dhosek

One of the few homework assignments I took in the line cs class I took was to write a calculator program that could store data in variables a–z. I wrote a simple algebraic solver instead with arbitrary length variable names.

I used to be able to type, e.g., “days since 24 June 2024” into a browser window and get an answer. At some point, Duck Duck Go stopped giving a response, so I turned that into “days since 24 June 2024 !g” to get it from Google. In the last couple-three weeks, Google now gives me an AI-generated answer that is wrong as often as not.

Something else I’ve noticed is that occasionally I’ll do random queries in Claude (since I never hit my usage limits on my personal account) like giving it piles of my writing and asking it to speculate on the identity of the author or asking it to tell me what it knows about various people I know. On the latter, I’ve found that Claude has strict boundaries about what it will say about people while the AI box on Google will happily dig into people’s backgrounds to an uncomfortable level.

They play a clever little game where they borrow against those shares to live on. Since there’s no realized gain, there’s no income (and the interest is deductible against any incidental gains that might happen along the line). Then when they die, the sale of shares to pay off the loan is a non-taxable event and the estate value is reduced so the heirs won’t pay as much (or any) estate tax.

Property tax increases are hamstrung by Prop 13 and until that’s repealed, will continue to be.

And while the wealthy always threaten to leave when faced with higher taxes, the fact is that they never seem to actually do so.

The site is based around georgism whose fundamental premise is that taxing land is the universal solution (much like for republicans cutting taxes is their solution to everything: economy going great? We should cut taxes. Economy going poorly? Cut taxes. Deficit too high? Cut taxes.) I don’t put much stock in analysis by single-solution thinkers.

The Art Institute of Chicago is not on the lakefront. There are a handful of buildings east of Lake Shore Drive, with the most notable being the Field Museum, The Shedd Aquarium, Adler Planetarium, McCormick Place, Lake Point Tower and Soldier Field. McCormick and Lake Point Tower are the newest of these, with the former built in 1967 (replacing an earlier structure built in 1960 but destroyed by fire) and the latter in 1968. The others were all built in the 1920s and 30s (the Art Institute building, which is in Grant Park, with roughly half of its structure east of the trench with the IC and South Shore electric railways and the rest fronting Michigan Avenue, had the older section built in the 1890s and notably was the only construction in Grant Park to not be opposed by Montgomery Ward¹). The proposed location for the museum in Chicago would have been in land owned by the Chicago Park District which is part of Grant Park and is meant to be free and open to the public and would have been a privatization of that land (it’s worth noting that the Shedd, Adler and Field properties, along with Soldier Field are all owned by the park district and not their primary tenants).

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1. The person, not the company named after him which he founded.

He also wanted to put it on the lakefront of Chicago, but that’s not what Chicago’s lakefront is for.

Let’s not forget though, the prequel trilogies were—not good. Lucas is at his best when he has collaborators who can help take the half-baked ideas and fully bake them.

I was curious about what was happening with the domain name here (after all, shkspr.mobi has nothing to do with Shakespeare) so imagine my delight at discovering it was an actual poem and my vague notion that I’ve been to the site for poetry in the past was, in fact, correct.

But that’s because that’s a situation where there’s only one president. If you were in a situation where there were multiple presidents you would definitely say he’s a president.

My kids find mechanical disks (let alone things like CDs/DVDs or (gasp) vinyl) to be bizarre concepts. The fact that the disk drives for the IBM mainframe that I worked with in the mid-to-late 80s were the size of a washing machine absolutely blows them away.

Ugh, TIL that Python doesn’t have labeled breaks. Now I’m wondering what other languages in current use don’t have this functionality.

I’ve not quite had the same dramatic change of weight (only about 20% gain), but my fingers have retained their diameter through that. I was genuinely curious about what caused people to need resizing.

Infinite distance and travel cost too!

Odd, I was married for almost twenty years during which I think I took off my ring twice (maybe not even that much—if I recall correctly, I persuaded the surgical staff to tape my ring rather than have me remove it when I had surgery). Never had to resize it and it fit fine the whole time. I don’t know what lifestyle leads to a finger changing size dramatically during the lifespan of a smart ring.

I think Nepal is the only flag that cut a corner.

I’m surprised that the near-identical flags list omits Slovenia and Slovakia which both have white-blue-red horizontal stripes and a coat of arms (albeit with slightly different placement and different background colors on the coats of arms). A part of me feels like it’s part of a long-time joke the two countries are playing to confuse non-Slavs (the Slovenian word for their language is Slovenščina while the Slovak word for their language is Slovenčina and this is just the beginning of the confusion between the two countries/nationalities).

It’s a warning of what it’s going to do next…

Weather is not climate. Not to mention we really don’t have roughly the same weather anyway.

Kind of reminds me of a college classmate back in the 80s made a Hypercard game which he had called Escape from Harvey Mudd but which the college asked (maybe demanded?) that it be renamed as it started to get distribution so the more commonly seen version was called Escape from Grid Tech. I would guess that there might have been some reputational concerns as that classmate was one of the people who dropped out of Mudd during my time there (the late 80s cohorts had a lot of people, myself included, who had wavered between humanities and sciences and after exposure to life in the sciences decided to opt for the humanities instead—most of us ended up doing programming for a living having no marketable skills post-college. The one person from my freshman year suite who actually finished his degree at Mudd went on to become a music professor).

There’s also the depth. A crt monitor would have a depth at least equal to the diagonal measurement which meant a lot of desk space lost to the monitor. On the other hand that also meant some prime cat nesting space that was lost with the lcd transition.

You’re absolutely right, but I need to go to the bathroom/get some coffee/take a smoke break/get back to this task now so we’ll have to discuss this further later.

There is a link to the paper in the article: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05283

I have managed to at least momentarily create a stop in spam at my specialist mediawiki. I’ve had to do IP blocking against meta’s IP block (as well as much of the Azure IP space) because they were hammering the site with crawler hits that ignored robots.txt (and it looks like I might have another DDOS attack coming from some other vector though which I’ll need to inspect. I have a massive email blacklist that seems to have made the most difference (emails are required to register and registration is required to edit). Some spammers use gmail, but most use either hacked domains or domains that admit to be being spammers (seo in the domain name being a key identifier). Maybe I should be blocking the OpenAI IP space as well.

There end up being some weird edge cases where there are some countries which have both the equivalent of .co.uk but also allow registrations directly under the two-letter country code as well. .mx is one such case where most business are, e.g., costco.com.mx, but it’s also possible to register directly under .mx as well so Toyota Mexico is toyota.mx and not toyota.com.mx (the latter is registered, and ostensibly to Toyota, but the whois and nslookup records give very different results and the website doesn’t load when I try to visit it).

In my twenties, I had decided that I didn’t want to have side projects or a job that followed me home. I wanted to just go to work, come home and be.

Shortly after I made that commitment, there was a notice published that I was starting a typography magazine.

I had talked publicly about doing this, but it was something that I had planned on doing with my then-girlfriend who subsequently broke up with me and I decided that I would shelve it. But thanks to that notice, I started getting inquiries and I ended up doing the typography magazine anyway. I’m glad for the experience of having done it, less so for the negative impact it had on my finances for the next decade.

He’s doing exactly what he said he would do when he ran. People who voted for him can very much be held accountable.

From what I’ve seen of what AI can do for coding, the part of software engineering that I like is going to be automated out of existence, much like the ability to do serious calculations by hand got automated out of existence with the development of computing. Writing code by hand will be as marketable as factoring 5-digit numbers in your head.¹

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1. I enjoy doing both, but I doubt that anyone will pay me what I’ve been paid in the past for this five years from now.

Yeah, I’m pretty much on a trajectory of building up as much retirement savings as possible before AI completely kills my career. The sweet spot seems to be about three years out. I honestly don’t know how to guide my 12-year-old son who loves math¹ and coding.

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1. Which at his age essentially means solving computation problems, although he figured out how to take something like 0.3535… and turn that back into a rational number without any guidance at all.²

2. I want to see how close to the general solution he’s gotten on his own, but given that he’s not had any formal algebra, it’s damned impressive and bodes well for his future development.

Presumably this is on their roadmap. The Jobs-era thing would be to come in with something that people on HN would say, “yeah, I could do this myself with open source tools” but in practice falls into the category of “I could build this $30 thing for $15 for parts and then another $15 for the parts I had to replace because I screwed up the build the first time and then $30 to just buy the damn thing” that would really blow non-HN people away even if it is more expensive than most other local computing systems, but I don’t know what the Ternus-era Apple will be like.

Apparently, yes: https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/ivbwoo/cur/multimedi...