takinola

How would you prevent the token from being used by a different person than it was issued to? This is the online equivalent of getting your older cousin to buy you alcohol from the store using their own valid ID

> Aggressive lookbehind correction: these days you have to be seriously on your guard for your keyboard to not sneak-edit something you typed 5 words back

If I ever meet the person that invented lookbehind correction, I’m not sure I’ll be able to restrain myself. This person has robbed me of my peace of mind as I now have to be on guard every time I type anything on a mobile keyboard

The real decision is whether medical advice from an LLM is better than no medical advice at all.

I would always prefer a doctor’s advice over consulting an LLM. However, if I was stuck in Antarctica with no ability to consult a doctor, I would definitely use an LLM. The problem is there are people in society that are effectively isolated from medical care (cost, access, etc) so they might as well be in Antarctica, as far as medical care is concerned.

I agree that cashing in quickly before the fad faded was probably the right move for Labubu. However, there’s no world where Birkins (or other designer handbags) are a “necessary accessory”.

I often imagine future school kids bored out of their mind on a field trip to visit Neil Armstrong's footsteps on a lunar museum. Their exasperated teacher trying to get them to pay attention and recognize the gravity of what they are seeing but they are too distracted playing mind-pokemon or whatever is cool in 2350 AD.

C&H was the first time that I realized how authenticity resonates with people. I think people love C&H because they recognize Calvin, Hobbes, Suzie, Biff, the parents (or even Rosalyn) in themselves. Calvin often said the things that we thought only ourselves were thinking (remember the strip where Calvin is selling swift kicks in the pants for 10c because the world clearly needs it?).

Now, I see this technique work so well for business and political leaders, comics, social commentators, etc. It is a very effective technique to capture the hearts of your audience.

If memory serves, Waterson said the later years were colored by his feelings from dealing with publishers. One of the most memorable comics for me is one where Calvin ends up in bed after resisting his parents' bedtime commands. In the final panel he bitterly declares that clearly his desires have no impact on his outcomes.

The Mafia makes (made?) a ton of profit but are a net negative on society. The better heuristic may be to consider what would be lost if the industry did not exist. Anything beyond subsistence agriculture would probably be impossible without financialization. There's a reason you had banks even in the middle ages when the average person was poor.

> Other than Ports, the top 7 highest-margin industries (stock/crypto exchanges, stock exchanges, banks, toll road operators, financial services and asset management) are in financialization and rent-seeking, basically acting as middlemen that use other people's money to extract wealth.

OK, I'll bite. This is a very ungenerous take. Entities that aggregate and provide capital create enormous real human value. In fact, I would argue that most of the improvement in modern life that we all take for granted is because capital markets are available and accessible at scale. Where does the biotech company working on the new gene therapy get the billions it takes to develop and bring that drug to market? Where does the aircraft leasing company get the money to pony up for aircraft at hundreds of millions a pop?

I think it is fair to argue about whether the financial services use their position fairly/wisely/etc but it is unfair to dismiss the industry as "middlement using other people's money to extract wealth".

If there is a different tree of life right here on Earth and we don't know about it, that would cast doubt on our ability to detect life in worlds light years away. Also, if life had multiple false starts here on Earth, that does also suggest that it is very difficult to take hold even on the original Goldilocks planet. The idea that multiple versions of "life" co-developed and became a single strain is quite interesting to consider. I wonder what else needs to be true to support that theory.

One (terrifying) option is we are alone. There is no real reason to believe life is abundant in the universe. Even on Earth (the one place we know for sure can support life), life has only occurred once. Life may just be so much more rare than we think is possible.

Lots of billionaires live in Palo Alto. You pretty much can't walk down University Avenue or grab a coffee at Town and Country without bumping into one. Plus most of Zuckerberg's neighbors are not "regular people", at least not from a wealth standpoint. This brings to mind the famous quote from a Palo Alto city meeting where one of the residents complained about "billionaires running roughshod over us regular millionaires!"

This is going to be the most anticipated S-1 in history. Tech and finance podcasters will live off it for weeks.

It is about being able to think clearly about your code logic. If your code has many places where a variable can change, then it is hard to go back and understand exactly where it changed if you have unexpected behavior. If the variable can never change then the logical backtrace is much shorter.

Archive: https://archive.ph/20250919133304/https://www.washingtonpost...

This is not even a joke.

I mean 640KB should be enough for anyone too but here we are. Assuming LLMs fulfill the expected vision, they will be in everything and everywhere. Think about how much the internet has permeated everyday life. Even my freaking toothbrush has WiFi now! 1000x demand is likely several orders of magnitude too low in terms of the potential demand (again, assuming LLMs deliver on the promise).

I am pretty sure he talks about being robbed and also having times of starvation in one of his letters. I'm guessing his travels weren't very comfortable.

Lots of senior executives, celebrities, etc have other people buy stuff for them all the time - flights, gifts, lunch, etc. The problem is this is very expensive so not available to most people. If agents reduce the cost and are mostly reliable, there will be a significantly large market for this service.

5% of my social media feed is AI generated. I can easily imagine a completely AI generated feed that is custom tailored to my interests. The future is already here. It is just unevenly distributed.

Because you want to control who uses it (offboard separated employees, onboard new employees automatically), integrate into your auth systems to make it easier for employees to access, get an SLA if something goes wrong, connect to your data auditing systems, etc, etc. Companies have a lot of needs outside of just the core functionality of a product.

Apparently, the relationships between the executive leadership at Cisco (especially Len and Sandy) were ... volatile. I took a class from one of the top execs in the early days and he had so many colorful stories about his time there.

No other programming concept has caused me more grief than dealing with time and timezones. It starts to get really mind-bendingly complex once you start thinking about it deeply. That is even before you start encountering the quirks (some places have timezone changes that depend not only on the time of year but also on the actual year). Lesson learnt - choose a library (moment is great) and never think about time again.

I would love for someone to make this type of post but switch which songs were AI and which are human created. I would bet there would be people saying the humnan-created songs were soulless and the AI songs had that "je ne sais quoi".

I literally just said "Nothing from my end" on a zoom call. Still waiting on my million dollars though so not sure how reliable this method is.

I’ve been closely involved with one of the largest shelter providers in the Pacific Northwest for the last couple of years and I can say this is not true for the vast majority of people we serve. The primary causes of homelessness for those people are getting evicted because of a temporary financial crunch (health issue, lost a job, etc), domestic issues (leaving a domestic violence situation) or legal issues (refugees, etc). I had a similar belief (that substance and mental instability) prior to working with this organization because the visibly homeless people I saw seemed to fall into that category so I fell into this bias. However, what people miss are the tons of people living in their cars, wearing regular clothes, not panhandling and showing up to work best they can.

In addition, the causality is sometime backwards. The substance abuse and mental issues come after homelessness as people try to cope with the incredible stress of life on the streets. This, of course, makes it even harder to pull out of the downward spiral.

It’s tough but I encourage everyone to find a way to support/volunteer reputable organizations in their areas

To be fair, Dogs of War was based on Forsyth’s experience covering real-life mercenaries in the Biafra war.

Fun fact, he started out as a war journalist and got fired for playing favorites and slanting his coverage towards one side. IIRC, he only started writing as a fallback after that.

Archive link - https://archive.is/PsBXp#selection-5747.0-5747.61

At this point putting realistic sounds in movies would confuse the audience and take them out of the movie. Bald eagles don't sound like most of us think they do and swords don't make that sound when you wave them around or sheath them.

There are a lot of things in movies that don't align to real life. Eagles don't sound like you think they do. Swords don't make that sound when you sheath them. The problem is that audiences have been so used to these visual and audio metaphors that reality would break the illusion.