viggity

There are some fascinating theories on how writing media affects writing direction and glyph shape. A lot of southeast asian languages have a lot of curves/circles because they'd use a stylus on a banana leaf and the curves are less likely to run a split in the leaf.

I am suggesting that the major causative factor for life outcomes is genetics. Not "racist" property tax funding models. You can take the girl out of the trailer park, but you can't take the trailer park out of the girl.

I took 3 years of Japanese in HS (96-99). About 2 years ago I was doing a lot of work with genai and japanese typefaces. It was wild digging into how different the japanese web is. Back in like 2005, it was common to stylize english text by embedding it in an image and then applying drop shadows, etc. By 2022 everyone does the vast majority of that within CSS. Not in Japan though, I couldn't believe how much text content is still in image form.

I have always been kind of hyper aware of <everything>. My wife and I only dated for 6 months before we got married in sept 2019 (second marriage for both of us, we knew what we each wanted). But I definitely felt a bit awkward telling her about what I thought was coming with covid in late dec 2019. She was a bit suspect at first but polite and just went along with it because we were newlyweds and she loved me and gave me the benefit of the doubt. Holy shit, most everything went how I said it was going to at least through June 2020. AFAICT, she's still convinced I'm from the future.

Nice work! Out of curiosity, how are you deciding what the verse of the day is? i.e. is randomness weighted somehow? There are are ~31k verses in the bible, 23k in old testament, 8k in new testament. Is it 2.5 times more likely to be an old testament verse? Or, perhaps you're picking a testament at random, then a random book, then a random verse. Lots of ways to skin the proverbial cat.

Since the whole point of this is to limit LLM token consumption, it'd be interesting to see the results of prompts that use it.

I've seen a ton of people who just paste a CSV into a prompt and expect it to work well because they don't know any better, but the results are typically hot garbage. It's too repetitive, it can't memorize and/or process such a big chunk of data. Asking an LLM to use pandas to iteratively analyze some CSV works great, though.

These kinds of results seem all too common. Like, why? Are companies just too used to using their general business attorneys for it, and those attorneys are just ignorant? Hungry for extra billable hours?

I worked for a PoE lighting company for a couple of years. Yes, the ability to program your lights based on time of day, occupancy sensors etc was all nice for the end consumers. But the big advantage was that since it didn't use mains power, the owner of the building didn't have to hire a union electrician at eleventy gillion an hour to move some light panels around in a drop ceiling.

Does the second amendment apply to non-citizens?

I'm against the government jailing a visa holder for their speech, but revoking their visa is not jail.

1948 vs 2025 Jewish Population:

Algeria: 140,000 -> ~0

Morocco: 250,000 -> ~0

Yemen: 550,000 -> ~300

Iraq: 135,000 -> ~0

Lebanon: 20,000 -> ~40

Iran: 135,000 -> ~0

The book suggests two main reasons for this.

1. The reformation increased literacy/education in the populace to a greater extent in protestant areas, because you no longer needed clergy to talk to God, or understand the bible. Protestant countries have had better education for longer and it has a compounding effect.

2. The "Marriage and Family Program" (the "MFP")... protestant areas discouraged cousin marriage and levirate marriage much earlier than catholic countries, and it is still very common in the rest of the world. Consanguineous marriage is ludicrously prevalent in the middle east, it makes most of the rest of the world more tribal and you end up with compounding genetic defects. By making cousin marriage taboo, it encouraged children to move to a different town and made people less clannish.