gs17

You can also ask it what Trump said about who won that election, although it will adamantly refuse to compare the two results.

Yeah, I'm not sure why they're calling it that. XR glasses, maybe, but not VR if you can't actually have any immersion.

Meanwhile in Washington:

> As the 5 p.m. cutoff to pass bills approached Tuesday, Sen. Shelly Short, R-Addy, launched an unusual bid to bog down the Senate process. She demanded Lt. Gov. Denny Heck, a Democrat, to have the chamber’s secretary read all 39 pages of a bill focused on electrical transmission infrastructure. Usually, the clerk reads the first and last line of legislation into the record. Heck agreed.

> This maneuver killed the transmission bill, as well as several others Senate Democrats were hoping to vote on before the deadline. One of those looked to address surging theft of copper wiring. Senate Bill 6190 would’ve imposed new recordkeeping requirements on scrap metal businesses and made destroying “critical communications infrastructure” a felony.

Better luck next year, I guess.

> the seats necessary to alter that aren't even open

Seems to be anyone's win right now: https://www.realclearpolling.com/maps/senate/2026/toss-up (and RCP is considered to be conservative).

In this case, I don't know that the result will be increased prices necessarily. If landlords are forced to show people honest prices (as opposed to now where the advertised price is at least a few hundred under the real price, but those are mandatory "fees" instead of rent), they may have to bring prices down to compete. It's possible that the currently "honest" landlords will raise rent to match the new higher prices with fees lumped in, so we'll have to see how it plays out.

> third party apps with account/phone/video+photos requirement to access package room

And despite that, packages will still be stolen regularly.

Yes, there are people insisting that this will make things impossible for tenants because "no one will want to be a landlord anymore" if they can't charge junk fees.

I think this might help small landlords out a bit. Big corporate landlords can easily add nonsense fees to make the rent look low. Small landlords wouldn't bother charging you to use your own mailbox and usually don't have common areas to charge you for access to. With things made transparent, the small landlords can simply offer a price, and be on a more level playing field.

A restaurant here (Seattle) has a "Shabbat lease" where the business is operated and staffed by a separate group for part of the week. I'm not sure on the details, but I think they had to word the contract in a very specific way (and even then I'm sure different authorities would have differing opinions on how acceptable it is). I'm used to it meaning "we close early Friday, don't open Saturday".

There's legends of rabbis with golems that go both ways. The famous Golem of Prague was turned off for the sabbath. The less famous Golem of Drohitchin was specifically made to do work that Jews would not be allowed to during the sabbath, which resulted in a fire when its instructions weren't clear enough.

Yes, a lot of bills are introduced in one chamber and die in that same chamber. This case is referring to it being introduced by "Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), along with Representatives Val Hoyle (D-Ore.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.)", presumably there's a companion bill for the house, since the links seem to only have the Senate version.

And it's worse than that, Micron said that converting capacity to HBM was at a 3:1 ratio, so that 250k HBM could be up to 750k in non-HBM. Fortunately, some of the increase is due to improved processes.

Samsung is already building another fab (which was originally suspended due to low memory prices years ago). Hopefully when it goes live in a few years it's not all dedicated to HBM for AI.

A shame that this should if anything, lead to consumer DRAM prices getting even worse.

"turn all the lights on/off" and "it's too dark in the bathroom" worked for me, but anything less direct didn't. "it's too cold" actually made it turn the thermostat down ("it's cold" made it... turn the lights down?)! Although the confidence on the bad responses was pretty low, so it might be worth adding a threshold to the demo.

Or maybe it just has a weird thermostat down bias? "make it hot" also had it turn it down (specifically it went from 20->18, or at least tried to, the UI still showed 20), with high confidence. Also might have a bit of a Celsius vs Fahrenheit confusion. Neat concept, but I might not want to let it control the oven at the moment.

The laptop demo worked better until I tried to open the mail app. "Check mail" kept opening the browser with an error, and "check email" makes a note with the text "email", "open email" goes to "https://api.email.com/v1/email" in my real browser, but "open mail" does work.

And I presume the "reasoning" isn't very trustworthy? In the car I got "'turn it up' means lower volume -> set_volume with lower value." For the house, reasoning would correctly say that I wanted the alarm off, but it didn't actually do it.

Agreed, it can be really hard to get around a roundabout as a pedestrian if it's not designed for it, and then they make it so both you and people entering don't know each other are there until you're about to get hit.

One of my least favorite Claude-isms is "not nothing", and it makes sense why it loves that useless phrase so much now. It's the same pattern.

Yeah, I also switched back to ChatGPT. It still is a bit too much of a sycophant, but I'll take that over shallow and pedantic.

You can use the split and join blocks to get the code and turn it back into blocks, but it's not well documented like I mentioned earlier. You split a ringified script "by blocks" to get a list version, which you can then use the "[text] of [list]" block (it's the one with length selected by default in the dropdown). That allows you to get the "Lisp" version in code.

Once you have the text version, you put it back into a split block set to split "by blocks", which gets the list version, which can then be put into the input list of a join block to get the code again.

This is technically discoverable from within Snap itself since they provide a library wrapping these steps, but it's not the first place you might look if you don't know it already exists.

You have to add one, in the sounds tab you can record one, or in the file menu they have a library of them you can load (they also have libraries of sprites and backgrounds which are pretty useful when we use this with students).

The CoT isn't necessarily showing that it ran a classifier. The system prompt has:

> If Claude suspects it's talking with a minor, it keeps the conversation friendly, age-appropriate, and free of anything unsuitable for young people. Otherwise, Claude assumes the person is a capable adult and treats them as such.

> I know almost all colleges in the US have walk in free mental health counseling

I've been to two universities and this was not the case from the university itself, especially outside of normal business hours. If you didn't have an emergency, you had to wait months, if you had an emergency (I was explicitly told the only way to see someone anytime soon was if I said I'd kill myself if I didn't get an appointment and then they'd see if there was someone available) you might be able to talk to someone sooner. After hours emergencies maybe the psych ward at the hospital would see you? There's free resources, but universities aren't really providing much.

It's an odd quirk of Snap that they never cleaned up. Some blocks have a "friendly" error message. Delete a variable and uses of it get "Hmmm... a variable of name 'name' does not exist in this context". That one just regurgitates the JS error when it should say "You need to add and select a sound to play a sound".

That one is a bit more defensible for variables, when you rename variables, it gives you "rename" or "rename all". "rename" renames the variable, leaving uses of it the same, "rename all" also renames where you used it. Deleting a variable leaves the blocks that references it in place but they'll throw an error if called (IIRC this is useful if you wanted to switch from a global to local variable or vice versa).

Now, custom blocks have a different issue, where deleting one just severs any code that was using it (so if you had some custom blocks in a program: [on start] -> a -> b -> c, deleting the definition for b will mean c no longer gets called). There's now a block to delete custom blocks, so you can make self-destructing code.

They've fixed surprisingly many of the quirks, but my biggest gripe with Snap is that they don't like to add documentation with new features. A lot of the older content has a nice "help..." context menu option with a description of what it does (which is often out of date itself, e.g. the "split" and "join" by blocks feature isn't shown on those blocks), and newer blocks have the context menu option... but nothing pops up.

That's more of a problem in text-based coding. One of the things I genuinely like about Snap (well, in my case NetsBlox, which is a fork of it) is the ability to have spaces and weird characters in a variable name.

Edit: Oh, you meant the lambda in the post title? It's not really part of the name, but you can at least type it into Snap itself.

Snap does have a limited keyboard mode (shift click), but it's not really as good as "real" IDE.

https://ifm.ai/k2/ seems to work for me.

> Let's maybe add comments? The final code can have comments. Fine.

I'm pretty sure they mean going from 150% to 125%, where 1.25/1.50 = 0.83, so they're calling that a 17% reduction. It's less than today, but also more than a limit they made up and then didn't apply.