Viewing profile — zdragnar

It's worth pointing out at least that there is a qualitative difference between silence in isolation, and being around people who are intentionally being silent. I live in a rural …

State capacity is a common good though, and AI makes abusing it much easier.

30 or so years here, still 5/10 after all these years. I don't let it bother me for the most part, but it'll certainly never be anything but a negative thing. I'll be honest, this …

The job requires methods more akin to restoring a painting after a knobhead splashes it with ketchup than a pressure washer, as it is a historically preserved building.

There are distinctive patterns of language use that can be powerful when used sparingly. LLMs trained on a massive copus of human communication, picked effective patterns, and over…

> Btw. how do you crack your wrist (you mean sudden movement to left/right/up/down) Apply a bit of tension to your wrist by closing your fist and squeezing gently as if you were gr…

I think shoulder height and arm length relative to desk height must play an important role in this. I went the opposite direction- mechanical keyboard, large trackball- and my pain…

If your string needs to be presented in multiple locales, you probably want to go a step further and use something like the ICU syntax and a proper parser and formatter rather than…

At least in the good ol' days politicians had to set up fake charities and foundations to rake in the dough. Now we've got Biden bragging on air that he was withholding already app…

I read it in your earlier post, but it didn't really address OP's arguments. It's basically an enforced mediator pattern. Even the article summary points out the language design do…

I've read this a few times, and it still sounds like you're trying to re-invent an operating system. You describe things like "access the file system" but what even is that? In Lin…

What is a capability in terms of programming language design? It sounds more like the sort of thing that would belong at the standard library level, where builtin APIs are guarded …

A company is made up of people, and makes products. Products can come and go for many reasons (or any reason) but the company will always have people.

> “I know that others (politicians and commissioners) are dumb/lack smarts/gullable but I’m not since I’m so wise Not at all. I'm saying that there are competing interests in placi…

Not all sites are equally suited for a data center. This is especially true when you look at plans that allow data centers to operate off of on-site generators prior to full grid c…

A big part of an engineering performing requirements analysis is owning the technical understanding of the requirements and identifying areas where the requirements are not technic…

Two points of disagreement: "Code monkey" absolutely was and still is a thing. I was hired by Big Name Co originally to be staff but a reorg had me do typical senior position dutie…

> One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works. The canonical example was RMS needing to fi…

Code switching between registers is a fact of life in America. Nobody speaks corporate natively, and it's more extreme if you grow up or live in an ethnic minority enclave. What Am…

Back when angularjs was first becoming popular and wide adoption of data- attributes through HTML 5 were being discovered, everyone and their dog wrote their own lightweight versio…

There's no "national infrastructure" for water. Aside from what the EPA does, it isn't within the remit of the federal government to manage municipality water systems.

Broadly speaking, I agree with your frustration, but I think this specific case is different. LLMs respond strongly to tone in wording, because they are trained on wording, and wor…

Counter anecdote, I've had gas mowers survive decades and EV electrical equipment (in this case, a chainsaw and a battery pack for a mower) both die within 14 months of purchase.

I would presume that if their results end up being more impactful or interesting, you end up being a footnote and lose the spotlight.

In the US, HIPAA requires companies to sign a BAA to handle any protected information. That's pretty much the only thing stopping data from being shared. That is why, for example, …