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• Post #3792714

  Is there an English word for "the thing from which a shadow is being cast"? For example, when looking at a shadow of a particular tree, you could say "The shadow's foo", and your interlocutor would understand that "foo" refers to a particular tree, specifically in the tree's role of being the thing that -- along with the Sun as light source -- is responsible for the shadow that is already a common reference point in the conversation? If not in English, doe...

• Post #2723707

  This is also the answer to the CEO crowing about giving his customers two-day turnaround time. Dude, if it only takes your people two days, then it'd only take your customer a week just to do it themselves. -- My friend Jim, on the new world of AI-assisted software construction

• Post #2473548

  Whenever I'm trying figure out whether a friend or a colleague would be a successful candidate for public office, I always find myself coming back to one quality: Can they wrap up a meeting or a phone call quickly while still making all counterparties feel respected and heard? I seriously think that might be the single biggest qualification, at least in U.S. elections. It covers so many situations: talking to constituents, talking to campaign donors (which one will be spending a lot o...

• Post #2473547

  There's a gem, placed with exemplary subtlety, in the recent New Yorker article about Sam Altman (emphases mine): At the behest of his fellow board members, Sutskever worked with like-minded colleagues to compile some seventy pages of Slack messages and H.R. documents, accompanied by explanatory text. The material included images taken with a cellphone, apparently to avoid detection on company devices. He sent the final memos to the other board members as disappearing messages, to insur...

• Post #2473546

  Suddenly today I got it: I'm an Ineffective Altruist. I and my fellow travelers in the Ineffective Altruism movement are still waiting for the in-depth New Yorker piece about us, not to mention the gobs of guiltwashing billionaire money, but in the meantime we quietly soldier on.

• Post #2473545

  It's funny that we ended up using the word "phone" for devices that addict primarily (though not exclusively) through visual stimuli.

• Post #2222448

  Musk and his team want access to the IRS's taxpayer records because having taxpayer records enables threats and extortion. Did you get behind on your taxes, say, and work out a payment plan with the IRS? Well, if Trump's team knows about that, now they something to hold over you -- for example, something to threaten you with if you continue your public criticism of the Trump administration. The beauty of Musk, from Trump's point of view, is that Trump doesn't h...

• Post #2044231

  The one point that has resonated most strongly with me in recent months is that there is a consistent pattern with autocratic takeovers that succeed. They are imposed by presidents or prime ministers who, for contingent reasons, are actually very popular. Fujimori in Peru, Orbán in Hungary, Erdoğan in Turkey, Bukele in El Salvador. The pattern is the same. Either they tamed inflation or a crime wave or removed a deeply unpopular government. They did it in a window of overwhelming popularity. Tru...

• Post #802411

  Boosting my own post from late last night, because this thought (from someone else) deserves wider circulation: https://kfogel.org/notice/B4ASCRpho58pyygqpc

• Post #802410

  If "leaves" is the plural of "leaf", and "knives" is the plural of "knife", then what is the plural of "nerf"?

• Post #802408

  This search for "Vincent Raphael Kwok" (substitute whatever search engine you want for the one I specified) turns up exactly one result: he is mentioned in Wikipedia's page on quantum chemistry, in the History section of the page, for being one of three co-authors of a 1927 article about diatomic hydrogen. The other two co-author's names are links to their Wikipedia articles; Kwok's name is not a link and there is no further information about him. I fo...

• Post #802407

  Least surprising headline ever: "Bets on US-Iran ceasefire show signs of insider knowledge, say experts".

• Post #802406

  If you ask a large number of people whether asking a large number of people to guess something will often lead, when averaged, to a better guess than an expert would have made, will the predominant answer be "yes" or "no"?

• Post #322437

  insurrectionary materials called ‘zines.’ Let that sink in. “insurrectionary materials called ‘zines.’” https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/guilt-by-association-first-antifa-case-sweeps-anti-trump-activists-into-one-terrorism-conspiracy

• Post #139903

  So, we're building a data hub! But maybe someone's built it already? Most of what we need likely already exists, ideally as an open source product, and we'd much rather start from an existing product and community than just build from scratch on top of PostgreSQL of course. Anyone know of things that roughly meet these criteria?: Immediate needs:API (obviously)Support for attachments/files (some systems may call these "blobs"?)Migrations (both up and down)Easy to back up...