kkoncevicius

> You’ll notice one other small change to the tidyverse message: we now advertise the conflicted package.

Not a fan of the nature in which tidyverse promotes itself. They used to be more aggressive - i.e. advertising their books in package load messages [1]. But these new changes still feel like an ad.

To me, as an outsider, tidyverse seems to mainly be about "dplyr". The main thing holding all of it together otherwise is just the fact that majority of their functions return a "tibble" instead of a data.frame, forcing you to load all the jungle of the rest of their stuff whenever you use one of their packages.

[1]: https://win-vector.com/2019/08/30/it-is-time-for-cran-to-ban...

> I just think that the concept of intruding into my frame, via embedded ads or notifications, is distraction I simply do not ever want.

And thats why in Brave ads are opt-in rather than opt-out.

Brave ads, if you opt in, are displayed as system popups, not in the browser. You opt in so that you get a reward - BAT token - for seeing those ads. These rewards you gain are later distributed to all the content creators, according to how long and how often you visit their websites.

The main reported correlations after a quick read:

> The male composites were not obviously differentiated based on masculinity.

> Both male and female right-wing composites appeared happier than their left-wing counterparts.

> The right-wing faces, particularly for females, might be perceived as more attractive.

> Among women contempt was non-trivially correlated with a predicted probability of left-wing ideology.

The desktop environment is quite configurable and can adapt to a few different styles of doing things. For example, I like asceticism so I hide the menu bar (clock, etc, on top), hide the dock (list of opened applications and quick-launch icons), and have an empty desktop with just a wallpaper. I use "Spotlight Search" (which you get by pressing meta-spacebar) to launch everything. The search is very integrated with the system so you are able to start applications, search your email inbox, browse bookmarks and web history, open notes and contacts, etc, all with the same search.

But of course there are also feature for people who do things differently. One good example is Stage Manager [1]. There are also things like "Mission Control" and multiple desktops, but I am not the right person to talk about these.

Oh one more thing - seems like Apple likes to reverse things on purpose. So the "x" for closing windows is on the left, and not on the right. The desktop icons appear on the right, not on the left. If you use trackpad to scroll it's also reversed - when your fingers slide down the page slides down as well. Takes some time getting used to this.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7t_BCmY-lg

Bad:

- Inability to set up your /home/ (which is /Users/ on a mac) the way you like it. There are default folders for Documents, Pictures, Music, etc and they cannot be deleted. If you delete them they are recreated either immediately or on reboot. My hack-of-a-solution was to alias ls to hide them [1].

- There are also applications that you cannot delete. One such application is Chess - a program that let's you play chess. No idea why it's there by default and why it's impossible to delete it.

- .DS_Store files. Whenever you open a folder in a Finder (default file browser on a Mac) it will add a hidden .DS_Store file within that folder. This file stores and remembers how you chose to arrange your folders in a graphical file manager. But these files often get in a way: you will find them in tarballs, git repositories, etc. Just like with removing folders, I don't think there is a solution that can turn them off.

- Recent OS update made system-settings look like you are on a phone. Apple probably wants to push an interface for system settings that is common to iPads, iPhones, MacBooks and even Apple Watches, but for me it's hard to get used to that.

Good:

- Default Applications are quite tasteful. In particular the Mail client, and default Apple Terminal. They have everything I need without being full of toy features

- Stable. Both hardware and Software. My MacBook pro is 5 years old now, but I never had an issue with hangs, reboots, crashes or anything of this kind.

- Third-party package managers. Homebrew is more popular, but I prefer MacPorts. Whichever you choose, you can set up your system to use linux compilers, shells, coreutils, etc. By default Apple command line arsenal is a bit dated and opinionated so to me this is a must. Once you have this done the command-line experience is almost indistinguishable from Linux (well, apart from /home/ stuff and .DS_Store things).

[1]: http://karolis.koncevicius.lt/posts/cleaning_home_on_macos/i...

There are a lot of tools dedicated to this. My past favorite is vimv [1].

However, for me this operation is so rare that having a separate command just for mass-renaming files does not seem to be justified.

[1]: https://github.com/thameera/vimv

Vis inherits default keymaps. I prefer the way kakoune tried to clean them up by - for example - putting all the "goto" commands under "g" (where Vim has H, M, L, g;, G, gg, $, 0, ^, etc) and all the "view" commands under "v". Such rearrangements make a lot of sense and to me were more intuitive right away, even after a decade use of Vim. Then there are things like ";" and ",", W, B, E, and gE (where something like w, W, e, E would be a lot more obvious), etc. Vim likely acquired those incrementally and that's why they are all over the place. But if an editor were to start from scratch they could be re-arranged in a more logical order. Yet every vim-inspired editor takes Vim defaults for granted.

I vastly prefer the Vim way of action+selection to kakoune way of selection+action. Here is a short write-up (not mine) about why kakoune model is not that appealing [1].

So helix is not for me. My ideal editor would be a modern re-implementation of the Vim way of doing things, probably using different keys, probably thought-out more, probably more light-weight. But for some reason no editor wants to go there. They either break from Vim's model (kakoune, helix) or follow Vim along with all it's flaws (Neovim, Vis).

[1]: https://github.com/noctuid/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs/editin...

I like J. Blow's take on ideas vs implementation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3UrdwnAu3o

Ross Ihaka said in one talk that lazy evaluation would be one of the things he would remove if he was re-writing R today.

https://youtu.be/88TftllIjaY?t=1994

Interesting, thanks for sharing. I would be tempted to call this a bug in the Makefile if this is the case. CDPATH is a standard bash environment variable, people use it in various ways: https://github.com/search?q=%22export+CDPATH%22&type=code

If all these causes the build to fail then the maintainers of that build should be informed.

AGI does not mean it is conscious

Don't know what mysterious medical problems you are having, but my guess is that you are not so unique. Other people might be out there that have the same or similar combination of symptoms. My first step would be finding that group. They will likely have online forums, advice about doctors, tips of what might work, etc. Then the next step is filtering out bullshit from helpful advice.

I would bet that the potential future employer would be more impressed by your ability to make and solve things, rather than talk about them. So unless you will be applying for a teaching or writing position it would be safer to use your knowledge for starting projects and creating a portfolio.

> Moderation is so aggressive that they seemed to have forgotten the purpose of the site is to help people.

The purpose of the site was never in helping people (as in answering every question). The original purpose of SO was in constructing a searchable database of question-answer pairs. With this in mind a question that was asked before, or is too complex, or too vague should be closed as off topic. I think something like this also happened with the question OP was trying to ask.

A quote from https://blog.codinghorror.com/what-does-stack-overflow-want-... :

Stack Overflow ultimately has much more in common with Wikipedia than a discussion forum. By this I mean questions and answers on Stack Overflow are not primarily judged by their usefulness to a specific individual, but by how many other programmers that question or answer can potentially help over time.

OK I will be the party-pooper this time.

Blogging is a waste of time. You see a website with 100 blog posts. That could easily be 1000 hours of work. And then if you ask such person if he/she gained something from it the answer will be of course. The relevant question should be - was it worth the effort? Could they have gotten the same thing with less effort in some other way?

When/if you are starting to blog you should make your goal clear. Are you blogging to get some money and side income? - there are better ways to achieve this. Are you blogging to advertise something? - there are better ways. Are you blogging for vanity and fame? - there are better ways. Are you blogging to create notes for your future self so you do not forget something? - there are better ways.

In my opinion there are very few goals where "having a blog" is the right answer.

Glad it is useful. Just a note of advice - prefix your bookmarks with a symbol that is not used to start directory names (was @ in my case).

This is useful for two things - 1) avoiding clashes with existing directories, 2) having a quick command to list all the bookmarks: cd @<tab>

Adam Duff (LucidPixul). He does Art talks - talks about stuff while drawing, but something in the way he speaks and presents his stories clicks with me.

His channel: https://www.youtube.com/@AdamDuffArt

Example video about procrastination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJlJC6yjLpw

If anyone here knows similar YouTubers - please let me know.

This is more in the "hack" category, but here is a solution for bookmarking directories[1] that I am quite fond of:

  mkdir ~/.marks/
  export CDPATH=.:~/.marks/
  function mark { ln -sr "$(pwd)" ~/.marks/"$1"; }

Then:

  mark @name   # add bookmark called @name for the current directory
  cd @name     # jump to the bookmarked location
  cd @<tab>    # list all available bookmarks

It can list bookmarks, auto-complete, jump to sub-directories within bookmarks, all without introducing any new commands - just `cd`.

[1]: http://karolis.koncevicius.lt/posts/fast_navigation_in_the_c...

> And what exactly is so threatening about TikTok to make it a legitimate national security threat?

Competition for US-based companies.

So in this setup, when you read your email you would put it on the "read" monitor, but when you compose an email you would transfer it over to the "write" monitor?

The article leaves me with an impression of trying to defend socialism and attack capitalism.

Yet when I read the text - it says that certain right-wing corners portray socialism as leading to authoritarianism, while at the same time being blind to the authoritarianism in corporations. But if authoritarianism in corps is bad, it's even worse at the scale of whole nations. So the final message seems to be "capitalism is bad, but not as bad as socialism"?

Weird take.

> You conflate natural language and ideas, creating new ideas does not require creating a new statistical model of language.

The way I see it, currently, the correct logical inferences made by a model are a by-product of it trying to output acceptable text. That is to say - they are one of the properties, that it has learned, that makes the text acceptable. So it can say that 2+2 is 4 and, of course, even more complex statements like that, but it's based on modelling language, not modelling what is under the language.

> There is plenty of evidence that GPT can indeed create entirely novel ideas, it can do logical inference, imagine scenarios that don't fit its world model, create entirely new code.

I am certainly open to being convinced otherwise, maybe you can give me the best example of a new idea created by GPT?

GPT is a language model, meaning it tries to model language - output something that would be acceptable as text by a human reader. In a similar way how your screen-saver might mimic water. But just how your screen saver isn't useful to study the properties of water, these language models are not useful to come up with new ideas. In fact, they are even biased against making new discoveries. Anything new is, by definition, outside the model. If a model were to return a new thing (not found in the training set) it would be down-weighted as being in the risk of not looking like an acceptable text (i.e. - was never seen before). Not unlike how a new behaviour of water (say under certain interesting conditions) would be outside the capabilities of your screen-saver, which only tries to mimic the existing and known properties of water.

As a practical example - try asking it to make an original joke. It will either fail, or give you a joke, written down word for word, from somewhere else on the internet.

By the time of GPT6 these problems might be overcome, but then it would be more than a language model.

Yeah very similar for me, something with the way the author expresses himself. For example in the very beginning:

> Some are angry that GPT’s intelligence is being overstated and hyped up, when in reality it’s merely a “stochastic parrot,” a glorified autocomplete that still makes laughable commonsense errors and that lacks any model of reality outside streams of text. Others are angry instead that GPT’s growing intelligence isn’t being sufficiently respected and feared.

> Mostly my reaction has been: how can anyone stop being fascinated for long enough to be angry?

I am in the "stochastic parrot" group, but in no way am I angry. And I know people who think it should be respected and adopted faster, etc, etc, and those people aren't angry. Something just out of touch between how I feel about things and how the author describes them.

And these:

> Again and again the past few months, people have gotten in touch to tell me that they think OpenAI (and Microsoft, and Google) are risking the future of humanity by rushing ahead with a dangerous technology.

I seriously question how many people "gotten in touch" with the author to share such a silly message. But also this contributes to the writing style: "everyone is angry, I am reasonable; everyone asks me about the dangers of AI, and I explain it to them".

Children are an asset on a farm and a liability in a city. This alone might be enough to explain these trends.

Supporting your aging parents is easier when you have brothers and sisters, and harder when you are alone. This is the same effect, but on larger scale. The children of bigger families will now have to provide for those that could not or decided not to have kids. At least thats the way I look at it.

I usually do the same but arrived at this by using a mental prefix of "test that". As in:

"this test tests that" input has length 256

Since the prefix would be equal for all the tests only the last part becomes the name.

Today there is also a third possibility: your account is shadow-banned.