I had no idea that ottoman had a color.

It’s nice. Feels like browsing in an old western saloon.

I don’t think it has to be, or even should be the case really. I mean, as a general rule I don’t think it’s a great idea to let kids download stuff off the internet and run it without a knowledgeable adult at least reviewing what they’re doing, or pre-screening what software they’re allowed to use if they’re younger than a certain age. You can introduce kids to open source software and teach them computer skills while still putting limits on what they’re allowed to do, e.g. not allowed to install software without asking a parent, or only allowing them to test software on an old machine that doesn’t have sensitive data on it. I know I got thrown to the internet as a kid but I don’t think that’s the best way for kids to learn stuff.

That said, I don’t have kids and don’t plan on having them, so I don’t know how realistic that is for kids nowadays. I don’t know if they’re still as far ahead of the adults as we were when it came to working the internet so I recognize the possibility that that all may be clueless childless adult nonsense.

I don’t share your concerns about the profession. Even supposing for a moment that LLMs did deliver on the promise of making 1 human as productive as 5 humans were previously, that isn’t how for-profit industry has traditionally incorporated productivity gains. Instead, you’ll just have 5 humans producing 25x output. If code generation becomes less of a bottleneck (which it has been doing for decades as frameworks and tooling have matured) there will simply be more code in the world that the code wranglers will have to wrangle. Maybe if LLMs get good enough at generating usable code (still a big if for most non-trivial jobs), some people who previously focused on low-level coding concerns will be able to specialize in higher-level concerns like directing an LLM, while some people will still be writing the low-level inputs for the LLMs, sort of like how you can write applications today without needing to know the specific ins and outs of the instruction set for your CPU. I’m doubtful that that’s around the corner, but who knows. But whatever the tools we have are capable of, the output will be bounded by the abilities of the people who operate the tools, and if you have good tools that are easily replicated, as software tools are, there’s no reason not to try and maximize your output by having as many people as you can afford and cranking out as much product as you can.

IME:

If each over-universe is capable of simulating multiple under-universes, I would think that being toward the fringe is way more likely than being toward the root. Maybe we’re in one of the younger universes where life hasn’t evolved to the point where it’s simulating universes complex enough to generate intelligent life for a hobby. Or maybe others in this universe have and Earth is just a backwater.

I don’t think it’s as simple as the teapot. We can already simulate tiny “universes” with computers that have internally consistent rules, and there’s no reason to think those simulations couldn’t get more sophisticated as we harness more computing power, which I think puts an interesting lens on the “why are we here?” question. I don’t think there’s evidence to believe that we are in a simulation, but I think there are reasons why it’s an interesting question to wrestle with that “What about a giant floating teapot?” doesn’t share.

Why would I send anything to some anonymous internet black hole instead of a journalist?

I have big plans for those repos and I am definitely going to get around to it 🥹

There’s no way there aren’t sexy twink spies as well.

Something that sucks but still helps me is taking caffeine breaks. I feel like ass during them but by the time I get to that point I don’t really feel much from what I think could reasonably be considered an alarming amount of caffeine, after a few to many days I’ll have some again and I get some benefit from it. Or at least don’t feel quite so crappy.

cross-region failovers are a thing, but they’re expensive to maintain so not everyone does it. I am kinda surprised one region failure had this much impact though

You might be able to do a find and replace with https://github.com/pymupdf/PyMuPDF . I’m not an expert on PDFs, so I’m not sure if it can be done in a way that preserves all the important formatting, but if you feel comfortable DMing me the PDF (or one of similar complexity) I could try to write a script that replaces all instances of the target text in a way that preserves the rest of the document.

Neat. Do they still put the seat warmers behind a paywall?

That’s one of the cool things about stories, IMO. the narrative of the same events can change dramatically depending on the context in which they are being retold. You can tell a lot about why someone retells a story based on what parts stay the same, what parts change (and how), and what parts get dropped in later retellings.

Why not? Science should be done in the public view. I want more professional scientists in my feed.

EDIT: and amateur scientists. And non-scientists who are curious.

Storytelling is how we build memories. I like to just let em roll and see if I notice anything new. The idea that we can only tell stories exactly once to each audience and then have to seal them away forever is… kinda lonely.