@mmasnick.bsky.social Big Head, is that you?

I’m on one hour of sleep, I have been reading about the negative effects of LLMs and I’m thinking about starting a religion honoring the intrinsic dignity of the human mind and valorizing education, arts and crafts, and self-improvement

British understatement among the !Kung of the Kalahari:

“Say that a man has been hunting. He must not come home and announce like a braggart, ‘I have killed a big one in the bush!’ He must first sit down in silence until someone else comes up to his fire and asks, ‘What did you see today?’ He replies quietly, ‘Ah, I’m no good for hunting. I saw nothing at all . . . maybe just a tiny one.’ Then I smile to myself because I know he has killed something big.”

Turbo Pascal vs. Pedro Pascal.

#Pascal

If you use the word "utilize", I'm gonna assume you just want to sound smarter than you are.

It's a dime-word. There's almost never a reason to ever use it, so when you do, it sticks out as a conscious choice to avoid simpler, more useful words.

It's one of my pet peeves, since every cult/MLM salesman I've ever met utilizes utilize. It's a bamboozle-word.

@Craigp ditto “leverage”

This is a fun puzzle from Inigo Quilez at the bad place.

It's shorter than you're probably thinking even if you're taking account of the fact that it's shorter than you're probably thinking.

So frickin cool

https://m.dpreview.com/photography/5400934096/probe-lenses-and-focus-stacking-the-secrets-to-incredible-photos-taken-inside-instruments

@dan I would like to use it as a futon

@pervognsen ha, I've been using fish for a few years and didn't know about either. On my Mac over SSH to Linux (with fish running both places), alt-s works fine, but the second binding doesn't work either locally or remotely. Maybe I need to figure out how to hook up fzf to the `cdh` command?

The Cursor AI Editor is so good, it generates code that is literally useless. In the marketing example at the top of their homepage.

If these tools just automate bad decisions and useless code, they're a net-negative for productivity.

https://lukasatkinson.de/2025/net-negative-cursor/

@irene I thought Porsche still used boxers more widely than they apparently do. I guess it’s pretty much just Subaru now. Another Subaru quirk: frameless windows. Not sure anyone else does that.

Why don’t the Saxons just fuck off back to Saxony? Britain for Britons!

https://open.substack.com/pub/samkriss/p/an-island-of-strangers?r=4tjsy&utm_medium=ios

@carnage4life what idiot would hire Amazon to build a user interface?

@carnage4life I mean, I guess this is better than not chickening out...

@simontatham @fanf "Roughly speaking, the discrepancy of a sequence is low if the proportion of points in the sequence falling into an arbitrary set B is close to proportional to the measure of B, as would happen on average (but not for particular samples) in the case of an equidistributed sequence."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-discrepancy_sequence

@palvaro must be a full moon