mastodon
4.6.0-nightly.2026-04-17
Interesting to see Copilot injecting ads into PR descriptions. Although there are a handful of older instances of this, if GitHub search is working properly, it looks like this started happening at scale around 10 days ago with more than 1k injections of this particular ad per day since then (if you search for other ad strings, you can find the rate of other ads)
What will they think of next?
I've been dealing with a bad case of RSV. At one point, I said to someone, "at least this will help my immunity", but then I looked it up and it turns out getting RSV doesn't seem to give you much immunity to RSV. So much for that!
https://academic.oup.com/jid/article-abstract/163/4/693/944323
And there's a theory that covid somehow reduces people's immunity to RSV below the already low levels found in pre-covid studies. Also, I wonder why the RSV vaccine is only approved for older adults and infants?
It's sort of amazing how quickly you can do things now. I wanted to try writing an alphazero-style AI for Azul. With no AI background, it took me maybe 2-3 hours to (2-3 days wall clock) to beat the best AI I could find to play against:
I don't think the AI is superhuman, but I've just been training it on a CPU on my laptop and it's not bad and measurably better every few hours, so maybe it will get there if I just let it run for longer (or if I get a real workstation)
Interesting story about Google publishing someone's phone number on searches for them when they gave the number to Google for account verification/security:
https://danq.me/2025/05/21/google-shared-my-phone-number/
Reminds me of the time a company I worked for (AFAIK) accidentally used phone numbers obtained the same way for ad targeting and got fined $150M
Am I missing something, or is cost saving work systematically undervalued?
Pricing cost savings as breakeven at 25x seems high, but it's a common sentiment. Before joining Twitter, I had a "sell" call with the then-CTO who said the same thing: if a senior eng saves $10M/yr (25:1), that would be considered poor performance and should be a no hire.
That's incredible! Twitter had maybe 2k eng at the time. If each made $10M/yr at the margin, the company would increase its profit by $20B/yr/yr.
