californical

I’ve been using Fastmail for years now. Easy to use, reliable, and consistent. No major extra features but that’s exactly what I want for an email provider! I see it recommended here sometimes, so I’m happy to be that guy today

Can we just have it as an additional data point, on top of what we should already know from where the train should be from switching history? If we get 99% accuracy, is that enough to check with an operator “specify which track you are in, left or right” when the measured value is different than the expected?

They didn’t say replacing 100% of flights or drives with trains, but the vast majority of trips people take would be popular enough to sustain regular service for those people.

You don’t have to ban a thing for 100% of cases, there will always be outliers. My wife and I love driving deep into the wilderness. But still the vast majority of our travel is routes with heavy traffic, let’s replace those trips

> you can find certain pop-culture lore, for example, covered in insane depth on Wikipedia; not everything was sent away to Fandom wikis

But if the pop culture lore has insane depth then it’s probably valuable enough to keep, yeah? If it has a few limited snippets and very few people writing about it as sources, then it’s a lot more questionable

80/20 doesn’t mean literally 80% and 20%

It’s just a rough way to say “mostly this with a decent bit of that” because 20% seems like a medium-small percent that could or could not matter depending on the context

That’s all anyone means when they say 80/20

To your second point, the 80% could be lots of basic things and the 20% could be the important facts, so it’s not always meant as a dismissal that the 20 doesn’t matter

I think that’s exactly what the GP was saying

Why not both?

That’s job security in the same way that a building maintenance guy gets job security from somebody filling the toilets with garbage everyday and flooding the bathrooms

Like sure it’s true that you’re more necessary now, but when you took the job you weren’t expecting to need to be elbow deep in shit every day, and you’d probably prefer to go back to the days of changing lightbulbs and vacuuming hallways

What, that the EU cares about the effects of products on people other than the purchaser?

That things which are good for an individual but bad for everyone else deserve scrutiny?

> implementing custom ray tracing in the game engine that claude code runs on

Haha, I don’t doubt it! Pretty damning overall for long-term maintainability of vibe-coded projects, even as the models are great at a lot of individual tasks

I mean a harness around a model is pretty trivial, I’ve also built one (heavily relying on LLMs to build it).

With a few thousand lines of code over the course of a week or so of my limited evening energy, I have agentic loops, ide integration, and a limited selection of custom tools which are all very safe (no unintended changes), along with session management and awareness of git.

It works great, is customizable, and allows integration with any provider.

If they need 30k changes per day, it’s not due to the nature of the problem!

Are calculators now or have they ever been non-deterministic?

It really depends on the person, for me I have my own setup script that works on both Mac and Linux, installing all of my core software using whichever method is best for each system, I basically have a csv with columns of “program” “install command Linux” and “install command Mac” and it just works.

Then all of my dotfiles are backed up, with any important other config, in a big gig repo. And all of my documents/photos/etc live on a separate hard drive which gets backed up to the cloud.

All of that to say, with the right setup nix is mostly unnecessary, and honestly the benefit of not using it is that I can wipe my system anytime and restart it with just my usual important programs ready to go. Any mess made along the way gets purged automatically in every fresh install

I mean there are different levels of processing, yes, and many of the additives that have been researched do have negative effects. Maybe minor negative effects, but over time the combination of a lot of chemicals with minor negative effects can absolutely affect your health and cognition in a perceptible way.

There is research for a lot of additives, but many have limited evidence or small studies that aren’t replicated. Usually the result is either “it doesn’t affect health either way” or “it is negative to health”. Very rarely is there an ultra processed ingredient with a large body of science that says “we should eat more of this specific thing, it has a positive effect on longevity!”. And if we do, it’s usually medicine rather than a food additive, which due to being heavily researched and tailored to individuals, prescription medications are healthy (obviously). But these aren’t that…

So I think you have to stretch your reasoning that the practice as a whole is probably negative, but I feel like I’ve personally seen enough negatives of certain UPF that I limit my intake whenever reasonably possible.

Obviously having small amounts isn’t going to be horrible but they’re in everything now

In photography I think it’s automatically slop if it isn’t coming from an actual documentation of reality.

I don’t apply the same criteria to things that are intended as non-realistic art, you can have non-slop AI graphics, as it doesn’t matter there. But in photography there’s an expectation that the subject is a real moment in time at a real place.