(_|_)

It doesn’t have to be a big baroque thing. When there’s a dotfile I configure regularly, I move it to a Git repo and use stow to put it “back” into place with a symlink. On new machines, it isn’t long before I try something that doesn’t work or see the default shell prompt and go “oh yeah, I want my dotfiles”, check out the repo, run a script that initializes a few things (some stuff is machine-specific so the script makes files for that stuff with helpful comments for me to remember the differences between login shells or whatever) and then I’m off to the races.

In Haskell, that’s “unit” or the empty tuple. It’s basically an object with no contents, behavior, or particular meaning, useful for representing “nothing”. It’s a solid thing that is never a surprise, unlike undefined or other languages’ nulls, which are holes in the language or errors waiting to happen.

You might argue that it’s a value and not a function, but Haskell doesn’t really differentiate the two anyway:

value :: String
value = "I'm always this string!"

funkyFunc :: String -> String
funkyFunc name = "Rock on, "++name++", rock on!"

Is value a value, or is it a function that takes no arguments? There’s not really a difference, Haskell handles them both the same way: by lazily replacing anything matching the pattern on the left side of the equation with the right side of the equation at runtime.

I got the .net and .org of my last name, and offered $50 to the owner of the .com as he wasn’t doing anything with it. Kind of a lowball, admittedly, but I would’ve gone up to a hundred or two. Instead, he told me it was worth thousands, which, lol, but then he didn’t renew it, which I only found out because a random third person reached out to me as the owner of the .net offering me the .com. Turns out they hadn’t actually bought it yet, though, so instead I scooped it up and now I’ve got the trifecta!

Yes, but most human em dashes are from writing going through relatively professional processes, not, say, writing a comment online. Of course, there are many — like myself — who know how to type them quickly, and choose to use them, but LLMs are definitely a lot more eager to use them than the average person.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m not sure what the worst case scenario is… like, is some company going to get rich off of their proprietary cp and sudo implementation that they forked off of an open one?

That is indeed the right way to do it, unfortunately Plex doesn’t handle it well. It’ll show all the episodes separately, but each one plays the entire file (fair, it doesn’t know for sure where the breaks are, but could be done better), and watching the whole thing marks only the one you selected as watched, so you have to mark all the other “episodes” as watched manually (this is annoying, if it knows you watched the whole file, it should know that you’ve watched all the episodes it covers).

Usually if an episode is a 2 parter in one file, I’ll just name it for part 1 since you’d watch them together anyway, but for cartoons the two parts are usually entirely unrelated, so it really only works properly if the file’s split. It’d be better if the interface at least showed that a range of episodes are combined so you could, say, start it and know that the episode you want needs to be scrubbed through to find it, and also if it marked them all as played when you watch the whole thing.

He’s seen that media companies that want to get their mergers approved have to suck up to the dictator first.

That “unacceptable and insensitive” comment was, in reality, an entirely reasonable take on how Charlie Kirk directly stoked the fires that ended up taking his life. They’re sending a clear message that you are not allowed to speak honestly about any of the context surrounding the event, and can only share an opinion if it shows Kirk in a positive light, since apparently neutral or worse is not allowed.

For most software, iteration starts getting diminishing returns only if it’s approaching feature completeness and no bugs. LLMs are plateauing well before they became super genius job stealers like they were supposed to, and it’s going to take a major breakthrough to see any significant improvement.

Those images in the mirror are already perfect replicas of us, we need to be ready for when they figure out how to move on their own and get out from behind the glass or we’ll really be screwed. If you give my “”“non-profit”“” a trillion dollars we’ll get right to work on the research into creating more capable mirror monsters so that we can control them instead.

Fan art is generally protected because of a rule called “fair use”, which allows people to use copyrighted work without permission. For example, if you briefly quote a book, the author won’t have success if they go after you for copying from their book, even though you clearly did. Generally speaking, a person making fan art and not selling it is going to be protected under fair use. The law wants creators to have control of the thing they created, but we all live in a shared culture and we all deserve to participate in the art we experience, so there’s some wiggle room, and this has been the case long before AI was a thing.

What these AI companies are doing, on the other hand… well, it hasn’t really been tested in court yet, but they’re doing a lot more than single images or brief quotes, and they’re doing it for money, so they’ll likely have some work to do.

The problem is that the sports industry has been propped up for decades with cable, where every subscriber paid fees for sports whether they cared about it or not. If they charged a reasonable price to just the people who care, it’d be a devastating loss. And cable was structured the way it was because that’s what made the most money, and though cable’s slowly being replaced by streaming, don’t be shocked when the streaming landscape starts to take on a similar shape. There’s already lots of bundling going on, remember when streaming meant that you could save a ton of money by just paying for what you wanted? They’re going to do whatever they can to keep the revenue from falling.

My characterization would be that there’s a spectrum here:

• 100% yes code: compilers, IDEs, scripting environments, databases, you wanna get something done, you are going to be specifying it in something that at the very least looks like traditional source code.
• Completely on the other side of the spectrum, traditional consumer-oriented software: word processor, web browser, accounting/bookkeeping (not spreadsheets though, we’ll get to those), photo/video/audio editor, maps, music player, etc.

That first side of the spectrum is pretty easy to pin down. It has little to no metaphor or abstraction, and the pointy tip of this side is no metaphor at all, just writing machine code and piping it directly into the CPU. A higher level language will let you gloss over some details like registers, memory management, multithreading, maybe pretend you’re manipulating little objects or mathematical functions instead of bits on a wire, but overall you are directing the computer to do computer things using computer language, and forced to think like a computer and learn what computers can and cannot do. This is, of course, the most powerful way to use a computer but is also completely inaccessible to almost everybody.

The second, I’d link together as all being software with a metaphor that is not particularly related to computing itself, but to something more real world. People edited music by physically splicing tapes together, an audio editor does an idealized version of that. Typewriters existed, and a word processor basically simulates that experience. Winamp wasn’t much more than a boom box and a sleeve of CDs. There is usually a deliberate physicality and real-world grounding to the user’s mental model of the software, even if it is doing things that would be impossible if the metaphor were literal. You don’t need to use code, but you also don’t get anything code-like out of it.

No-code is in between. It’s intended for a similar audience as the latter category, who want a clear, easy-to-understand mental model that doesn’t require a computer science degree, but it tries to enable that audience to perform code-like tasks. Spreadsheets are the original example of this; although they originate as a metaphor for paper balance sheets, the functions available in formulas fundamentally alter the metaphor to basically “imagine if you had a sheet of paper that could do literal magic” and at that point you’re basically just describing a computer with a screen. Everything in a spreadsheet is very tactile, it’s easy to see where your data is, but when you need to, you can dip into a light programming environment that regular people can still make work. In general, this is the differentiator for “no code” apps: enabling non-coders to dip their toes into modifying program behavior, scripting tasks, and building software. They’re limited to what the tool provides, but the tool is trying to give them the power that actual coding would provide.

I’d never thought of WordPress as low-code, but I think that fits. Websites go beyond paper or magazines, and WordPress allows people to do things that would otherwise require code and databases and web servers and so on.

Ugh, I’m devastated, I was so sure that math was gay but this is making me question everything

Safari on iOS has always had some pretty strict limits on what extensions can do. For example, content blockers don’t get to run code on the pages you browse, it’s more like they give the browser a list of what type of thing to block when you install and configure it, then when you’re browsing, the extension isn’t even doing anything, it’s just the browser using the list. Obviously that’s more limiting, there might be ads that are best dealt with by running a bit of code, so it makes sense that they’d consider it “lite”. (The benefit of those limits is that ad blocking extensions can’t run amok and kill your phone’s battery since the browser’s handling it by itself.)

There isn’t a simple evolutionary definition of “fish”, not the same way there is for, say, mammals. If you found the common ancestor of everything we call a mammal and said “everything descended from this one is also a mammal”, you’d be correct. If you did that for everything we call fish, every animal in the world would be a fish. Also, we decided which animals were fish mostly on vibes, so without a clear definition you can pedantically argue that everything is a fish including mammals.

I would guess it’s web requests made during a chat session, e.g. the user asks about kayaks and the AI searches and fetches some pages to put into its context before answering. That’s not really scraping, it’s data being used in the moment in response to a user request, closer to what a “user agent” has always meant in the web world. A crawler would be crawling the site, systematically trying to follow every link and collect what’s there with little to no human involvement.

That’s a decently rational response you’ve described, though. If you were really at immediate risk, you’d probably know it, especially with an alarm going off to get you looking for signs of danger. And it’s usually better to have a lazy, skeptical evacuation than a panicked stampede. Schools do fire drills to check the alarms, sure, but it’s also important to make them a routine thing that all the kids know how to handle.

The tokenization is a low-level implementation detail, it shouldn’t affect an LLM’s ability to do basic reasoning. We don’t do arithmetic by counting how many neurons we can feel firing in our brain, we have higher level concepts of numbers, and LLMs are supposed to have something similar. Plus, in the “”“thinking”“” models, you’ll see them break up words into individual letters or even write them out in a numbered list, which should break the tokens up into individual letters as well.