I will repeat this as many times as I need to: no matter how terrible you think your writing is, I would far rather read it than anything that came out of an LLM.
A programmer, interested in life, the universe and everything.
I will repeat this as many times as I need to: no matter how terrible you think your writing is, I would far rather read it than anything that came out of an LLM.
"Three generations of Europeans have lived in a world in which they’ve been vassals of either the United States or the Soviet Union. That has taken a severe mental toll, and we can see it in our political leadership on this continent. Europeans have been dependent on the United States - militarily, economically and culturally - for so long that they’ve lost the ability to imagine a world that’s any different" - https://davekeating.substack.com/p/an-eight-point-plan-to-free-europe (can't vouch for the rest of the article yet)
Europe appears to just have given up on doing anything technical. Perhaps we should hurry up & stop pretending we want to do anything ourselves, so we can speed up getting to our eventual destiny of a full time holiday destination for American, Chinese and Russian tourists. And mind you, that is the _best_ outcome I can see right now. https://therecord.media/spain-awards-contracts-huawei-intelligence-agency-wiretaps
A very “surprising pattern” that people don’t want to use fucking shit that doesn’t fucking work and depends on stealing people’s work and fucking lighting the mother-fucking planet on fire while feeding their fucking money into the greedy throats of billionaires.
Narrator: Thomas tried to push the giant cat out of the way, but the kitty didn't move.
Photo: Irene Nathanson #Photography #Photographie #Fotografie #Nature #Wildlife #NaturePhotography #WildlifePhotography #Cats #cat #caturday #CatsOfMastodon #FediCats #Felines
The Rogue Court vs Modern Democracy
I wrote this two years ago, after the Court effectively abolished affirmative action. It’s even more obvious now: America can accept the Roberts Court as legitimate and its rulings as the final word - or it can have democracy in a pluralistic society.
Not both.
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-rogue-court-vs-modern-democracy
In my Portable Puzzle Collection, it was recently (a few weeks ago) the 20th birthday of the game "Mines": a reimplementation of Minesweeper which ensures every grid can be solved by reasoning rather than guesswork. The first click in a completely blank grid is guaranteed to be safe, and to open an area of more than one clue, and after that, you can always identify a safe square to open next by thinking about the currently visible clues.
This makes it possible to generate grids with a much higher density of mines than standard randomised Minesweeper, such as the example shown here with 99 mines in only a 16×16 grid. I actually didn't predict that this would be possible when I wrote the grid generator originally: I only expected to be able to play on settings like the standard Windows ones, without those nasty last-minute frustrations. The ability to turn up the density by more than a factor of 2 was a very pleasant surprise – my algorithm was far more effective than I had anticipated!
The odd thing about Mines is: in the past 20 years, this one game has received far more bug reports about insoluble game instances than any other puzzle in my collection. Very likely more than all the other games *put together*.
But not one of those reports has turned out to be a real bug in the grid generation. In cases where they sent a save file or a game ID, I generally played through the game myself to make sure; if they only sent a screenshot, I've always at least pointed out something I could see in the picture. *Everybody* who sent this kind of report turned out to have missed something.
Happy 20th birthday, Mines!
I’m done with trickle-down economics. I’m inventing piñata economics. That’s where we beat rich people with sticks until money falls out of them.
Every engineer worthy of the title adopts one unshakeable article of faith: POPULARITY IS NOT A QUALITY METRIC
Wednesday, it's Captain!
(see https://mathstodon.xyz/@Scmbradley/114676343373917170, https://infosec.exchange/@isotopp/114680337675015896, now posted from a proper computer with a keyboard and edit tools instead of a cellphone, and on an actual Wednesday)
"I think we're beyond words at the moment. We're into the final solution, where you intentionally create a famine while you're killing people so you can make sure that the wounded die of the fact that their bodies are incapable of healing."
Ghassan Abu-Sittah
Conflict Surgeon. Head of Division of Plastic Surgery and founder of Conflict Medicine Program, American University of Beirut Medical Center.
Been horrifying teammates by referring to undocumented information that's held only in people's heads as "locked in meat storage".
Please use this with your teams/projects and report back on how they like it?