zestyping

I believe this is the article he's referring to:

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...

It cites this study, published in The Lancet (open access full text):

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Summary:

The study calculates that 91.8 million all-age deaths, including 30 million deaths of children under 5, were prevented by USAID funding in the period from 2001 to 2021, and projects that DOGE's cuts to USAID will result in 14 million additional all-age deaths, including 4.5 million deaths of children under 5, by 2030.

> Yes, the code is generated. Yes, the docs are generated.

> I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either.

It's vibe-coded. Get over it.

It's a crime in this day and age to make a new font with an uppercase I and lowercase L that look the same.

It's hard to believe people are still designing new fonts with this glaring error. In 2026!

Could you explain the first step, "Manually Labeling Colors ? What did you manually label? I didn't quite follow.

From the way the article is written, it sounds like you presented yourself with a bunch of faces of completely random colours and then manually sorted them into two categories, "plausible skin colour" and "implausible skin colour".

But I feel like I must be misunderstanding, because I don't see why you would do that. Why wouldn't you gather photographs of actual faces and sample colours directly from the photos?

So now there are two mutually incompatible versions of YAML that silently apply different semantics: both do implicit coercion but _different kinds_ of implicit coercion. YAML 1.2 still coerces an arbitrary set of ways to spell "true" and that's exactly the insanity that created this disaster in the first place. The YAML spec writers just couldn't let go of their bad habits.

Honestly, this seems like an even worse situation than before. If you're making a new tool and choosing a configuration format, stay away from YAML.

Approval, not ranked-choice.

Ranked-choice reduces transparency and understanding of the vote-counting process, disenfranchises an alarming percentage of lower-income voters, obstructs risk-limiting audits (which are essential for security), and is non-monotonic (increasing voter support for a candidate can make them lose). Further, ranked-choice doesn't actually fix the spoiler problem and won't eliminate two-party dominance.

Approval voting is cheap and easy to implement, dead simple to explain, count, and audit. Not only does it eliminate the spoiler problem, it is easy to see why it does so: your ability to vote for any candidate is independent of your ability to vote for any other.

Whether they are sentient isn't even relevant. I agree with you that they aren't, but sentience is the wrong thing to focus on. It's also the sort of hairy, sensational question that will easily lead people down rabbit holes (and unfortunately that includes journalists).

Children are sentient, but we still hold their parents accountable. Adults are sentient, but in some coercive situations we hold the party in power accountable. The fact that they are sentient is not determinative.

What matters is that we have _no accountability mechanism_ for them. There is no effective way to hold AIs accountable, therefore we must hold their operators accountable, full stop.

The important indicator is "I spend more time on this than I myself want to." That applies equally well to games or anything else.

I like this approach.

Specifying the requirement in terms of measured impact is a good strategy because it motivates the app companies to do the research and find effective ways to address addiction, not just replace specific addictive UI patterns with different addictive UI patterns.

Building measurement into the law also produces a metric for how well the law is working and helps inform improvements to the law.

I don't think the same of them because they are not the same thing. Can you not see that the potential for harm is far greater? You can't simply ignore the potential uses of the technology you create. You have the choice to design your technology so it retains its usefulness while limiting the harm; have you given any time to thinking about how you could do that?

The alien is a diversion from the concern; I'm talking about realistic human avatars. Let's stay focused on that.

Let me suggest a worthwhile exercise. Just take ten minutes. What are some of the ways that realistic human avatars would make deception more effective or more scalable than previously possible?

Come up with three scenarios, and let's talk about them, honestly and thoughtfully.

When you generate real-time video of realistic-looking talking characters, the definition of success is fooling people into believing they are talking to a real person when they aren't.

If you pursue this, your explicit goal is deception, and it's a massively harmful kind of deception. I don't see how you can claim to be operating ethically here if that's your goal.

The primary purpose of generating real-time video of realistic-looking talking people is deception. The explicit goal is to make people believe that they're talking to a real person when they aren't.

It's on you to identify the "immense" benefits that outweigh that explicit goal. What are they?

Renaming files from a window title bar broke some years ago and has never been fixed. I most often want to do this in Preview, but every other app with clickable filenames in the title bar has the same problem.

The filename in the title bar has a down-pointing chevron next to it, indicating you can click it. You click it. A small drop-down window appears with the filename, the tags, and the folder where it is located. You edit the filename and press Return, as you would when renaming the file in Finder, or as you would when completing any text field. Nothing happens. The file isn't renamed.

Only if you press Tab (?!) is the file renamed. Insanity.

itle

My thought exactly. The sampling circles only enable you to (awkwardly) solve a problem that was fabricated by using circles in the first place.

That's a legitimately run _election_, which is necessary for but not the same as a legitimate democracy. For a democracy to be legitimate you need an impartial judiciary, an enforced constitution, fundamental civil liberties, and an accountable government.

What does "be a lifeline" mean? If it means "rescue them every time they have a financial emergency", is that an infinite commitment?

Please, consider a better name. It's really hard to promote something with a name that no one can pronounce or spell.

Are you able to understand the difference between taxes and slavery? If you can, try your hand at explaining why taxes and slavery are different. I'm am not merely asking rhetorically; I'm serious. It's a worthwhile exercise because it reveals something about your underlying model of the world.

Can you explain how these work? Does the server send small subrectangles of the large grid when the user scrolls to new regions of the grid? Does the browser actually have a two-dimensional array in memory with a billion items, or is there some other data structure?

Goodness gracious, that font in the new logo is the most hideous font I've seen in a very long time.

> This is incredible. Government telling me how to backup my data. Incredible.

No more incredible than the government telling you that you need liability insurance in order to drive a car. Do you think that is justifiable?

Code can show you HOW something is done. Only documentation can explain WHY it is done that way.

Interesting. According to https://www.wiz.io/blog/s1ngularity-supply-chain-attack the initial entry point was a "flawed GitHub Actions workflow that allowed code injection through unsanitized pull request titles" — which was detected and mitigated on August 29.

That was more than ten days ago, and yet major packages were compromised yesterday. How?

Also wrong. You can always destroy value by making a mistake. Trading and then realizing you made a mistake, just like investing labour and then realizing you made a mistake, does not create value. Trading is not special in this regard.

Value can be created either way: through labour or trade.

Regardless, your statement that all wealth is created by trade is false.

It is indeed misleading. It is showing an untruthful value, and an untruthful change in value, on purpose. A small lie, perhaps—but nonetheless a lie.

You have a strange idea of what "right" means.

Showing a true reflection of the actual, irregular, progress is getting it right. It's honest and informative.

It's a lie, though. When I see it, I know the interface is lying to me, and then I trust it less henceforth.

I'll never build a lie into my work. It's not worth it.

Okay, they messed up something here. The number of little ASCII-art person squares depends on the size of your browser window. The squares get smaller when you make the window narrower, so it looks like it was coded to try to keep the number roughly constant.

If I make the window narrow enough, there are 10 squares in a row and 19 rows, a total of 190 squares. The number that are coloured "very conservative", "conservative", "centrist", "liberal", "very liberal", respectively, are 39, 67, 24, 31, 29.

In percentages, that's 20.5%, 35.3%, 12.6%, 16.3%, 15.3%. Roughly 56% conservatives, 32% liberals.

If I make the window really wide, I see 20 squares in a row and 13 rows, a total of 260 squares. The distribution is now 39, 100, 37, 46, 38.

In percentages, that's 15.0%, 38.4%, 14.2%, 17.7%, 14.6%. Roughly 53% conservatives, 32% liberals.

It's weird that the number of squares increases and decreases when you resize the window, and I would argue it's misleading because there's an animated transition that is obviously meaningless. But it's a lot worse that the proportions aren't consistent! All of us saw exactly 39 in the "very conservative" category, so maybe it is failing to proportionally scale that category while scaling the others?

Conclusions:

1. There's a programming bug that misrepresents the proportions.

2. The sample is significantly skewed toward conservatives.

The weakness of formal verification systems is that they turn the problem of writing correct programs into the problem of writing correct specifications, which is just as difficult, while adding extra layers of complexity. How do your tools address this difficulty?

Wow, that's a massive blind spot you've got there.

The value comes from doing the thing. Fixing the tractor creates value. Growing and harvesting the potatoes creates value.

Trading the potatoes for something you value more, yes, also creates additional value. But notice that potatoes have value to you even if you don't trade them for anything.

If you choke on a grape and a helpful volunteer saves your life, they create value. Nothing was exchanged, but they sure as hell generated wealth right there.

Labour and voluntary trade both create value. I wonder what sort of mindset one must have to forget that labour exists.