superb-owl

Unlike most of you, I strongly disliked Dennett's philosophy. But he seemed like a wonderful human, and he always made me think.

Highly recommend the book “Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale” for engineers interested in music theory

https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ttss.html

I wrote a bit about Cantor's quest to get people to take infinity seriously here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/church-of-reality-cantor-on...

It reminds me closely of Gary Webb's death, though the circumstances are different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb#Death

But more to your question, I think a great example of corporate self-interest leading to serious crimes is the Ebay stalking scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal

I was super excited to take a robotics class in college. I'd fallen in love with programming and was excited to take all that magic into the real world.

We all had to buy roombas to program. The final exam was getting it to traverse a maze. It seemed so simple! They even gave us the exact dimensions and layout ahead of time. Just hard-code the path, right? Spin the wheels so many rotations, turn 90 degrees, spin some more.

Except the real world is messy, and tiny errors add up quickly. One of the wheels hits a bump, or slips a little on the tile, and suddenly you're way off course. Without some kind of feedback loop to self-correct, everything falls apart.

My excitement for robotics died quickly. I much prefer the perfectly constrained environment of a CPU.

> Writing about the best essay implies there is such a thing, which pseudo-intellectuals will dismiss as reductive, though it follows necessarily from the possibility of one essay being better than another.

Not to be a pseudo-intellectual, but this confuses partial orderings and total orderings. It makes for a fun discussion, but I hope Paul would agree that there's obviously no "best essay", real or hypothetical.

"Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned."

--Paraphrasing of the Dhammapada

The “cocktail” thing is real. A while back I tried to get DALLE to imagine characters from Moby Dick [1], but it completely refused. You’d think an AI company could come up with a better obscenity filter!

[1] https://superb-owl.link/shapes-of-stories/#1513

Zan also recently wrote about how to break habits (like caffeine): https://zantafakari.substack.com/p/how-to-tame-your-impulsiv...

I often go down rabbit holes like this, trying to collapse and simplify the application stack.

But inevitably, as an application grows in complexity, you start to realize _why_ there's a stack, rather than just a single technology to rule them all. Trying to cram everything into Postgres (or lambdas, or S3, or firebase, or whatever other tech you're trying to consolidate on) starts to get really uncomfortable.

That said, sometimes stretching your existing tech is better than adding another layer to the stack. E.g. using postgres as a message queue has worked very well for me, and is much easier to maintain than having a totally separate message queue.

I think the main takeaway here is that postgres is wildly extensible as databases go, which makes it a really fun technology to build on.

No to be pedantic, but payroll isn’t 100% of cost. Plus cash flow issues, sales volatility, probably declining revenue as you scale down…my guess is the headcount should be more like 20-30. And that might not cover their personnel needs if a lot of their revenue relies on services and customer success (which is usually the case for OSS companies)

This is great. I wish the left side showed the frequency ratio as well as the raw frequency

I'd love to see this on a toroidal surface

> A sibling comment mentions search engines. I think there's a big difference. A search engine doesn't replace the source, not at all.

Google has been accused for years of replacing sources with their "One Box"--the big answers at the top of the page, which are usually pulled from or corroborated by search results. They don't want you to leave the search results page (where the ads are).

Aella has collected some great stats on polyamory

https://aella.substack.com/p/polyamory-vs-monogamy-how-relat...

Protip: don't create aliases that override common commands (e.g. alias cp='cp -r'). Months down the road, you'll try to copy/paste some long piped command, and be confused as to why it works on everyone else's machine but not yours

Instead, create alternative commands, like alias lsl='ls -lah', and put in the work to make it the default thing you type.

Yeah that jumped out to me too

Video of the lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRfXcWT_oFs

I've been self-hosting Lychee for a while and love it

https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee

> Finetuning seeks to extend the length of the context window itself.

Does it? I'd thought fine-tuning was more like transfer learning, adding highly specific data to the training set (e.g. your internal codebase) rather than actually modifying the architecture.

> I think when Einstein or Newton make statements they are making statements about reality and not just sense impressions.

Einstein in particular made huge strides by thinking in terms of sense impressions, e.g. by using his imagination to take on the perspective of an observer falling off a roof:

> I got the happiest thought of my life in the following form:…for an observer in free-fall from the roof of a house there is…no gravitational field. Namely, if the observer lets go of any bodies, they remain relative to him, in a state of rest or uniform motion, independent of their special chemical or physical nature. The observer, therefore, is justified in interpreting his state as being "at rest."

The emphasis on sense impressions over an appeal to an external reality is something he owes to Mach: https://blog.superb-owl.link/p/church-of-reality-ernst-mach-...

I've been asking for something like this for a long time!

Am I right that everything is stored as-code, and that code and UI live in a 1:1 relationship? Seems like maybe the data and the code are separate?

I would _love_ to see (a) version control built in (i.e. a github integration) and (b) support for testing!

I've said this here before, but Ursula Le Guin's rendition is one of the best

There is actually a large philosophical debate on the relationship between determinism and free will.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism

I managed a blind engineer for a while. My main takeaway was: avoid whitespace-delimited languages (e.g. python). Go seemed to work well.

ACX primer on Land Value Tax:

* Original book review: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-progress-a...

* Follow-up part 1: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-...

* Part 2: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-2-c...

* Part 3: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-3-c...

The first review is very much worth a read--well written, entertaining, and informative.

Maybe morality can't be quantified.

https://blog.superb-owl.link/p/contra-ozy-brennan-on-ameliat...

Ursula Le Guin's translation is, IMO, truest to the spirit of the original text. I defended it a bit here:

https://blog.superb-owl.link/p/taoism-minus-the-nonsense

I couldn't agree more. I talked a bit about how amazing and magical LLM-based text classification is here: https://blog.superb-owl.link/p/the-shapes-of-stories-with-ch...

The reason client-side rendering is so popular (IME) is that it creates a clear separation between frontend and backend devs. You can use separate repositories, languages, deployment flows/cadences, code review, etc, with an API as your connection point (and the fact that you get an API by default with CSR is also nice).

I don't think CSR is going anywhere, mainly thanks to Conway's Law.