Thoughts
Good morning.
Stressing myself out thinking about copyright licenses again.
I should make a list of the issues I have with Codeberg's "Licensing" page.
"Licenses which permit to close the source, i.e. temporarily-open licenses." like what does this mean. Like I know what copyleft means. But I don't know if they do. Ah. You know what it is, they're assuming the project publicly accepts contributions. More accurate wording isn't temporal, for example "Licenses which permit re-licensing new versions under a proprietary license without the agreement of all contributors."
Downloaded Balatro at 8pm. Just beat ante 8 for the first time. Sick Baseball Card + Shortcut + level 8 straight build.
Okay so here's the deal. My brain is basically turned off. However, I still live. And I am still a real person. I need to eat lunch and
unfortunately that is an operation today. However, we will keep moving.
"It's just enough to be strong in the broken places"
-Faith Enough, Jars of Clay
I am real person because God made me.
This is very important advice and I wish I had heard it before trying to write an SD card spec implementation in Zig.
> Here's how you deal with byte order:
> Cry
> Suffer
> Code the program to deal with it
I got the first two steps down, but missed the third one.
I say my passion is programming, but actually my passion is hunting mammoths. Unfortunately I was born in the wrong epoch.
It's funny to me how musicians continue to refer to "tracks" on "records" even after everyone else has stopped.
Decided to stay up until midnight tonight instead of yesterday night because of complicated calculations performed by the bees in my head.
Me with a super-dim flashlight that Iâve had since I was 10 that I canât get rid of because itâs now nostalgic:
There must have been a moment at the beginning where I could have said no. Somehow I missed it.
I love âthere must have been a moment at the beginning where we could have said no.â It was a Reddit comment about someone ending up as the
guardian of a kid they didnât want, somehow (they were honestly confused and unable to explain how). And I love it because itâs hilarious, because there definitely wasnât a time to say âno.â Child-distribution isnât something that you opt-out of. But I also love it because, isnât that all of our lives? Arenât there things where weâre like âsurely I couldâve said no to thisââbut you couldnât have. Stuff doesnât happen to you by default. And the stuff that does happen to us, we donât have a say in. We all are where we are because of our decisions to do things and not do things and how we react to the things that we canât control. And we know weâre in control, because we are, but that doesnât mean we end up where we want to be. Iâm the one that took every step but Iâm still lost.
=> https://thoughts.learnerpages.com/?show=44ebf380-38af-4d08-af86-a17785d4ba2a
Edit 12:14am Jan 2nd: Okay so I've Googled the quote and it's actually from a movie. Or maybe a play. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100519/characters/nm0000377) It's as of yet unclear whether my brain hallucinated the reddit-post context or if it was quoted there.
John provides this image without commentary (beyond that he sees "huge differences" in his signature that other people don't see) but I love
it as an example of what perfectionism can do to you. When you're a perfectionist or detail-oriented, no one notices issues that you notice, ever. But some of those issues are important and some of them are unimportant. Not only are the differences in the signature something that doesn't matter to the person receiving it; the scale that they're being judged on is completely subjectiveâinvented by John himself over the course of countless hours signing pages. If you care about details and other people don't then it's difficult to discern what details are meaningful and which ones are a result of your brain ruthlessly judging every detail.
Schwab Charitable is rebranding to DAFgiving360 which might be the ugliest company name I've ever seen in my life. It looks like a password.
I cannot think today. because I am too stressed. I am going to explode. my head is full of bees.
o3 performance is very impressive.
The o-series CoT-token approach is very inelegant, but this proves it can get the same results as human reasoning, in terms of general-purpose problem solving, self-feedback, and arbitrary-complexity algorithms. (Things earlier LLMs couldnât do.)
We have a long way to go to make it cost effective, quick, and to shore up the remaining issues (e.g. special reasoning or letter-based questions that are limited by the linear-token-window input), but thatâs implementation, that will happen eventually. (This is a subtle change from my previous stance.)
It remains to be seen if there are remaining breakthroughs that allow these problems to be solved more elegantly (e.g. using a different representation for CoT tokens, or a training breakthrough that requires a smaller training dataset).
I think the âwillâ question is still open; Iâm kind of still skeptical this will lead to computers that are able to act independently (I.e. without prompting).
I love this image so much because youâd have to get permission from like 8 different copyright holders if you wanted to sell it.
Culture is just inherently supposed to be so referential.
This is fanart by Shepscape. They obviously have copyright on their art.
Itâs fanart of the Hermitcraft SMP. You could avoid using the HermitCraft trademark when referring to the piece and so thatâs probably not a problem.
More specifically, itâs fanart of Shepscapeâs HermitCraft x Detroit: Become Human crossover AU. Again, I donât think thereâs anything in the image itself that would be a problem but you would have to avoid using the trademark when describing it.
HermitCraft is of course a Minecraft SMP. The only evidence of this in the image is that X is wearing an axolotl skin, which had recently been added to the game. I donât think Microsoft would have a case that this was their axolotl design.
However, X has only mixed this axolotl design into his normal skin, which is based on the protagonist of Doom, âDoom Guy,â who is copyright id Software.
Ethoâs skin is similarly from a pre-existing media, namely, Naruto.
I believe all three of the creators pictured, Etho, Xisuma, and Cubfan (the metal arm is throwing me off since I donât follow the AU but I believe this is Cub), have copyright on their own depiction.
Now, this particular comic (of which this image is just the first two panels) is themed around Joywaveâs song âDestruction,â which is copyright Cultco music/Hollywood Records.
However, the lyric in the first panel, âwill the soundtrack kindly produce a soundâ is a sample from Disneyâs *Fantasia* (1940).
I think that covers it. Iâm assuming Cubâs skin is original to him and Iâm assuming the BWOMP is original to Joywave (at least for practical purposes as itâs transcribed here).
I could put up with the lack of technological details except that thereâs also a lack of political details.
Weâre 8 episodes in and there are no (living) named characters on Earth.
> âBut the new protocols had been introduced way back in August of 2245, and we are now approaching the end of 2246. Werner himself has been on Mars for more than six months, and objectively things have only gotten worse. Back on Earth, some Omnicorp executives were starting to get concerned that the bold new direction their CEO was embarking on was taking them nowhere good.
> But Werner had two things working in his favor. First, his supporters on the board of directors were still with him. The grumbling about the new protocols back on Earth mostly came from people who had not wanted Werner to be CEO in the first place, and they were a minority.
> The majority on the board still supported him and his mission to modernize and streamline this great hulking near shipwreck they had inherited from the late Vernon Byrd. The other thing was that thanks to his centralization of control, most of the really bad stuff happening on Mars was being papered over. Earth was not really getting the whole story here.â
(Revolutions 11.8)
Compared to the same author describing the British reaction to the failed Stamp Act. (Revolutions 2.3)
> âOkay, so by the spring of 1766, the Stamp Act has been repealed, and the Declaratory Act passed.
> This formula for ending the crisis worked well for the moment, but Lord Rockingham did not long survive the solution, and in July he was dismissed as Prime Minister. In his place, George III turned to the man who had successfully steered Britain to victory during the Seven Years War, William Pitt the Elder. This was good news for the colonies, as Pitt had just come out as a full-throated supporter of American interests, but while it looked good on paper, the reality left much to be desired.
> In accepting the Prime Ministership, Pitt was also created First Earl of Chatham, taking him out of the House of Commons and plopping him into the House of Lords, where his ability to manage daily administration was much reduced. Not that it mattered anyway, Pitt was in poor health and frequently absent from London altogether. Without a strong guiding hand, the individual ministers were left to their own devices.â
I think this is a fair comparison. Theyâre both trying to say the same thing but the second one is actually interesting, actually compelling, because itâs giving you some level of fact. I donât even want to say detail because theyâre both pretty high level, but naming the opposition and explaining why he couldnât do anything is so much better than not naming the opposition and explaining why theyâre completely irrelevant.
And this is where I go back to the internet technology issueâyou canât just say âEarth was not really getting the whole storyâ with 0 explanation. You canât just take for granted that Werner has the ability to limit the flow of information between citizens. And I donât need it to be believable, but you canât pretend like all information is communicated on letters that Werner is responsible for hand-delivering. And Iâm not cutting anything. The explanation for why Wernerâs board of directors and shareholders supported h the New Protocols, despite their failures, was âEarth wasnât getting the full story.â
One of my other problems with Revolutions, and a lot of sci-fi, is that entire sections of the plot fall apart if a single person has my
level of understanding of technology.
Like you can write a fantasy world without end-to-end encryption but if you write a sci-fi world without end-to-end encryption you have to explain to me why all knowledge of end-to-end encryption was lost.
Maybe if Iâm bored one day Iâll run the hypothetical of âwhat if everyone in the world was infinitely smart?â
Iâve been thinking about it recently because the Martian Revolution podcast has an antagonist who is described by the narrator as extremely smart and simultaneously makes numerous awful decisions. I mightâve mentioned this before, but itâs an equivocation that I find frustrating.
The other week I listened to the album *Welcome to the Black Parade* through, and despite wanting to like MCR, I don't think I really got it
until doing that.
My last couple of thoughts, including this one, have been incomprehensible and I hate it. Explaining myself is so tricky.
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Andrew Kelley will do this thing where he responds to a simple question with a single link and no commentary. And it's iconic because it's
easier to write a single sentence, so in linking to the documentation, he's putting in more work in order to be 30% more passive-aggressive.
My parents tried to warn me that *A Tale of Two Cities* isnât good, meanwhile Iâm reading these sentences over and over to myself.
Transcript
âfor these reasons, the jury, being a loyal jury (as he knew they were), and being a responsible jury (as they knew they were), must positively find the prisoner Guilty, and make an end of him, whether they liked it or not. That, they could never lay their heads upon their pillows; that, they could never tolerate the idea of their wives laying their heads upon their pillows; that, they could never endure the notion of their children laying their heads upon their pillows; in short, that there never more could be, for them or theirs, any laying of heads upon pillows at all, unless the prisonerâs head was taken off.
Blurred Zoom backgrounds are so out of fashion now that AI generate images with blurred backgrounds.
Jon Bois quoting "people who have been flattened by the Earth still live" in his own video is so funny.
"Triple to gap" joins "extraregional" in the category of Minecraft speedrun strat names that sound amazing.
The "o" in "to" is a schwa, you can almost say 'triple-da-gap' (going like Italian, not Brooklyn).
I wish my brain was awake today. I had half a margarita last night and then stayed up until 11p so Iâm basically hung over.
Iâm such a hater
Why do you need a relational database???? There's just no way.
I guess I shouldn't meme because I haven't actually looked at the regz internals. Maybe there is somewhere in this single-file Zig script that produces a single output where it makes sense to serialize the input into a binary format and run SQL queries against it.
microzig developers in their efforts to overcomplicate things are converting from xml -> sqlite -> zig instead of from xml -> zig directly.
Ah yes I've always wanted to store my register definitions in a relational database.
Yesterday I conducted a double blind taste-test between Liquid Death brand water, store-brand spring water, and tap water. The spring water
narrowly beat out the Liquid Death on texture. However, it was conclusive in establishing that my tap water tastes awful. The experiment identified a potential area for future study: whether my cups make water taste bad, as all three had a bitter, plasticy taste that I don't remember from metallic containers like my Hydro Flask or the Liquid Death can.
Good news. The maternal mortality rate in Seirra Leone is twice the global average.
This is unironically good news because it's down
from 5 times the global average 6 years ago, but I still think we can do better.
(This is the number of mothers who die in childbirth as a fraction of the number of births.)
Theory: songs that sounded good over the radio were very smooth because they had to survive static.
Breakcore then introduces static.
Wait this literally just occurred to me, what if your primary Git branch was `mistress`. I'm sure someone's thought of that before. master
is cancelled because it's gendered.
I think hannahxxrose x Feinberg is the most delusional I am about anything.
Like there's nothing there and I think they're so cute.
Still not over Definitely Typed. One of those things that you would say is impossible if it didn't exist.
There are a lot of people, me included, who try to speak with a tone above their experience. Often times, this falls flat. Zig's mlugg is
one of the people who genuinely speaks as if he is older than he is. Now, you can tell he's young because he talks about things as if he's never talked about it before, but he sounds like someone older talking about something they've never talked about before, if that makes sense.
The head maintainer of the Catppuccin org is Hammy. His area of expertise is CI. Historically, I havenât been the biggest fan of CI, it
alway seems less exciting than âactually working on the project.â But itâs really impressive to see how Hammy is able to use it as a tool to compensate for areas heâs not familiar with and magnify the scope of what heâs able to do. By investing time to make sure that repos have CI to handles dependency updates, check builds, and publish new versions, Hammy can handle a lot of the boring and administrative parts of maintenance. Thereâs a Catppuccin AUR repo that uses CI to check for updates in the underlying packages and automatically publish new versions to the AUR. Hammy doesnât run Arch; he got other maintainers or volunteers to do the actual packaging once, then he wrote the CI configuration to do it repeatedly, automatically. If someone else built the project once, you can use CI to maintain it, keep it up-to-date, flag breakages, review and merge PRs, and publish new releases *without even cloning it locally*. Definitely very cool.
"plausible...for up to a minute" Google Genie 2 marketing.
(Okay, this is a research blog post, not a product.)
But still, AI moment.
Not to be libertarian, but there's a law in America that sets a minimum medical loss ratioâi.e. it caps the percentage profit an insurance
company can make.
I'm not an economist but it seems like a bad idea because the only way to increase profits is to increase expenses. I think it was a part of ObamaCare which only went into effect in 2012, but insurance costs have been rising disproportionate of other countries since before that, so it's not our only problem.
> If you realize that youâre dying, they only thing to do is turn back toward your childhood. Oh so many people donât realize, or realize
> too late. I saw a man getting a transfusion of blood. Though it was necessary to keep him alive, the pain of having it injected into him incapacitated him.
"If you're walking and you're frustrated 'cause you're not where you want to be yet, bro you're missing it."
https://youtu.be/dxah7uHPYo0
At some point you do have to have a goal.
There's a bit in The Great Divorce where an artist is talking about how much he wants to paint heaven. And his friend is like, 'you're missing it. When you were a kid, you didn't paint for the sake of painting, you painted to capture the beauty of the world. If you're looking at it only for the sake of painting it, you're not seeing it.' (p. 82) There's sin in both directions. There's sin in stagnation and there's sin in movement for the sake of movement. There are small amounts of Goodness in everything, but those small amounts of goodness are not God. There's a trope of Tumblr posts and modern atheist thinking that says that life is about appreciating the small things, your cat or your trip to Japan. And those things are good. And it can be dangerous, finding yourself in a place mentally where you can't see any goodness. And for that person who is in a depression, it can be easier to see the small amounts of goodnessâthe beauty of a single flower, or a good meal, or their family's love. And moving towards those visible good things can be a way to get out of their slump. But those small, easily visible, good things are not God. God is bigger. Your reason for living needs to be bigger.
"Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!" -Luke 2:14
âyou canât just do what is best, you also have to build trust and coordinate with others so you are on the same pageâ
Zig programmers are driving me insane.
Zig lets you write some code without specifying the types of variables, and somehow the Zig programmers end up in a situation where they donât know the types of their variables.
Thereâs a B-plot in Colferâs *Supernatralist* about gangs that race cars, and itâs really good. The A-plot has some really weird structural
issues. So Iâm really not a fan of the book. I read it back in the day, just picked up a copy to see if the car race scene was as good as I remember. Itâs quick, but pretty good. (I mean, itâs a kids book.) Pages 81-111 (midway through chapter 4 to midway through chapter 5âonce the race is over itâs back to A-plot).
I wish I could describe why the A-plot is so bad. I think itâs because the characters donât have much investment in it.