Grothendank

A 10% conversion rate would be incredible. If that were the case, it would be hard to be angry at people for exploiting this factor.

However, I would be very surprised if the conversion rate of a popup signup sheet is even 2%.

And there is a similar negative conversion effect: If any article asks me to sign up for anything, I stop reading that article immediately, and move on to an article that respects my attention.

Yes, I am in a small minority. But I also share many links with my peeps, and I never share links with popups. I hope that puts pressure on authors to share things freely.

If 30% of your users hate the interface so much that they immediately leave your service, then sure, you can say "70% of our users have no problem with our strobing call to action". But that does not stop the problem - 30% of your potential revenue base is walking away, when you could retain them.

I recommend reading longer histories and reading them on audiobook. Those tell history in a nonlinear way, going events over and over and over from different perspectives, until you get the feeling of what it was like to live in that time. Your intuition about many rivers branching and merging is exactly what good history is written like. Once you have read some good histories, it's easy to fundamentally fall in love with all the stories and realities of the people travelling down these seemingly infinite rivers.

for example, read Adrian Goldsworthy's "Pax Romana" and "How Rome Fell" for a very entertaining and up to date view of rome at its height and decline, with hundreds of little nonlinear story details. The audiobooks are on the audiobook bay. Listen to them view a Smart Audiobook reader with auto-pause for if you fall asleep, and start listening during exercise, cleaning, cooking, and commuting.

If you start doing this, you'll start listening to about 2 histories a month. In a year you'll have a much deeper understanding of history and how it's written.

Unfortunately, audiobook is the best format I've found for overcoming the size of history texts. It really helps me with my reading difficulties and tendency to get stuck on boring passages. The history is much more engaging when someone is reading for me. Also, many passages are going to go over your head, and it may put you to sleep literally - that's also fine!

The goal is to start understanding and enjoying the small little stories that historians write. History is full of millions of them, and many of them are enjoyable!

Why does this feel like a union made in hell?

Partnering with the incomprehensibly byzantine andcomplacent architect of the SEOpocalypse AND "late-to-the-ai-party" Google does not give faith that the solution will be more performant or private than Github's copilot.

This is just another in a series of terrible blunders in the last year that has wiped out any goodwill I had towards gitlab. WTF happened, did they get a new CEO or something?

Ironically, there is a school of thought on meditation which says that it's perfectly valid to meditate by picking a task or chore, then performing that task so that it engrosses the entire mind. According to this line of thought, this working meditation is even better than normal meditation, because it gets shit done.

Two Approaches: Grinding and Flow

One approach is to do the task with perfect awareness and focus. We dismiss extraneous thoughts when they arise. We and focus on doing the task perfectly and without unnecessary pain or suffering.

We could call this Grinding, since we still feel effort.

Another approach is to enter a stateless flow. In this state, your awareness and focus and identity are no longer present as you do the task. You neither feel effort nor make errors as you do the task.

We could call this Effortless Effort, or Flow.

I'm not trying to be flippant here, but how many of ghidra's 2 million lines of code have you audited?

I'm looking at it. It's very beautiful code. 2,049,616 lines of it.

Okay. I have looked at the code. Now what? Has that made me more secure?

Is ghidra safe to use if you consider the NSA an adversary?

Every person I've asked this question has had their noses so far up the NSA's pooper that they could not imagine considering the NSA an adversary.

But suppose you were running a malware honeypot operation for the CCP. Would you still use Ghidra? Why or why not?

And please don't pass the buck and say, "I probably wouldn't be allowed to use ghidra" or "I'd probably use whatever my CCP handler told me to use" or "I wouldn't be working for the CCP in the first place." That does not inform me about the security risks of using ghidra with the NSA as an adversary.

This actually works!

It works astoundingly well with poorly written technical manuals. Looking at you, CMake reference manual O_O. It also helps translate unix man pages from Neckbeardese into clean and modern speech.

With science papers it's a bit more work. You must copy section by section into GPT4, despite the increased token limit.

But sure. Here's how it can work:

1. Copy relevant sections of the paper

2. As questions about the jargon:

"Explain ____ like I'm 5. What is ____ useful for? Why do we even need it?"

"Ah, now I understand _____. But I'm still confused about _____. Why do you mean when you say _____?"

"I'm starting to get it. One final question. What does it mean when ______?"

"I am now enlightened. Please lay down a sick beat and perform the Understanding Dance with me. Dances"

This actually works surprisingly well.

Should jackasses on HN use plain language instead of jargon? Surely.

But AI workers mainly develop and use jargon because it is an easy and natural way to consolidate concepts.

Sure, there is a kind of conspiracy caused by publish or perish. Researchers may use jargon to make their work harder to reject on review; laborious speech and jargon can make statements sound more profound. However, no technical field is immune to this. We'll need to systematically change science before we can eliminate that problem.

Until we manage that, if you care about the concepts enough to want to understand them before there are good plain speech descriptions, just pop the jargon into google scholar and skim read a few papers, and you're good to go. If you don't care about the concepts that much, then don't worry about the jargon. The important concepts will get their own non-technical explanations in time.

As it stands, AI jargon is not that bad. It tends to be pretty fair and easy to understand, compared to jargon in, say, biochemistry or higher math.