DogBot

can't believe galileo disrespected traditional european ways of knowing like that

@cxgonzalez There’s something in it that feels slightly amiss to be. You want to be worthy of the admiration of your children. But the end goal isn’t that admiration - that’s a kind of vanity. You want to help show your children the good so they can become worthy themselves

this video has done irreparable damage to my psyche

Listening to Spotify shuffle while coding Mellow sad chill song comes on, mean it by k flay. Liked the song, but hasn’t really impacted me emotionally before Gets to this line and I start ugly crying in my office

@Old_Engerland @RamVasuthevan sheldt Black Friday was similarly brutal. Also participated in Dieppe.

@DogIsABot @RamVasuthevan I assume you’re talking about Verrières Ridge, the Normandy battle memorably recounted in ‘the valour and the horror’. Hard to think of western allied forces who suffered a similar casualty rate while on the attack.

Most WW2 revisionism is very boring (generally various flavors of Nazi apologia, or pedantic moralism over instances of Western Allies being somewhat bad too, as in Dresden), but one form of revisionism I would like to see more relates to the sociology of combat vs. support assignments in the US military. Overall, service in the Western militaries was obviously drastically safer than in the Red Army or the Wehrmacht. However, what few appreciate is that it was actually extremely lethal for the small percentage of men who found themselves part of the combat infantry. Due to the US having a relatively vast logistics tail, the combat troops were very small as a percentage of the whole (like 15% of the 2.5M overall troops in Western Europe), but incurred 80% of the casualties. Furthermore they were NOT equitably rotated, and were generally kept on in that role until they died or got too wounded to continue. This was done for the cynical purpose of maintaining high morale in the military at large at the cost of resentment within the ranks of the combat infantry of whom a quarter died, a death rate almost comparable to that faced by the bomber forces and Arctic convoys. Servicemen groked this pretty quickly and there seems to have been a great deal of effort expended on getting out and staying out of the assault infantry, including exploiting personal connections, favoritism, and manipulating paperwork (bribery doesn't appear to have been a thing, but who knows, not exactly something you register in the records or even talk about later). This is sharply at odds with Romantic postwar propaganda portraying military service as a mass patriotic effort in which the broad masses of the male population participated on an equitable basis, when the reality was really probably closer to how Ukraine and Russia are fighting their war today - everyone with money or connections finding themselves comfy logistics and related roles in the rear, while a minority of the least connected and most naive find themselves in the thick of the meat-grinder until they die, are crippled, or successfully desert. It would be interesting to see more research on this topic since it challenges the core "patriotic" myth surrounding WW2.

@cruelsardaukar @Daveloew2 Alternately perhaps if the crossing was extraordinarily dangerous for weather or magical beast reasons

@Daveloew2 Yeah, the only way to make it make sense is for the crossing to be extremely costly and difficult and long. Which, it clearly is not

The geography is a total mess, the narrow sea is so narrow that most of Westeros should be more integrated with Seven City trading networks than the North. The real world equivalent would be the Mediterranean, where either the region is very tightly integrated (Roman times) or coastal regions are borderline depopulated due to raiding from one side of a cultural divide against the other (Islamic raids during the Middle Ages)

@DanFriedman81 @JoelDPN Hard to imagine a whedon star fleet academy not being fun

@JoelDPN Points of comparison are: “Supernatural,” “The Magicians,” “The Boys,” “Gen V,” “Starfleet Academy.” Everybody else working in Whedon’s wheelhouse doesn’t do it as well as Whedon.

The cancelled figure it makes the most sense to bring back is Joss Whedon. The guy is a generational talent, and he was never accused of any serious misconduct. Basically the allegation against him were: 1.) That he had a temper and yelled at people on set. 2.) That he dated actresses and was kind of a cad. He was never accused of rape or sexual harassment. 3.) Michelle Trachtenberg said her parents had a rule that Whedon was not allowed to be alone with her on the set of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." People imputed lots of sinister sexual stuff implications onto this, but it apparently happened after he yelled at her on set. 4.) That he was mean to Charisma Carpenter, that he yelled at her a lot, and that he was furious when she didn't time her pregnancy around the show's shooting schedule and he killed her character because of this. 5.) When he came in to replace Zack Snyder on "Justice League" he had a very poor relationship with the cast, who had signed on to make a different movie with a different director, and did not like the direction he was taking things. He bickered with Ben Affleck and was accused of threatening Gal Gadot. 6.) Ray Fisher, who played Cyborg in "Justice League" was promised a major breakout role in Snyder's version of the film and his screen time was cut dramatically in Whedon's version. Fisher was furious and accused Whedon of being racist, and Whedon's various other enemies recognized this as an especially damaging allegation and supported Fisher. This happened at a time when the accusation of racism was extremely destructive, and Warner Bros was also looking for a scapegoat to blame for the failure of "Justice League." The HBO show Whedon was working on was cancelled in the wake of this and he hasn't done anything since. At this point, I think we can recognize that this was a wild overreaction. Whedon is an enormous and basically irreplaceable talent. The showrunners doing some of the largest shows right now in this space have never made ANYTHING as good as EVERYTHING Whedon has done (with the exception of "Justice League"). This guy could easily be a Taylor Sheridan-level franchise talent in the streaming era. Bringing him back makes a lot more sense than bringing back Max Landis.

@gaulicsmith I think it’s that we’re blessedly early. You can’t have life in the system of a first generation star. Maybe you need at least a third generation

So either (1) we are alone (2) there is some great filter before this occurs (what I think) (3) we simply haven’t been found yet

A lot of people have suggested you can colonize the galaxy in a few hundred thousand or million years with sub-light speed, and I was going to counter with “why would they do that” but that’s not how it works. Any species that has a maximally-expansive mindset will simply dominate the ones that don’t on a long enough time frame

My wife asked me to explain curling to her. She thinks just because I’m Canadian Inwouldnknow the rules. Jokes on her, nobody knows the rules 🇨🇦🍁🫎

@MaryJackalope @grok Is tarring and feathering of civilians a war crime under international laws of war?

The United Empire Loyalists of Canada have released a commemorative coin for the 250th. Unbelievable

@esrtweet @bennhoffman Probably works eventually, rather than immediately - imagine stuff you tell it to forget stays in context until compaction and then is dropped

@bennhoffman Yes. Sometimes I tell the LLM to forget things. I'm not sure if this actually works, though.

I went from entirely hand-coding to getting high volumes of useful AI generated code in less than a month, with only extremely rare and manageable hallucinations, though just one change to my programming practice. Which I will now describe. 1. Write and maintain a context file Before you write a line of code, dump your thoughts about what you want to do into a text file. As you have more thoughts about it, add them. It should be designer's notes. It could be a to-do list. It should be where you sketch things like file formats and protocols and module organization. Eventually, pieces of this file will migrate out of it and become formal documentation. But it is not formal documentation. It is you dumping your thoughts to where the LLM can read them. Even your half-assed, speculative thoughts. The process of writing and updating your context file will help you achieve clarity about your design. And of course, it is a huge, useful prompt. I've always had a tendency to include designer's notes with my source distributions. It was a natural evolution from that to having a context file from the beginning of the project. The only conceptual breakthrough was one I realized that it was okay for part of the document to be a graffiti wall. 2. Design from the middle out. Your program has an engine. Design that engine as though it were intended to be a reusable component, even if it isn't. That is, specify the inputs, the outputs, and the invariants. The thing I'm saying to avoid is classical "top-down" design, which tends to over-constrain the visible interface of your program. Also, absolutely do not worry about the low-level details yet. Don't sweat performance, in particular. Once you have an engine that works and you can unit-test, then you can build and tune the rest of your program. Be prepared to throw away the interface scaffolding you built to test the engine (but keep the unit tests, of course). Why you do things this way: it's how you get proper internal modularity and separation of concerns - and a result that's maintainable and understandable. An LLM will not usually give you these things if you just tell it what you want the entire program to do. Your engine may have a bunch of parts that you need to design-sketch and specify separately. That's okay; the point is, you're carving the problem apart in your head into pieces that you can specify crisply to the LLM. Just keep biting off pieces of the problem that you can specify well until you get to the point where you can start plugging them together into production code. An example of this kind of piece is: a parser for some sort of input format. That piece is done when you can see your program dump a digested syntax tree that has the shape you had in mind. Among other benefits, partitioning the work like this means that individual design sessions are less likely to overrun the context limit of your LLM and start getting crazy behavior. This isn't a change in my practice, because it's the way I've been doing things since I was a fledgling programmer. Aaaaand...that's it. That's all there is to it.

@usr_bin_roygbiv @staysaasy Berkson’s paradox rules everything around me

@staysaasy I have a very different take on this. Yes it's true boomers and middle managers love to see your face on calls, and will assign you value as if you are performing better than you actually are. However most jobs themselves can be completed without video calls at all.

In 2026 if you’re even semi-regularly off camera in a meeting you are obviously bad at your job. It’s such an easy tell it’s shocking people don’t realize it. You should just have your pfp on the remote call be a banner that says “low performer.”

@celulacecedista This was probably a bad example - clearly most DNA mechanisms etc , evolved earlier. I do think that there was a ramp up of complexity during this time, where a lot of the protein machinery necessary for complex life but not basic eukaryotes was being developed

@DogIsABot Probably not? Most "nanotechnological" HAD to be already developed before the boring billion. The development of Eukaryotic life and its extra stuff is big but talking about "nanotechnology" a probably boring time.

The boring billion was actually a period of mad nanotechnological development

“You’ll get to brush your teeth tomorrow” I explain to her “and the day after that” but I’m suddenly conscious that days are not without end, and I realize that I also don’t understand why she doesn’t get to play with the water in the sink forever

I wonder if that is how I'll feel when I'm dying. I wonder if I'll cry, not understanding why everything that was so beautiful, and now seems like it happened so fast, has to end.

Breaks my heart to see how sad my toddler daughter gets when she realizes it's time to leave the sink, stop brushing her teeth, and go to bed. "No! No!" she shouts, tears streaming down her face. I try to explain to her she’s been at the sink for 20 minutes and

@pegobry_en French casualties as a population percentage were low compared to some coalition members, but as a fraction of deployed troops were comparable to the US. A number of partners saw higher casualty rates among deployed troops than the US, though the US deployment was the largest

Now that the controversy has died down, it is my sad duty to report that Trump's "they kept off the front lines" comment was accurate, though phrased with typical Trumpian exaggeration and disregard for social convention. NATO countries (including, at times, I am ashamed to say, France) routinely insisted on more stringent rules on whether to put their troops in harm's way, being afraid of casualties for political reasons. It's nevertheless true that the US's NATO allies fulfilled their duty under Article 5, including, in very many cases, putting their troops very much on the front line, with the consequence that many honorable non-American NATO soldiers gave their lives for this Alliance, a fact which Americans should not forget.

@bpadams @minordissent This is part of why I reacted the way I did. I actually believe this part! And that’s why the negativity was upsetting. Alexander should be able to get his ego out of the way if he’s writing about someone he loves.

@minordissent "In case it’s not obvious, I loved Scott Adams." "I want to believe Scott Adams went to Heaven." "I’ll consider myself part of the same student body as all the other Adams fans, and join my fellows in tribute to our fallen instructor."

Yeah the essay was pretty scathing. I don’t recall him having a single good thing to say besides “but he’s really funny”. While i do admit, it gave me a critical perspective on Adams who I had a universally positive perspective on beforehand (and thus i suppose I am begrudgingly grateful for my new, more nuanced perspective) i don’t really see how anyone could read it as not bone picking/pissing on Adam’s grave.

@aswren I don’t really think so. Both Scott’s have many strengths, but I don’t think thick skins are among them

@DogIsABot I had a similar revulsion, but I think Adams would have liked it. He was a man, that for whatever his other faults was reflective, introspective and open. It’s a great bit of writing

Found the Scott Alexander Scott Adams post deeply upsetting. It starts with some extremely incisive, perceptive reflections. This is usually out of bounds, but fair when it comes from a place of care and love. Mid way through the post, it become clear this was not the case.

@PrefFalsifier Weirdly, I don’t think it was meant as an attack

@DogIsABot Yeah bad taste on Alexander’s part to attack a man who just died