crooked-v

It reminds me of the people who reinvent some basic concept of physics with an LLM (usually, but not always, incorrectly) and think it's 'revolutionary'.

Also see the 80-year-old woman in SF who killed an entire family at a bus stop, while speeding, while going the wrong way on a one way street, and was sentenced to probation and community service and banned from driving for three years.

Of course, them doing it like that makes the security theater even more obvious, since they don't bother doing anything about it until renewal time.

I think of the legal system in the US. It's easy to find statements about how the entire legal system would collapse if people stopped taking plea bargains because nothing is actually funded or operated in a way that actually guarantees the right to trial in any practical way.

> come up with a new company idea, Run that company

So far nobody's even shown an LLM succesfully running a high-traffic vending machine for as much as 30 days at a time.

Yep, any concern about text widows and orphans in modern app layouts becomes irrelevant as soon as you have to localize.

Just build your layout so it can squash/stretch appropriately.

I've got a bunch of BILLY bookcases that have survived several moves and are conveniently easy to mod with basic power tools.

Sadly, I don't know if it's worth trying to keep them at this point, because they replaced the previously decently durable wood veneer surfaces with glued on wood-pattern paper wraps (https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/ikea-furniture-inflation...). It's lead to me having a mix of old ones that still look like the day I put them together and new ones where all the corners are already visibly raveling from the wear of a single move.

The same paper specifically notes that the increase of units affordable to very low income levels depends on there being any significant number of units affordable to very low income levels in the first place, and that's something that's functionally nonexistent in places like San Francisco and NYC.

> The last place I worked created a team of principles whose whole goal was to create a system to turn jira tickets into PRs

Demotivating work aside, that also seems like a complete dead-end to me, because somebody else who focused their company around it will do it better and cheaper (even before considering subject-specific VC money).

Housing shortages are a result of local policies, and rent control makes housing shortages worse (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105113772...).

SF as a city has the fundamental problem that there's a huge part of the electorate will blame the housing shortage on absolutely anything they can find that's not the actual fundamental physical shortage of housing. That leads to an endless tangle of local laws and organizations supposedly trying to "do something about it", that are fundamentally just making the problem worse by adding marginal cost to every new already-difficult-to-pencil housing unit.

It doesn't.

Way back when I was in high school, the most important part of essay writing was figuring out how to expand the topic I cared nothing about to the required X pages. I'm unsurprised that college students would default to the same thing.

The problem there is that not even the physicists completely agree on the details, because we know black holes definitely exist, but every explanation breaks one rule or another that should apply from different disciplines. It's part of why they get so much ongoing attention.

Wild-ass guess: maybe the aftertaste of peppermint oil twice daily leaves people who are already unhealthy wanting to snack less, leading to minor weight loss.

I suspect this case has origins less to do with the programming itself, and more to do with UK bureaucracy just not giving a shit, as with the post office scandal where authorities, including the legal system, blindly believing in the outsourced systems led to hundreds of false prosecutions and thirteen suicides (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal).

See also "Am I German or Autistic?", which despite the cheeky title, does a pretty good job showing the balance between cultural and mindset patterns and autism spectrum traits. https://german.millermanschool.com

If not for Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, I'd probably had just completely bounced off Shakespeare's works in high school.

> “the x”, with x having not only no antecedent but also being a coined word or quasi-synonym for something that is already named in the code base

It does the same thing if you try to get it to do analysis of text or turn data into summaries. It will invent cryptic hyphenated compound words to describe things instead of using plain language or preexisting terms.

Because storing PBS archives is a voluntary public service, and storing other random peoples' stuff isn't.

From personal experience when I was younger: Spending a month traveling on European trains with a backpack will teach you a whole lot about what you actually need to pack, and what you will want to just leave behind and purchase again locally if you really turn out to need a given item.

For me, the starting point that makes a lot of it way easier is to focus on layering. Anyone who lives in the Bay Area will instantly understand it: you don't build outfits for different weather, you build outfits for all weather that just depend on how many layers you've got on. For example, no cold-weather coats: instead you pack a feather-light and very foldable rain shell, layer it over thin sweaters for cold weather (multiple, if it's cold enough), and wear it directly over a light outfit for warm rainy weather.

Japan has buildings addressed by block rather than by street (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system), which is a legacy inherited from older systems and can be a nightmare for finding places (web searches will find you plenty of complaints from native residents about the system and its issues, like a lack of any consistent ordering). I suppose it does have the advantage that streets can be changed, interrupted, etc, without affecting the expected addresses at all.

Here in California, we have Carmel-By-The-Sea, which has had no street addresses for more than 100 years. The town is finally implementing them after endless resistance entirely because the basically static population has finally aged out enough that people's medical supply deliveries and the like can't get to the right houses.

On a side note, boy, this page is a nightmare of low-contrast design and ads everywhere on top of that.

Genuinely effective protests are rarely entirely legal.

The housing part never 'decayed', it was actively blocked by the people who already had homes. That's why you see things now like California actively overriding local zoning.

For people looking for treatment for long-term tinnitus, notched sound therapy has been statistically shown to help by reducing brain activity in relation to the perceived tinnitus frequencies (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8832119/). In other words, it doesn't go away, but it becomes less "important" to the auditory centers.

There are various professionally provided therapies of this style, but there are also simple self-therapy apps that find the perceived frequencies and then play white noise or a music library with the sound adjusted to produce the notched effect in that small frequency window. For example: https://audionotch.com/ https://www.tinnitusnotch.com/ https://www.tinnaway.com/

> LLMs write better than anyone I've ever worked with

And yet every time I see AI-written documentation, there's paragraphs worth of throat clearing and space-wasters like the word "genuinely" for things that could have been outlined in a couple of bullet points.

For me, step 1 of trying to make Claude even vaguely usable is putting in a hook that just tells it 'FUCK YOU, STOP USING PIPES' whenever it tries to chain multiple bash commands.

Also, give it another couple of years and there's going to be a lot of work for any moderately experienced developer fixing broken slopcode hitting the hard wall of bad design.

Reading between the lines, I would bet the bail jumping charge was based on him crossing state lines back and forth, and was dismissed by the court when it became clear he wasn't actually running away anywhere. Thus the cops hunting for any and all petty bullshit to punish him with instead, like the marijuana possession.