dfltr

I don't know if this is the official term for it, but that just sounds like metagaming[1], i.e. incorporating knowledge of the opposing player (or of trends among a group of opposing players) into how you play the game.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metagame#Competitive_gaming

There should be a whole checklist of "Things that were still a hard problem in The Expanse" that any space-related startup has to answer.

My partner is a mathematician who realized (along with the other members of their working group) that if they were to deviate from the standard alphabetical authorship order, they could author a paper on the DILF Theorem.

I think there's an additional step of "Find out what they want" that was left out of the original comment because the desires of actual toddlers are (usually) not fundamentally evil.

Do they want to exterminate your loved ones? Do they want to ship dissenters off to concentration camps? Do they want to simply profit off of the people in power who are doing those things? If so, the whole process has an early return case that's more along the lines of "Antifa rally at Omaha Beach."

It's got electrolytes, it's what abiogenesis craves.

These people are anarchists! No really, they are. The stoop coffee to "It takes the hood to save the hood" pipeline is real.

And to top it all off, they're charging us for the soup, and it's getting more expensive every time we give them another ingredient.

> Legacy modern code

As opposed to Vintage Pioneer code?

Short answer: Yes.

Slightly longer answer: Depending on the business, building organic inbound traffic via evergreen content like blog posts can be an effective way to get potential customers in the door. This type of inbound lead is usually higher quality and lower cost overall than paid ad traffic, which has gotten pretty miserable over the past few years.

The thing that frightens me is that the objective here is the explicit inverse of Chesterton's Fence: In dismantling these agencies, the DOGE team's intent is to cause the exact cascade of dysfunction that Chesterton warned about.

Elon Musk (and the billionaire class he represents) doesn't want a functioning CFPB because it doesn't serve him (or them). It will take a little while for them to fully sabotage the IRS and DOE as well, but they're working their way up to it.

“So what," the Chelgrian asked, "is the point of me or anybody else writing a symphony, or anything else?"

The avatar raised its brows in surprise. "Well, for one thing, you do it, it's you who gets the feeling of achievement."

"Ignoring the subjective. What would be the point for those listening to it?"

"They'd know it was one of their own species, not a Mind, who created it."

"Ignoring that, too; suppose they weren't told it was by an AI, or didn't care."

"If they hadn't been told then the comparison isn't complete; information is being concealed. If they don't care, then they're unlike any group of humans I've ever encountered."

"But if you can—"

"Ziller, are you concerned that Minds—AIs, if you like—can create, or even just appear to create, original works of art?"

"Frankly, when they're the sort of original works of art that I create, yes."

"Ziller, it doesn't matter. You have to think like a mountain climber."

"Oh, do I?"

"Yes. Some people take days, sweat buckets, endure pain and cold and risk injury and—in some cases—permanent death to achieve the summit of a mountain only to discover there a party of their peers freshly arrived by aircraft and enjoying a light picnic."

"If I was one of those climbers I'd be pretty damned annoyed."

"Well, it is considered rather impolite to land an aircraft on a summit which people are at that moment struggling up to the hard way, but it can and does happen. Good manners indicate that the picnic ought to be shared and that those who arrived by aircraft express awe and respect for the accomplishment of the climbers.

"The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweated buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they'd wanted was to absorb the view. It is the struggle that they crave. The sense of achievement is produced by the route to and from the peak, not by the peak itself. It is just the fold between the pages." The avatar hesitated. It put its head a little to one side and narrowed its eyes. "How far do I have to take this analogy, Cr. Ziller?”

- Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward

There's a whole fun additional layer of ethical replica hobbyists figuring out how to make replicas that are satisfyingly accurate to the original, but difficult for an unscrupulous third party to pass off as real.

One of my favorite examples is Gibson replica guitars with period-accurate serial numbers, but the serials are intentionally stamped during the wrong step in the painting & finishing process to signal that they weren't assembled at a Gibson factory.

It feels like one of those low-sci-fi settings where we thought it'd be funny and quaint to have post-collapse scavengers endlessly repairing retro tech, but now it's actually happening and it's not funny anymore.

Like for example: My dad bought a hulking integrated Akai amp / cassette / turntable combo in the early 80s. Every user-facing component was brushed aluminum, the volume pot was the size of a Dallas church, and it probably would have killed any living organism you dropped it on.

My dad died over a decade ago and I guarantee that amp is still sitting in someone's living room heating the place up. I'm just mad it's not in mine.

In fact the Gnorts would not have "a long list of rules to memorize" with "no underlying principles".

They would instead have a history and culture (or many histories and many cultures) to learn in order to contextualize words and symbols and find their actual meaning, because meaning doesn't really exist without context.

"Sugar: The Bitter Truth" (https://robertlustig.com/sugar-the-bitter-truth/) is a pretty long watch, but it's incredibly eye-opening in terms of explaining in detail exactly why our current dietary sugar intake is so damaging to our bodies.

Note: Robert Lustig is a professor of pediatric endocrinology at UCSF, I promise I wouldn't ask you (the reader) to watch a long-ass youtube video unless it contained extremely relevant science about how you (the biological machine) work.

Use case #1: You have a problem table (e.g. a high-volume events table) that grows non-linearly as your business starts to scale up. A queue + columnar store package like Trench moves the problem table out to a system better equipped to deal with it and lets your DB server handle its relational business in relative peace and quiet.

> Potemkin unicorn.

Thank you for putting these two words together, they're perfect.

Sites will for sure use the Web Integrity API(1) to blacklist "unsafe" user agents exactly the same way macOS blacklists apps from "unsafe" developers.

1: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrit...

I've had to explain this to non-technical stakeholders many, many times over the years, and I always use the restaurant metaphor:

If you run a commercial kitchen and you only ever cook food, because selling cooked food is your business -- if you never clean the dishes, never scrape the grill, never organize the freezer -- the health inspector will shut your shit down pretty quickly.

Software, on the other hand, doesn't have health inspectors. It has kitchen staff who become more alarmed over time at the state of the kitchen they're working in every day, and if nothing is done about it, there will come a point where the kitchen starts failing to produce edible meals.

Generally, you can either convince decision makers that cleaning the kitchen is more profitable in the long run or you can dust off your resume and get out before it burns down.

Oh hey, I can answer this -- I work out to ease ADHD symptoms and live in a shitty wood-framed SF apartment. Using a kettlebell or any heavy object you can hold in your hands, you can do the following routine in near-silence first thing in the morning:

Goblet squat, deadlift, bent-over row, pushups, overhead press. It's reasonably comprehensive, takes less than 10 minutes, and involves enough exercise to keep me moderately sane all morning.