Mark Waterson

@birch_js It’s a local variable. It has lexical scope. Its whole lifecycle is right there. On the screen.

@QiaochuYuan It’s also like weed in that the people who talk about it unprompted give a very warped perspective of the average consumer

ok here's some thinking out loud after asking gpt-5.5 to do a little research. i think this is a generational gap mediated by technological shifts. "porn" in 2026 means a very different thing now than it did 20 years ago, same with weed when older millennials like me were growing up in the early 2000s internet speeds were slow enough that streaming was not quite feasible - youtube didn't really blow up until 2006-7, which incidentally is also when both youporn and pornhub started. before that, during the period where internet speeds were high enough for easy access to photos but not videos (you used to have to wait for high-resolution photos to load), "porn" was like, pictures of playboy models or anime girls, and if you wanted more you had to put in the work of downloading or torrenting videos or, god forbid, renting or buying a physical VHS the standard liberal position at the time, as i recall it, was that watching porn was a cool liberal thing to do in the name of sex-positivity (but not so cool that you would talk about it in too much detail in public), and that if you were anti-porn that made you a conservative christian prude who hated sex, which i guess came out of the sex-positivity side winning the feminist sex wars (i would love to hear someone who knows more about the history of the waves of feminism say more about this) the rise of streaming porn and then the rise of smartphones together changed the game, now you have an infinite supply of arbitrarily hardcore video instantly available on demand on your laptop and in your pocket. that's a whole different level of accessibility compared to the previous era, let alone the eras before that. this was a completely unprecedented social experiment run on the entire world and discourse about the effects only took a few years to show up - r/nofap started in 2011, gary wilson's "the great porn experiment" tedx talk was 2012, time magazine ran "porn and the threat to virility" in 2016. i *think* this is when porn addiction as an online discourse became sort-of-mainstream but mostly among men and focused on the harm porn was doing to men (ED and so forth) now we need to add the rise of social media to the mix, which adds parasociality - camgirls, instagram models posting thirst traps, god only knows what they do on tiktok, culminating in the meteoric rise of onlyfans during lockdown. this is the bit that i'm guessing makes porn feel a lot more like cheating to zoomers because it breaks down the previous sense of there being a barrier between "porn stars" and "normal people." when i was growing up porn stars were like movie stars, you saw them on the screen and that was it. now a girl you might personally know might be or have been on onlyfans. a guy you date might have subscribed to her! that obviously feels much more like cheating than what people were doing before in 2026 it is much easier to feel like a guy watching porn is hooking himself up to a vast disgusting addictive machine, with a tentacle plugged into every screen, that corrodes the capacity for real human intimacy for clicks. it's significant that the girl in the video called it "gross" and not just "sexist" or whatever there is surely much much more to be said about how this ties into the broader - what are people calling it, the gen z sex recession? i'm thinking it must be crazy to have the metoo movement comboing into lockdown a few years later happen during your formative years. overall the naive sex positivity that millennials grew up with came out of a completely different set of material conditions, and i think it's cool and based that the zoomers are doing feminist sex wars part 2 instead, good luck to all the combatants

@ChrisGPotts in the context of the conversation, the point he is making is not that he is disparaging the AI industry, but that he is so unconcerned with that characterization that he will sign onto it explicitly himself

As a linguist, I am intrigued by the fact that, at the end of the clip, Yudkowsky says, "I hereby disparage the AI industry". I would have guessed that "disparage" was not a performative verb and thus that this would fail as an act of disparagement, but I suppose it's a meta-pragmatic edge case like "I hereby insult you".

@julianhyde If I'm following the question, I think you can use the more portable string_agg if you don't have array_agg

The query "find all students who take all courses" is called relational division. Is there a name for the "find all students who take a unique set of courses"? It's devilishly hard to express in SQL (without using tricks like ARRAY_AGG). See vldb.org/cidrdb/papers/….

@SimardPete @feelsdesperate every store I’ve been to you just weigh the bananas

@feelsdesperate Grocery stores running on 2% margins arent solved, theyre surviving. anyone whos watched someone scan 47 loose bananas one at a time at self-checkout knows there's room to improve

Grocery stores have been ‘solved.’ They’ve been solved. Anything with a 2% profit margin is solved. Maybe you could wring some more efficiency on an industry level with improved logistics but that’s going to an incredibly complex technical endeavor above the pay grade of municipal government. That’s why the ‘public grocery stores’ are such a good example of Dem Soc silliness. They’re a political set piece with ~0% chance of any net public benefit and an extremely high likelihood of wasted resources and opportunity costs.

@joseph_h_garvin IDEs being able to autocomplete functions from a . or pipe is a consequence of there being context up front, which also helps you if you need to read the code

Now that the world has LLMs, does the fact that IDEs can give you a method list when you write `object.` still matter? Or should language designers ignore that entirely now? Why or why not?

@alz_zyd_ @alexpotato Does needing a specific average markup per dish mean they need less variance in markup per dish? Depending on what people will pay for more variance could be better

@alexpotato I agree, my view is that the restaurant turns over a set number of tables per night, and wants to make some given profit per table, so roughly the dollar markup per dish should be similar, not the percentage markup

This is a very interesting table, and actually has some interesting economics. The percent markups are largely insane for pasta vs steak. But the dollar markups are actually pretty similar, in fact slightly favoring pasta. What's the right measure here?

@KilroyAmerica @sharghzadeh This is not one car, it’s a lot of cars (literally)

@sharghzadeh Urbanists whenever they see one (1) car: 😡

"NYC is full!" My brother in Allah, we have surface parking lots under the Empire State Building.

@DrigoToes @ConcealedSlacks @NastrondScourge If you pronounced the rough in through like rough you’d still be pretty close, it’s not like you’d be accidentally saying “yogurt” or something. Don’t throw the whole thing out just because it isn’t 100% aligned

I have heard rumors that children today aren't taught that specific letters make specific sounds and are instead taught to memorize how individual words are spelled and pronounced, like they're learning Chinese or something. Hard to believe that's real.

@Andrew_LilDras @TimHenke9 @martinmrmar define + as max, then + is commutative and this is true for x>=2

@TimHenke9 @martinmrmar Does this works, it seems to me that this + is non commutative?

This problem will stomp most people... 😎

@amir what the heck happens in these companies that makes people even talk about this kind of thing? I’ve never once felt any inkling of a temptation to post about transgender issues or whatever on a company board. Why would that be useful, interesting, or worthwhile any way

Google paid ~$3 billion to hire AI genius Noam Shazeer. He’s helped Gemini meaningfully since then but also kept posting inflammatory statements that angered colleagues and prompted Google to censor him.

@TheCoinDad @sentdefender this one is even funnier

@sentdefender U forgot to post this angle too before Trump turned his body. What u expect him to do if 3 ppl including Doctors are already on top of the man. Trump stood in this posture for a while before turning to the pic u posted. SMH

President Donald J. Trump looks on as an unidentified pharmaceutical representative lays with his feet elevated on the floor of the Oval Office.

@ChShersh > In 10 years, Rust will suffer the exact same problem as C++ But by the same logic, in 10 years C++ will suffer even more. The newer language will always be newer no matter how much time has passed

Just to clarify so people don’t misinterpret me again. Rust is a great language. It supports FP and I love FP. Rust authors managed to make a lot of this right. But creating a new great language is an easy problem. Not in a sense that it’s trivial. But in a sense that new languages are not encumbered with legacy decisions. They don’t have to make hard choices (yet) to maintain backwards compatibility. They can reap the benefits of other’s mistakes and just don’t introduce them from the start. It’s much harder to actually improve an existing language in a meaningful way and make lives of millions of devs easier without breaking things. It’s a slow and arduous process. I know it. But assuming you can easily rewrite existing software to a new shiny language is naive beyond delusional. In 10 years, Rust will suffer the exact same problem as C++ They won’t be able to add new exciting features without breaking stuff. So they’ll have to make compromises. And devs will start complaining that Rust has a dozen ways to do the same thing. You know what else will happen in the next 40 years? A dozen of new programming languages. It’s very naive to think we achieved a global optimum of programming languages today and Rust is the best we can ever create. Programming Language Theory advances every year, and in 10-20 years we can easily see a new exciting language with groundbreaking innovations. What we’ll have is an ever growing zoo of languages. Software Engineers will be expected to know even more languages and switch between them even quicker. The cycle continues.

@AnshumanKhanna5 @ChShersh It’s still just a lazy object at that point, you materialize it with std::ranges::to, which requires you to specify the output type

@ChShersh My first question for the image on the right would be, how do I know what does transform return? Does it return a span? Because we are doing operations on span Does it return a vector? Since the left one does These are the types of questions which make imperative better

This trivial example basically explains how my brain works and why I prefer FP over standard imperative code. A for-loop does "something". I have to inspect its body in detail to ensure the control flow is legit. A composable functional pipeline tells me what it does: 1. It filters 2. It transforms I can dive into the details, but I already see the named steps and immediately get a high-level picture. I don't think imperatively, "For each element, check if condition is this, then do this, otherwise". I think declaratively, "Keep all such elements and do this with them". Many people tell me they find the code on the left easier. And many will tell this in replies. It uses simpler features, and you don't need to know much to understand what it does. But as I said, it's a trivial example. The power of seeing the steps of the data transformation pipelines can't be explained. You have to experience it at least once for real.

@joseGFX_ @meowkoteeq @WarrenInTheBuff yeah, and it will be less intended the more unhackable it is

@Pertplus1 @meowkoteeq @WarrenInTheBuff Hacking something means using something in unintended ways. So a hackable badge means it is easy to make it do many things

Bro hacked his raspberry pi

@meowkoteeq @WarrenInTheBuff funny that something being hackable means you can’t hack it

@shaahin_a @FranNunesEcon @PatriciaNPino surely this cuts the other way, no? In the argument between creating a simplified theoretical model vs starting from observations about real world complexity, this is an example of the simplified model being the more useful of the two

@FranNunesEcon @PatriciaNPino Fitting an apriori function to some points is not "science" Learn something about science and its history

1️⃣When economists say there is “voluntary unemployment” it means that, if unemployed workers wanted, they could work for a lower wage (I’m not talking about fairness, this is not a philosophical debate). 2️⃣Economists claim that people act as if they were maximizing utility, not that they are “utility maximising agents”, and you can include everything you believe reports utility in your U. function(s). 3️⃣When economists claim that under some assumptions (something that you didn’t mention in your post) the market is the most efficient way to distribute resources, it’s a mathematical result. And again, long live Mathematical Economics, because Mathematics imposes coherence with your assumptions, which is a prerequisite for the search for truth.

@FinnMurphy12 wtf kinda picture is this

Polymarket CEO at the Knicks literally on the phone front-running the markets on next to score - outrageous stuff

@Thorn61616 @ShiberKnight @tommy_tradez_ @PeterTwinklage warning: do not search youtube for “eating m&ms” after reading this comment, it will nuke your YouTube recommendations

@ShiberKnight @tommy_tradez_ @PeterTwinklage Do you stick your fingers in your mouth when you eat M&Ms?

i’ve never quite understood this specific form of racism. America and Western countries have all sorts of food we eat with our hands! hamburgers, hot dogs, sandwiches, chicken wings, PIZZA, ribs, muffins, burritos, French fries, doughnuts, popcorn, etc. like, are you dumb?

@MostlyMonkey (also they state the reason for arrest and it’s not trespassing)

@MostlyMonkey Doesn’t look like she’s interfering with anything. If these guys just ignored her as she asked her questions, what would be impeded?

The cops have no need to provide random interlocutors with legal explanation for a 3rd party's arrest. I can't tell from the video if this person was being trespassed or interfering with legitimate police activity, but their position as an Alderman provides them no protection.