirement? Isn't it enough that over time it improves itself even if the process is complex and slow?

But also, vibe coded pathogens. Boo!

I named five companies that if you search for "$COMPANY_NAME flagship" you will quickly find relevant models.

Now if you are looking for luxury phones, that's a different thing. Something from Vertu would likely qualify. They are expensive and are made from high end materials, but the phones themselves aren't that special.

AI tools have devalued resumes and cover letters, personal repos, leet code scores, etc...

It's always been the case, but now it's more true than ever: your professional network is super important. If somebody on the inside can recommend you, your chances of getting an offer are good compared to throwing your resume on the pile.