Viewing profile — bcoates

I thought that, aside from being among the least visually appealing mass-produced cars in history, the Aztek was pretty well received -- basically an early version of the "the Amer…

Is reverse dns even a thing outside of irc and forgetting to give command line tools the "don’t be slow" flag?

The taste/texture of jello is just collagen (roughly, "meat stew flavor"), fruit juice, and (tons of) sugar. It’s just an extremely heightened version of natural flavors. There is …

I think it's an unavoidable consequence of the space constraints they're working with. On the plus side, when I dayroomed there it was dead silent and the room had blackout curtain…

Sony released an angry birds movie more than 5 years after peak interest, they're a trailing indicator

Memory pressure (and a lot of other overload conditions) usually makes latency worse--does that show up in your system? Latency backpressure is a pretty conventional thing to do. Y…

It doesn’t have to be and almost certainly isn't some billionaire. Formulaic spicy political nonsense is reliable engagement bait and it's easy to churn eyeballs into (small amount…

"Unlike New York, Chicago or L.A., which each have one, maybe two, San Francisco and the greater Bay Area have over two dozen" Whaaa...? Los Angeles has a whole rat's nest of overl…

A thing I've been noticing across the board is that current generative AI systems are horrible at composition. It’s most obvious in image generation models where the composition an…

That phrase template isn’t just overdone—it's something some text models are obsessed with. The em-dashes, the contrastive language—these are signs of LLMs being asked to summarize…

Pumped out water has to go somewhere . With the airgap, it will either back out your garbage disposal or pour out your airgap into the sink basin, depending on the location of the …

I think he said sharing a circuit with a fridge, which are generally 110 in the US -- i think this is how my apartment is wired (2-phase 30A to oven dedicated, one 20A for the whol…

The only complaint I have about sharpies is the crap ergonomics on the barrel, causing people to wrap tape around it just to get a nice grip, which inevitably gets super gross: htt…

Yes, I was hoping to see some actual insight on this Domestic Manufacturing Miracle but it seems to just be "if you build it they will come" This flies in the face of the more than…

I don't get it -- AWS deep archive is $12/TB/yr and provides actual durability and connectivity, not just drive-in-a-shoebox. That seems pretty hard to beat by buying raw storage a…

It's been closer to 100 years since we figured out information theory and discredited this idea (that continuous/analog processes have more, or different, information in them than …

Also the persuasion paper he links isn't at all about what he's talking about. That paper is about using persuasion prompts to overcome trained in "safety" refusals, not to improve…

I think they're understating the thread safety risks here. The import is going to wind up happening at a random nondeterministic time, in who knows what thread holding who knows wh…

I don't think there is any solution for that but "fix your broken linter".

The idea of app timers seems like exactly the weird self-negotiation alcoholics do around booze where they think mimicking the habits of casual drinkers (on what is, to the casual,…

The anthropomorphism implies that all messages from @grok are coming from a text generator with a single consistent "personality" chosen by Twitter or xai or whatever, where in rea…

Made worse by Grok on Twitter having a big dumb UI flaw: it replies to a user on the public timeline as just "grok" so trolls can prompt it to say wild stuff, then tag @grok with a…

'Toilet' itself is a euphemism, an archaic term for dressing/washing room and/or the act of washing up

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