schoen

I often thought that a cat could be named /bin/cat. After all, many cats seem to enjoy being in boxes or bins!

Can I assume you were taking the new electrified Caltrain? It feels a lot nicer than the old diesel Caltrain, including, I think, the comfort of the seats.

Looking forward to it! I just started my first-ever NetHack 5.0 game to practice a bit.

I've been working on a theory that a huge fraction of human culture and values could be interpreted as coping mechanisms in the same sense (as making peace with, or finding a way to manage or compromise with, limitations, suffering, or unsatisfactoriness of aspects of life, and concluding that the things thus successfully managed or the means used to cope with them are themselves good). I've been keeping occasional notes for an article on this concept for many years. I particularly don't think that there is only one community, subculture, or ideology that exhibits this psychological tendency.

Maybe someday I can get clearer on this and organize it and write it up!

(Yes, I know about the transhumanist criticism of acceptance of mortality that this LLM's view is more specifically evoking.)

The "fraud" claim is kind of bizarre to me, but it's clear (and not hidden) that Taler intentionally provided less privacy for payees than other designs and systems because of a conscious decision that payees should have less privacy.

I find this objectionable, but not at all deceptive or manipulative.

Introducing natural language uncertainties into a scripting language reminds me of AppleScript, which used almost entirely English words (mainly in sentences or at least verb phrases), but was nonetheless notably definitely not English. It was quite possible to forget at times which English verbs were language keywords and which weren't.

If I remember correctly, AppleScript was inspired by HyperTalk, which also mainly used English keywords in English-inspired syntax, but most HyperTalk wasn't valid AppleScript, and vice versa.

"Technical error" sounds frustratingly vague and contentless, but it's odd to think about the lack of cultural consensus about whether the ability for others to depict someone with generative AI is more a benefit to him or her, or more a risk. I could imagine someone hearing this and sincerely thinking that Meta was protecting Lula from deepfake attacks (making it slightly harder for people to falsely depict him doing saying embarrassing or offensive things). Uses of AI to mock or attack people often get more attention than uses of AI to praise them.

In the U.S., if someone had programmed a generative AI to be unwilling to depict Obama, I imagine many people would assume that decision was meant to help Obama, not harm him.

I've worked with Let's Encrypt (I mean inside the organization, not just as an end user) a bunch and I feel like I often know or can guess rationales for things, but while I know "why short-lived certs", I surely don't know "why 64".

Is it because it's a round number in binary?

It leads to the intuition that an economy where 100 people consume 10000 (let's say of energy because it should be inflation-independent) per week and 1 person consumes 100000 is worse than an economy where 100 people consume 9000 per week and 1 person consumes 10000. That is, you can strongly reject or disapprove of changes that strictly increase everyone's wealth or consumption.

I think this is not only mistaken but would wrongly lead people to often oppose economic growth, which is likely to increase inequality at least somewhat in many circumstances, while increasing almost every other measure of welfare. They often point in opposite directions.

The case where inequality is most important is when there are things whose supply is fixed or very inelastic (famously land, maybe housing), in which case you are in more of a long-term competition or bidding war with other people for some of those things. That might be a reason that total consumption is an imperfect metric too, because maybe your consumption of one thing with elastic supply (food?) went way up as the economy grew but your consumption of something with inelastic supply (housing?) went down at the same time.

Years of seeing ":help uganda" every single day have left me kind of instinctively curious about how to help Uganda, although I have yet to donate to Bram's charity ICCF.