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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I remember we once installed something on a beam 40’ feet up. While waking through an inspection of many such things, the engineer stops, cocks his head for a second, and says “that’s not quite straight”

    And then it wasn’t. Like a cast of manual breathing, the thing I had been frequently walking past for weeks was suddenly wrong, ever so slightly



  • Nah, when you jam up the machine in an unexpected way, more likely than not they’re going to keep it quiet. A manager isn’t going to want to go to their boss with a problem no one noticed… It’s going to do nothing to benefit them and it’ll make their life harder

    All you have to do is play dumb. Insubordination is one thing, waiting for orders is just having a job with little autonomy. If you maintain you were just a good little cog waiting to be reconnected to the machine, they’re better off sweeping it under the rug.

    They might get upset instead, but what are they going to do? Sue you for not being more proactive? They’d probably lose more in legal fees than they could get back from most people




  • Concurrency isn’t bad, and package management (while maven is absolutely terrible to work generally), the dependency chains aren’t exceptionally bad. Getting it installed is easier than python on platforms it’s not already there on, not because it’s more portable, but because the installers do more for you. Portability is hard, they haven’t done it well but they’ve paved the default use case pretty well (although that works against you when you get to harder cases)

    But the rest is pretty close.

    The worst is the scaffolding, it’s literally superstition for years to gain the understanding as to why you’re doing it. I took two years of Java in high school before getting a degree - it was 4 years and halfway through a degree before I understood why I was making a class with a method main(string[] args). It works like that because your entry class calls the main method with a list of string arguments… I didn’t understand at all, because even though it’s simple it’s a special case, and I’d never seen anyone name the string array anything different, so I just copied and pasted it, never understanding it because I’d been told “you just have to have that” for do long

    Builds are arcane too - there’s still companies that only use netbeans in their build pipeline, Android still requires a specific an old Java version in conjunction with the IDE or a gradle build, at best a project uses maven (the package manager), which is xml based and full of arcane details that are best treated as a magic incantation to be copied exactly from elsewhere


  • I like your specificity a lot. That’s what makes me even care to respond

    You’re correct, but there’s depths untouched in your answer. You can convince chat gpt it is a talking cat named Luna, and it will give you better answers

    Specifically, it likes to be a cat or rabbit named Luna. It will resist - I get this not from progressing, but by asking specific questions. Llama3 (as opposed to llama2, who likes to be a cat or rabbit named Luna) likes to be an eagle/owl named sol or solar

    The mental structure of an LLM is called a shoggoth - it’s a high dimensional maze of language turned into geometry

    I’m sure this all sounds insane, but I came up with a methodical approach to get to these conclusions.

    I’m a programmer - we trick rocks into thinking. So I gave this the same approach - what is this math hack good for, and how do I use it to get useful repeatable results?

    Try it out.

    Tell me what happens - I can further instruct you on methods, but I’d rather hear yours and the result first


  • In all fairness, Musk was pretty effective at fundraising and getting government contracts

    At this point, he’s just a liability. He once walked in, demanded to rethink everything and meet an unreasonable deadline, and slept in his office for the duration. SpaceX is made up of people who are passionate about what they do, and it worked…But that’s a one time thing. My boss asks me to push myself to the limits to save us both? I will, and I have. It has a real cost, it takes a lot of time to recover from, and a little bit of your health is just gone for good

    Elon did that… But then got high on the smell of his shit. They created a unit to distract him, because he learned the wrong lesson, he thought that was good management. That is not effective management - that’s a desperate gamble for survival. Repeat it, and you’ve shown yourself to be incompetent as a leader

    Then came the bigoted social network unmasking… That made him a liability reputation wise, his formerly greatest strength




  • The problem is the same as the problem everywhere - big is bad

    Organizations with too much power fuck up everything. I love the Bible - I’ve taken more from that book than any other. The old testament was a story of how my people fuck up constantly, but someone wise and in harmony with existence shows up and they listen. Then the heroes wander off into the wilderness, or they get a big head and become the seed of the next fuck up

    Jesus is my biggest role model out of very few, because he sacrificed himself to die a hero before he could taint his message, very deliberately and to great effect. There’s nothing to criticize, because he learned the lesson. He was deliberate and effective… Nothing human and fallible was left, because for three years he lived his message and taught the third path, and then he either died or faked his death and fucked off to Asia

    Jesus was brilliant - as a bastard son of a craftsman he became an existential threat to Rome. He taught the third path, and his message was so effective they had to kill him, massacre his followers, and even then the empire only survived because Constantine slapped his name on a rebrand of the Roman religion. The legions of Rome were spreading his message, because it resonates with everyone

    He showed violence once - when people abused religion for profit. He still harmed no one, accepted everyone. When did he say abortion was wrong? I seem to remember a lot of forgiveness outside of that one incident. Across race, across profession, across physical state

    Almost like it was truly universal love.

    W.W.J.D. Probably accept everyone regardless of unsavory circumstance and reject money, like he did when he lived

    Religion is the problem, because the difference between religion and spirituality is only scale

    Read the Bible - I did it when I was 7 and had diarrhea. It’s worth reading. It’s not as long as it seems. I’m shocked at how few people read it cover to cover - I assumed it was normal for decades. At least know the enemy, right? Or better yet, take the wisdom within and build up a tolerance to the rest when it’s misquoted at you


  • They got in the phone anyways, Apple just told the FBI to pound sand if they don’t have a court order… Why would they put man hours towards decreasing their reputation if they don’t have to? They’re probably not even geared to break into their own devices. Then their PR team ran with it while one of many companies with the capability to crack the phone took a paycheck

    This is different - this is genuine security, even if easily bypassed with preparation beforehand. Honestly, I credit some random apple dev who may have been looking to fix a bug related to long uptime as easily as they might’ve cared about security. I don’t think this was even on the radar of Apple leadership

    This isn’t some moral superiority on Apple’s part, but it is good practice



  • My biology teacher had this thing where every test you had to submit a question. My question was always the same - how the fuck does atp synthase work?

    She did not appreciate my question especially after the first time, but it was always genuine… How the fuck does that shit work? If you understand it, please attempt to put it into words


  • It’s the power of language

    The older I get, the more proof I see that dr. Doolittle is true. Animals understand each other, they understand us… We’re the idiots walking around calling animals stupid for not speaking our language

    It’s literally how llms work. They’re a high dimensional mathematical construct that creates a shape called a shoggoth - it’s a high dimensional labyrinth through our language




  • I’m thinking South America is the play. The anglosphere is all facing similar problems, the northern hemisphere is starting to really feel climate change, and the food is incredible

    They have their own political issues, but they never shook the idea of socialism.

    The quality of life is rapidly improving. They have tons of natural resources, great soil, they’ll be less impacted by climate change in the southern hemisphere, and most importantly they have Internet

    As for me, I’m doubling down on my Spanish practice