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sharkjacobs

2,860 karma · joined December 9, 2015

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sharkjacobs··on Making the case for Ed Zitron as the last of the great bloggers
For a long time, even when I disagreed with Ed I appreciated his earnestness and clarity of intent, but after reading that Wired profile that came out and learning that his day job involves doing PR for AI companies, I can't even take what he's saying at face value
sharkjacobs··on DoorDash Spent $1.4M Trying to Stop Mamdani from Becoming Mayor. Now We Know Why
If they were honest about it and said something like "we believe our actions were fair and legal and disagree with this decision" it would at least be ideologically consistent.

> In a public statement about the settlement, DoorDash said, “Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.” (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment on its campaign contributions.)

This is villain shit.

sharkjacobs··on Claude Opus 5.5
> “Verbose, hard-to-follow output has been my biggest frustration with frontier models, and Claude Opus 5.5 fixes it

God I hope so

sharkjacobs··on Brood War Bench
https://www.youtube.com/@CholeraSC/videos
sharkjacobs··on Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
> Countless other mathematical curiosities were developed in the 1700s -- and forgotten.

Really? Like what?

edit: this is either an unfalsifiable claim, because by "forgotten" you meant here is no extant knowledge or remaining record of it, or it's almost certainly nonsense and anything you could cite would be foundational to some area of modern mathematics, even if as a disproven counter theory.

sharkjacobs··on Terpstra Keyboard
I really expected this to be something from Brett Terpstra

https://brettterpstra.com/topic/keyboard/

sharkjacobs··on More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
And how do either of them relate to statistical literacy in the United States?
sharkjacobs··on Starbase, LA
> Classic scifi was optimistic and utopian

Yeah for sure, science fiction used to be optimistic and utopian, like Planet of the Apes, Brave New World, Frankenstein, 1984, Earth Abides, The Martian Chronicles, A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and Island of Dr Moreau, We, Farenheit 451 ...

sharkjacobs··on Why Are There Statues of Beavers on Top of This Oxford Street Shop?
It's funny to me, a Canadian, that this even warrants a did-you-know article because everything about the beaver fur/hat making industry is something I learned extensively about in elementary and high school because it was like, a major driver of the European exploration and colonization and therefore significant to the history of my country.

But outside of here it's just a footnote to a fashion trend.

sharkjacobs··on Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9
I would have been really excited about this circa 1999. I mean don't get me wrong, I was grateful for Unreal Tournament and Q3A, and I knew I'd be getting Halo soon, but this is the one game I was really jealous of my friends for.
sharkjacobs··on Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere
I often cut + undo because seeing the cut is feedback which tells me the operation successfully put the content into clipboard. This is not always a guarantee especially in web apps, and sometimes I just have focus on the wrong window.
sharkjacobs··on Map of the world's great castles and fortresses
> # Etymology

> Neither part of the monument's name is correct. ... was not a "castle" in the traditional sense, but instead may have functioned more like a "prehistoric high rise apartment complex".[8]

My understanding was always that aside from vanity castles like Craigdarroch (https://thecastle.ca) there aren't castles in North America because they're only practical in a pre-cannon world

sharkjacobs··on Blogging can just be stating the obvious
There's also a social component to blogging, right? When you post something it tells me about who you are. It helps establish my (probably parasocial) relationship with you.

And when you post something, I might be interested in it, even if I wasn't interested when someone else posted about it, because I'm interested in you and interested in what you have to say.

I think that human communication is about pure relationship socialization as much or more than it is about actually communicating information or ideas.

sharkjacobs··on OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom
> Developed from design to production in nine months, accelerated by OpenAI’s models

> the use of OpenAI models to accelerate parts of the design and optimization process.

I wish there was more about this. As is I kind of have to assume that this is just meaningless marketing, like saying development was accelerated by Microsoft Office or their 5k LG Ultrafine 40-inch monitors.

Like, if this was as big a deal as it kind of vaguely implies, they would be making a bigger deal of it, right?

sharkjacobs··on Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents
> Currently both Gitoxide and libgit2's networking functionality is either partial, slow or non-existant. Both GitButler and Jujutsu rely on forking out to Git in order to push or pull data. A big reason for this is the incredibly complicated credential logic involved, but all of this is (theoretically) currently covered in Grit.
sharkjacobs··on Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents
> One of the main things I would like to be able to use it for is to be able to bundle complex push/fetch functionality into GitButler and other standalone Git tools needing network functionality (such as Jujutsu).

> Having parts of Git as discrete, embeddable slices of library also enables things like building custom Git servers or client functionality in Rust.

> The full build of all Git functionality in Rust is currently around 27M, but since a large part of it is a library, it could clearly be easily split up into domains of functionality - subcrates that do specific things. Perhaps you could simply use the subset you need.

sharkjacobs··on Samurai City
> In a way, the Tokugawa system was a success. Japan experienced near-total peace between 1600 and the late nineteenth century, a remarkable achievement for a premodern society and a dramatic contrast to Europe or China, where tens of millions of people died in wars.

> Tokugawa Edo stands as a monument to the power of rent-seekers, producing little and demanding immense resources as a condition of civil peace.

The two dominant political axes. Which of is more repellent to you: a rigid stable social system based around millions of rent seeking parasitic landlords, or frequent social upheaval and conflict and open warfare

sharkjacobs··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
How does any article or discussion about this get past 150 words.

"There is no agreed upon functional definition of consciousness, and no way to measure or observe it outside of oneself. It is as impossible to detect consciousness in waves or energy or inert matter or stochastic systems as it is in other living human beings."

Anything beyond that is akin to a theological treatise about the possibility of ensouled animals.

sharkjacobs··on A Man Who Reads Books for a Living
> a professional book reader who evaluates literature specifically for screen adaptation
sharkjacobs··on Cheese Paper: a text editor specifically designed for writing
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "unit of work" but I really like writing in Bike[1] for this reason, it's a hybrid text editor/outliner. It is simply my favorite rich text editor and the outliner functions provide really good affordances for organizing and reorganizing paragraphs.

[1] https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/bike/

sharkjacobs··on BBEdit 16
It's supported for Tahoe. It's still good functional software and this is the ideal right? They're selling finished software for a flat price without needing a subscription model to support continued development.
sharkjacobs··on RSS feeds send me more traffic than Google
> RSS readers are generally automated. I know I've had them around for years pulling in articles that I never read

They try to address that

> I added RSS and Newsletter tracking. These data are very lossy. If someone is subscribed to my RSS feed and opens a post and their client downloads a lazy-loaded image at the end of the post, I get a hit.

sharkjacobs··on Will you heed my warnings now?
Are you saying this because it's an evergreen joke or because you really think there hasn't been meaningful progress in the field since 1996?

Duke Nukem Forever was release fifteen years ago. Some things never happen until they suddenly do.

The wolf really does eat the boy at the end of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

sharkjacobs··on Why I Write (1946)
> For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a matchbox, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf,’ etc., etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside.

This is fascinating and totally alien to my experience. I don't often think in words at all unless I am preparing to either write or speak them.

sharkjacobs··on Our newsroom AI policy
There's a good post from Aurich in the comments of the article detailing the practical reality of how they (don't) use AI tools in their image work, but as a policy statement this sentence is 100% vibes, 0% actual guidance or restriction
sharkjacobs··on Our newsroom AI policy
> Our creative team may use AI tools in the production of certain visual material, but the creative direction and editorial judgment are human-driven.

As opposed to what? This is a little facetious, but what could it possibly mean to have creative direction and editorial judgement without human involvement?

Presumably we're talking about image generated by a diffusion model or something, but further, an image which is generated without being edited by any human. The prompt used to generate the image isn't written by a human, and it can't really be based on the contents of the (human authored and edited) article either. No human may select the service or model used, and once generated the image is published sight unseen without being reviewed by any human.

If some kind of agentic AI does any of these things it is one which appears ex nihilo, spontaneously appearing without being created or directed by any human.

sharkjacobs··on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7
It feels like the results stopped being interesting a little while ago but the practice has become part of simonw's brand, and it gives him something to post even when there is nothing interesting to say about another incremental improvement to a model, and so I don't imagine he'll stop.
sharkjacobs··on It's cool to care (2025)
I agree with the sentiment, it is good to care, it is admirable and perhaps virtuous to care.

But it is not cool to care. Cool does mean detached, offhand, poised, aloof, unperturbed. That's why it's called "cool".

We don't need to hijack the term and pretend that it's cool to be enthusiastic and dorky and to talk too loudly when we get excited about something. The point is that those things are good even if they're not cool.

sharkjacobs··on Filing the corners off my MacBooks
I don't want to do the whole front edge but this has definitely inspired me to take a file to these notch corners
sharkjacobs··on Apple at 50
The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh came to be regarded as such a mistake and quintessential example of how misguided Apple was during the wilderness era that I'm not surprised they went in the opposite direction. Institutional memory etc etc
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