laughinghan

And the LLM makes subtle mistakes perceiving what you were trying to say, and I make subtle mistakes perceiving what the LLM generated.

It's interesting that you seem to think an LLM would be better than you at understanding what someone was trying to say. I have complete, 100% certainty that if a personal friend of mine was having trouble expressing themselves and was concerned about being misunderstood, I would understand what they were trying to say better than any existing LLM. (I suppose the exception would be if the friend was referencing some factual matter I'm unaware of but that the LLM has memorized, like a pop culture reference I didn't get or something.) Do you find that ChatGPT has more emotional intelligence than you?

Given that, do you really think goal #1 non-Web APIs really added much additional delay on top of the delay necessitated by goal #2 anyway?

This paragraph has both:

> The symptom is familiar: a stream that occasionally "locks up" briefly before catching up, jitter in audio or video, or a latency spike that appears to come from nowhere, a "hang" in the application when it gets blocked waiting for a packet. It comes from a single packet forcing the entire pipeline to pause. The underlying network recovered quickly; TCP's ordering guarantee is what made it visible.

So does this!

> WireGuard's protocol is a fundamentally different design point. It's stateless — there's no connection to establish upfront, no session to track, and no certificate authority in the picture. Two keys, a compact handshake, and you're encrypting. And unlike TLS, WireGuard's cryptographic choices are fixed: Noise_IKpsk2 for key exchange, ChaCha20-Poly1305 for authenticated encryption. There's nothing to misconfigure.

I think it’s specifically the resemblance to the clickbaity writing style that Twitter threads and LinkedIn and Facebook influencer posts are written in, presumably optimized for engagement/social media virality. I’m not totally sure what I want instead, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same tactics used in writing I admired, but probably much more sparingly?

What is it that makes tptacek’s writing or Cloudflare’s blog etc so much more readable by comparison? Is it just variety? Maybe these tactics should be reserved for intro paragraphs (of the article but also of individual sections/chapters might be fine too) to motivate you to read on, whereas the meat of the article (or section) should have more substance and less clickbaiting hooks?

This thread also has a lot of anecdotal examples of failure modes of 'diverse slate' rules, though, such as people who have already decided who to hire still interviewing women candidates just to appease the rule, thus wasting everyone's time.

It has had the connotation of "mainline", a synonym for "trunk", in version control since before Git existed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branching_(version_control)

Presumably this was originally due to the connotation of the railroad mainline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_line_(railway)

Which is exactly the point—the UI is written in HTML/CSS, not the native platform language, and the high-performance modules are written in C++ and Rust, also not the native platform language.

This just isn't true. Look into how Dan Harmon gave a genuine apology and accounting for his wrongdoing and was forgiven. Can you point to Sabatini doing anything that even arguably rises to that level of contrition?

• a quick search for "refuting bell's theorem" will turn up attempts in 2000, 2007, 2011, 2012, 2017, etc, so let's take this with a huge grain of salt

• Europhysics Letters is a reasonably old journal (1986) but an impact factor of ~2 is pretty low; I wouldn't consider this a major journal

• As the Reddit discussion notes: "Just because you call your model locally realistic doesn't mean it's actually locally realistic. Calling it "contextual" doesn't change that. ... That part where the "context" of photon 1 changes the polarization of photon 2? That's not local.": https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/nig8d5/bells_theor...

A homeless woman today in any major American city (which generally require hospitals to provide emergency care even to people without health insurance) is safer giving birth than a queen a few centuries ago. A homeless person today in any major American city is safer from cholera, tuberculosis, any antibiotic-treatable disease than a king a few centuries ago.

Society and technology have made us much better off overall, it's not close. The fact that we still have major problems today does not contradict the fact that we have also solved some major problems, too, thanks to science and technology.

Autonomy vs social control is a modern trend? That's not what totalitarianism was?

What change of governance? From who to who? (Or what to what?)

Shamelessness was previously only found in rulers and jesters? There weren't ordinary people who were assholes, and shameless about it?

Canada and Nordic countries rank highly in every major freedom index, yet these countries are all known for relatively high tax obligations and comprehensive environmental and climate regulation. No one serious believes all externally-imposed commitments are avoidable or oppressive.

I clearly completely failed to communicate what I meant about "diagramming" a programming language, as evidenced by all the people pointing out that syntax tree diagrams work fine on natural languages, and indeed were originally created for natural languages, which is totally missing the point.

What I meant was that the semantics of programming languages are so limited and constrained that they could easily be translated into an "executable diagram", such as a control-flow graph for imperative code, or a dataflow graph for functional code. The syntax of natural languages is indeed more-or-less similarly constrained as programming languages, but the semantics of natural languages seems completely nebulous and ill-defined to me.

To use the board game analogy from earlier, you could conceivably learn to play chess entirely in terms of chess notation ("1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6"), without ever learning about the 8x8 chessboard or the 16 pieces. Chess notation shares no syntactic structure whatsoever with the "syntax"/diagram drawing rules of a chessboard and pieces, yet their semantics are exactly equivalent.

In the same way, the "syntax"/diagram drawing rules of control-flow graphs has no syntactic structure in common with imperative code, yet exactly equivalent semantics. Could you imagine a diagram system that has no syntactic structure in common with natural language, yet completely captures the semantics?

I cannot begin to imagine that. The semantics of natural language defy description.

To me it feels a little deeper than just there being a "maze of rules". Your earlier mention of "everything's connected to everything else" resonated with me more.

In a sense, the expressive power of programming languages, and mathematical notation, feels very small. I liked the board game metaphor brought up in the top comment: programming languages and mathematical notation merely feel like arrangements of board game pieces (from an infinite box, and the rules of how they can be arranged are "context-free"). They don't have meaning except what we impose (ideally, assisted by comments).

A metaphor I brought up in another comment is that it feels "easy" to systematically translate an arbitrary program into an equivalent diagram, such that the diagram would contain 100% of the operational information in the program, and could be runnable as-is. (Would be cumbersome to input into the computer, ofc.) Whereas the idea of systematically translating an arbitrary natural sentence into a diagram just seems...nonsensical to me. I wouldn't even know where to begin.

Does that resonate with you?

Others here, and presumably your friends, have talked about how they think of programming "visually", but they don't think visually about conversing in natural language.

I thought of a concrete way to describe it: it "feels obvious" to me that any programming language could be "easily" replaced by a systematic diagramming method, with programs translated systematically into equivalent diagrams. If anything, a diagram would be clearer and more readable to me than the same program in plaintext. (Of course, it would be much more cumbersome to input such a diagram into a computer than plaintext.)

Whereas the idea of systematically translating arbitrary natural language sentences into diagrams is...nonsensical to me. I mean I wouldn't even know where to begin.

I'm curious if for you, do you feel like you could easily systematically translate a natural language sentence into a diagram? Or, because you don't think as visually as people like me, translating a program into a diagram is not "obvious" to you at all? Or maybe this distinction just doesn't feel significant to you, one language being diagram-translatable and another being diagram-untranslatable doesn't cause them to feel different, they feel equally language-y to you?

There is room for debate about how clear or strong the expectation of compensation was, but at least we can agree it wasn't 100% on the far extreme of "here, have this for free, I'm not expecting anything at all in return", and then going back on their word afterwards.

can donations be tax deducted ... labor laws ...

Interesting points. I think one of the ideas of the Open Source Collective as a 501(c)(6) non-profit is to provide more of that kind of legal certainty (donations aren't deductible as a charitable contribution, but may be deductible as a business expense). I wonder if it works?

Yeah, it's possible social pressure has the potential to be effective, although I think it would have to be well-organized, with someone like OpenCollective (or maybe it would be better if it was an independent organization?) that monitors and publicizes which companies are "leeches" making a lot of money off of open source, and which are "good citizens", or something.

"The accused" is interesting framing. I would hope that no one expects the innocent but accused to apologize for something they didn't do.

For the accused who are guilty, if we agree that denial is worse for society but currently better for the guilty, what can we do to change that, so that it is better for them to acknowledge fault and worse to remain in denial?

Often, those supporters have been on the receiving end of pretty serious hardships themselves. That doesn't justify supporting war crimes, of course, but if you don't acknowledge those hardships, you create resentment and the seeds of future strife, rather than healing.

Doubtless many people have made things worse with "non-apology apologies" [1]. But your brain wants to say "apologizing is right" because when done right, it is right.

To me, truth and reconciliation are self-evidently how we build a better world, and refusal to take responsibility for mistakes is self-evidently corrosive to the individual and to society.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apology_apology

A proper apology—one that (1) acknowledges the specific harm caused, (2) acknowledges responsibility and remorse for specific choices, (3) explains how they hope to make amends specifically to the aggrieved party—seems to me to be self-evidently the only possible way to heal a community.

Doubtless many people have delivered "apologies" that omitted one of those elements, or even all 3 elements ("I apologize if anyone felt offended"), and thereby made things worse for themselves. But to me it is self-evidently corrosive to a community and to a person's ego to adopt a practice of refusing to acknowledge mistakes.

For an example of the good that can come from a proper apology for a serious harm, consider Dan Harmon's apology to Megan Ganz: https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/1/11/16879702/dan-harmon-ap...