Stuff I found on the Internet
"it is possible to make C code run quickly but only by spending thousands of person-years building a sufficiently smart compiler—and even then, only if you violate some of the language rules. Compiler writers let C programmers pretend that they are writing code that is "close to the metal" but must then generate machine code that has very different behavior if they want C programmers to keep believing that they are using a fast language"
"Conviviality matters for science for multiple reasons. One of them is epistemic: if you want to derive knowledge from your work, you need to know exactly what you are doing, and that includes a detailed understanding of your tools. Moreover, research is much facilitated if you also have the inverse: the ability to create a tool that does exactly what you want to do. And since science is a collective activity, in which participants critique and build on each other's work, the understanding of tools needs to be shared inside a discipline." (also discusses the Python 3 transition as an example of a loss of conviviality)
"Instead of regarding the obligation to use formal symbols as a burden, we should regard the convenience of using them as a privilege"
"An Arabic font is a small program. The text you store is its input, not its output. The word is performed fresh every time you look at it, like music from a score."
this ink is water-soluble
good research, but how to you get the conclusion of a paper like this and still have some hope that structuring a text in a particular way will meaningfully address the problem? "Even replacing a single bigram, "The user", (a phrase heavily associated with reasoning) with "The request" drops attack success rates by 19%." it's just a circus clown show
"When people are presented with a draft note (no matter what its origin) this will impact how they proceed. It should be relatively possible to check the contents of the note for accuracy (does that match what just happened?), though we guess this gets harder the longer the time lapse between encounter and chart note correcting. Surely it’s harder to chart from scratch later, too, but we’d be really interested to see studies of how much misinformation gets recorded with or without automatic chart note drafts."
Coem, Love Languages, Prāsa, Kip, Captive
extraordinary
good list of resources at the end
"The rationalist community rediscovers Bayesian epistemology and treats it like a revelation, apparently unaware that the philosophy of science has been working through these questions since the 1920s. Blog posts get treated as foundational texts. People who have never read Kuhn or Lakatos or Feyerabend construct an epistemology from first principles, marvel at what they’ve built, and proceed to use it as the intellectual building blocks for decisions that affect billions of people. The confidence is inversely proportional to the depth. Dunning-Kruger at scale."
book of photography from pokemon snap. except none of the pictures have pokemon
sort of a grown-up pico8? looks cool but i wish they had an explicit policy re: AI code
a lot of this resonates with me, but the nick bostrom ref takes me out of it, and honestly i have a hard time buying the idea that the best way to keep software open is a bunch of local openclaw installs
"Perhaps, back then, the problem was that FOSS communities lacked the political consciousness necessary to recognise their strategic position and to connect it to a broader context and a theory of economic warfare. Nowadays, we deal with the reverse problem — growing political awareness with little strategic application."
"You’re just going to have to trust me because my editor told me I shouldn’t include links to hardcore porn in a magazine article, sorry."
"resources for unions, labor organizations, and worker-organizers fighting AI and automation at work"
"If a working version of an operating system exists somewhere, the goal is to have it here, in a form anyone can run on a reasonably modern laptop/desktop."
this is such a good list
"Unlike those of us that got an early glimpse of the potential of the internet before corporatism chewed it up and spit it back at us in subscription form, all many young Americans have seen is profoundly terrible assholes doing increasingly vile things in a country too broken, stupid, corrupt, and racist to function or resist"