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smitty1e

4,804 karma · joined April 20, 2019

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/smitty1e; my proof: https://keybase.io/smitty1e/sigs/1Rl0jp9P1X25M4ioEHHDwZYmRc_TRVDR2iwnWGyvS8Q ]
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smitty1e··on Study links coffee consumption to metabolic health and sex hormones
You just have to mirror your consumption of coffee; eggs; meat &c with the aggregate study mood for a given week, is all.
smitty1e··on Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election
Canonical Monty Python sketch => https://youtu.be/dVI5ZOT5QEM?is=bf1E43oA05Q3S0zI
smitty1e··on Python string literals are kinda funny
When there is a multiline template, you can make it look natural within

json_doc = '''{}''' % some_dictionary

and then populate json_doc via %(some_dictionary_key)s values inside of the brackets.

I find it more readable.

Furthermore, json_doc can now live elsewhere, if sizeable, and get imported.

I guess that template strings may be the newer way to do this, but this is very backward compatible.

smitty1e··on Python string literals are kinda funny
Whenever I'm building a JSON document, I revert to the old %s syntax just because it's more tidy than an f-string.
smitty1e··on Don't use your phone while you poop
I'm so full that I may have to run for public office.
smitty1e··on Reverse Jevons Paradox
> if the cost of a resource goes up, the total spend on that resource can go down.

Not unlike hiking taxes on the rich, seeing them vote with their feet, and revenue subsequently catering.

But as long as we reward politicians for delivering blame more than results, this political folly will continue.

Until Strein's Law[1] kicks the teeth in.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein#Stein's_Law

smitty1e··on The Potomac River Midair Collision
Ouch. I knew three of the deceased. #RIP
smitty1e··on The 14 Steps it takes to open my office door with a new phone
The feeling of becoming the product and requiring a Familiar loaded with Apps that amount to passive spyware cannot be escaped.

Very glad to be closing in on retirement.

smitty1e··on Fermi Paradox
We hand-wave at each other.

The repeatable experiment would be another universe itself.

Cutting to the chase and declaring you the winner of the discussion.

smitty1e··on Fermi Paradox
> rarely, if ever, evolves beyond primitive intelligence.

Given the complexity of the Periodic Table, molecules, DNA, &c can we agree that life is a low-probability event?

Previous paragraph omits the contextual perfection of our planet/solar system.

Seems fair to assert that we are a one-shot deal, until proven otherwise, here on Terra Fermi.

smitty1e··on Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages
The Astralcodex link has a YouTube URL to a woman purportedly reading the Epic in the original tongue.
smitty1e··on Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages
An interesting tangent to the language discussion is the Epic of Gilgamesh => https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-epic-o...
smitty1e··on How to Spot AI Writing
> That does not mean that LLMs are great writers: their prose lacks lucidity and elegance and is often formulaic.

AI is regression to the mean. That is, being the next great writer in the starboard tail of the distribution will not be the output.

If that's OK, then fine.

What's more telling is that this external machine is not the internal growth needed to become that great writer.

"There is no royal road to geometry", and Euclid yourself if you think that AI is that road.

smitty1e··on The Productivity Mirage
Ah, yes, the difference between the tool and the wielder is an old observation:

"If the iron be blunt, and he do not whet the edge, then must he put to more strength: but wisdom is profitable to direct." (Eccl10:10)

smitty1e··on Astronauts describe persistent 'observer' sensation after 6 month missions
This article recalls the Steven Wright joke:

“I woke up one morning, and all of my stuff had been stolen and replaced by exact duplicates.

I couldn't believe it.

I called my roommate in and said, 'Come here, look at this stuff, it's all an exact replica. What do you think?'

He said, 'Do I know you?'”

smitty1e··on It's not empowering to hand off the details
How quickly would you drop a non-deterministic compiler for the source code of a project?
smitty1e··on Overloaded Overloading
No, no, TFA is about python:

"self" aged well.

smitty1e··on The Dark Night of Mathematics
I guess I don't follow admitting to a religious dimension in mathematics, and then eschewing the religious answer to the existential problem cited: prayer.

"Lord, this situation bites."

Potential reply: "Tell me about it."

smitty1e··on Computational chemistry, Locally? My rant on SSH
Living this dream with the CI/CD pipeline deploying to a cloud system.

It's really, really hard to shrink the problem and troubleshoot with large, opaque, containerized chunks of functionality and services.

Can I just connect to a DB in a terminal and run some SQL to figure out the problem?

Why, no: no, you cannot.

smitty1e··on The Ever-Receding Pocket
Me: "Claude, give me a fair taxation system that supports a balanced budget in a debt-free federal government."

Claude: "Dude. Do I look like Lloyd Schumer[1]? Lay off the dope, son."

[1] Via Grok, since Google has chosen to forget this:

Lloyd Schumer (also spelled Schumner or similar variants; sometimes referenced with “Sr.”) is a fictional character from The Onion, the satirical news site. He was presented as the byline author of their classic absurdist horoscopes: a “retired machinist and A.A.P.B.-certified astrologer.”

smitty1e··on My falling-out with the rationalist community
A third alternative, to quote Dirty Harry, is "A man's got to know his limitations." https://youtu.be/CG2cux_6Rcw?is=44LjSt5DpEhY6BWr
smitty1e··on My falling-out with the rationalist community
It's not impossible that everything in the universe can be explained within the scope of human reason.

Life just seems to exceed that scope, is all.

smitty1e··on In Germany if you say a restaurant is just ok they send the gestapo after you
"The Gästeführer would like a word with you..."
smitty1e··on What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
Can confirm for some dumb joke subs.

You want to blow off some steam, and there is a laundry list of rules to read through.

Yeah, not bothering with all that.

smitty1e··on The End of Creativity
I went to a party in Germany some years ago.

It was a birthday for someone.

What was fun was that people all offered jokes or poems or whatever.

I remarked at the quality of the offerings, and was told that there where books of content to choose from. No one has to do all the labor from scratch.

But they do have to interact, and put a bit of themselves in there.

It's an 80/20 problem, and if ine is enough of a genius to be going much past the 20% individual effort, then Bravo!

Just don't phone it in with some 99/1 AI sloppery and look an ass.

smitty1e··on Wealthy AI workers send San Francisco house prices soaring
Why hasn't AI proposed the ultimate "fair" taxation scheme?
smitty1e··on Odyssey Linux
Same vibe.

Plus, there is a very "community" spirit in successful distros.

The Linux version of TempleOS is of clinical interest only.

smitty1e··on The Lindy effect in software
Case study: Turso[1]

Rewrite the open source SQLite in Rust under an MIT license[2].

Of course, once you complete the core product, there is the extended ecosystem to consider.

[1] https://turso.tech/blog/introducing-limbo-a-complete-rewrite...

[2] https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso

smitty1e··on Punk, or why I don't stream anymore
> And it’s not like there’s anywhere to go. The real world is strip malls and axe throwing and escape rooms.

While the ersatz realms of AI regress to the mean, religious traditions chug on, bringing joy to adherents.

Find your community of faith.

smitty1e··on In Emacs, Everything Looks Like a Service
Nice.

I'm going to go through https://github.com/emacs-tw/awesome-emacs as well as https://www.masteringemacs.org/

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