The Count is a little like Batman, but Bruce Wayne was rich before his parents was murdered. Dante was well-off before he was imprisoned,
but he wasn’t rich. He could have chosen to go back to that lifestyle after he left prison, but he didn’t. He became super rich, not because he valued money, but because he needed to be super rich in order to compete at the same level of the people that he was trying to get revenge on. The dramatic irony of The Count pulling a straight face with Villeforte is that The Count’s wealth, and lifestyle, and life, is a sham to get his revenge.
Imagine a Count of Monte Cristo adaptation where The Count is imprisoned for a legitimate mistake, but he goes insane in prison and
imagines a conspiracy against him. When he escapes, he punishes Villeforte and the others for their imagined crimes. It's shown that Villeforte and the others are not good people and probably deserve what's coming to them, but they weren't the ones who threw The Count in jail.
Aahhah *squeals*
I love The Count of Monte Cristo too much.
There was a post about Inigo Montoya, and as he's fighting the 6-fingered man, he offers him money and power, and Inigo says "I want my father back" before stabbing him. From the comments on the post,
> you know because this is a happy book (film) that Inigo will get his revenge, but will he get justice? Will he get absolution? Will he get catharsis? Those are the things we don't know and that line sells it more than any of the previous scenes.
And this is The Count. The Count is such a powerful, almost perfect, person, that he's going to get what he wants. It's cheesy how smart and strong and rich and powerful The Count is. The Count has everything that everyone else wants, but he doesn't want it! The Count is rich, and he knows it, and he knows that it doesn't matter. The Count wants the last 20 years of his father's life back. (Dante's father starved to death shortly before Dante would have been able to re-unite to him, because Dante wasn't there to provide for him.)
That's why The Count works as a character despite being cheesy and overpowered, is because he's having to settle for revenge.
Sometimes you don't feel like doing anything because you're actually just mentally done and you can't do anything. But other times:
* You're thirsty, hungry, hot, or cold
* You're tired and should actually sleep
* You're making the problem more difficult than it needs to be
* You have the energy to be doing something, just not the thing you're trying to do (e.g. sometimes I have the energy to fold laundry and sometimes I have the energy to write code, but they're different types of energy so I rarely have both at the same time)
It's important to realize that in none of these cases, including the one where you're mentally dead, is the solution to push through it and work anyways. It's also important to note that doom-scrolling actively prevents you from noticing other issues.
I went insane in 2009.
Hm
Hmmmm
I'm bored of the word "insane."
Maybe I'll continue the "my mind is" anaphora series.
The "my mind is" anaphora series, which I last updated Jan 12, 2021:
My mind is like oatmeal, a mush
My mind is like a vuvuzela
My mind is like a peanut and butter jelly sandwich, the least substantial real meal possible
My mind is like a pile of sand, falling over but very slowly
My mind is like a crescent wrench, and my problems are like a screw
My mind is like a box of chocolate, you never know what you’re going to get, but probably chocolate
My mind is like a pineapple, spiky on the outside and tastes bad on the inside
My mind is like a downward staircase
My mind is like a soda, mostly waters but with bubbles
My mind is like a steel trap and my thoughts are like water running through it
My mind is a little like a maraca
My mind is like a washing machine, spinning
Basically, I don't like tomatoes. There are pretty much no foods which I enjoy which include tomatoes. So if a group of my friends had a party dedicated to wearing tomato themed costumes, and talking about how much they loved tomatoes, and, of course, eating a lot of tomato-based foods, I probably wouldn't go. This has never happened to me, but it feels like it with almost every social situation.
It's just kind of a miserable hypothetical, but it's no one's fault, no one's to blame, nothing's gone wrong. I don't know. If I end up seeing a therapist for social anxiety, this will definitely come up.
It is difficult to discuss functional programming in the context of JS and Lisp, since neither are purely functional or purely imperative. (Assembly is purely imperative)
Normal JavaScript code consists of a list of statements. This is called "imperative programming," since your program consists of a list of commands.
[doSomething(); \n doSomethingElse(); \n rect(200, 200, 50, 50); \n // etc]
In imperative programing, you have functions, but functions are often just more lists of commands.
```
var drawDog = function () {
ellipse();
drawSomething();
}
drawDog();
```
Functional programming is a programming style that focuses on function's ability to take input and return a value.
This is a lot closer to a mathematician's idea of a function.
So rather than describing a list of commands, you define a series of functions that manipulate their inputs and return new outputs.
In functional programming, you try to avoid writing functions that "mutate global state." Basically, a function's only job should be returning a calculated value. An example of mutating global state would be changing the appearance of the canvas, or changing the value of a variable which was declared outside the function. These are, of course, things that you do in Javascript all the time.
The problem with CS is that it's too easy to make things modular. In plumbing, you're working with these standardized composable units, the
pieces of pipe. And you have different options and you can combine them in different ways, but the building blocks are well defined.
In programming, that building blocks are not well defined. Every project, you have to first choose your building blocks, possibly creating your own new building blocks, before you can put them together.
The plumber has to choose the material and radius of the pipe, but that's about it. To stretch the metaphor, the programmer has to choose the pipe material, and shape, and whether there's going to be an integrated internet connection in the pipe. The plumber doesn't have to worry if it would be more efficient to run Ethernet along the same path as the pipes, because that's not really an option.
I feel like programmers, or at least I, spend a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to create these modules. If I could just create a perfect set of building blocks, or of modules, or functions, then all future programs wouldn't have to re-invent them, they would be able to just compose this perfect standard library of functions into every possible program. Then programming would be like plumbing, because you wouldn't be writing your own classes or utility functions, you would just be writing the application-unique logic.
What this view misses, is that plumbing is made up of connecting segments of PVC pipe because it has to be. If it were feasible to machine your own shapes of PVC pipe for every project, that's what plumbers would do.
This is no perfect set of standard library functions that make every project possible, because there is no clearly defined boundary between where the utility functions end and the project-specific code begins. Unlike in plumbing, where that line is very clearly defined. The factory produces sections of pipe, and the plumber doesn't have any other options.
It's truly an awful day for people named Matthias.
The Joker is about how people with mental issues who try to ignore them, rather than properly addressing them, drive themselves further into insanity. And so also me.
What if you had a programming language where you wrote it in a short-form, syntax sugar'ed syntax, but then it output a human-readable
verbose AST, which was the canonical, maintained version of the code? So you'd like, write the code, it would get compiled to this IR, and then you'd delete the original and check the IR into version control. Someone else can then take the IR on their computer, read it, decompile it into the shortened form, edit it, update the IR, etc. If you were unhappy with the generated IR, you could edit it by hand.
The challenge is creating an IR that is simultaneously explicit and verbose, and yet still readable.
The problem is that this is addressing a strawman. Concise code that relies on implicit behaviors is oftentimes easier to read than more verbose and explicit code.
Not to be a feminist or an incel, but maybe a woman could ask me on a date.
I’m not afraid of rejection, at least that’s not my main concern. On the contrary, my concern is that I’ll want to back out of the relationship. Men are just expected to know what we want in a girlfriend. And, I mean, I want to be that type of person. I want to be decisive, I want to be able to commit. But that commitment really scares me because then if <something> and I break up with her, I would feel bad.
> He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new! Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true:"
> “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life."
The thing to understand is that Christians are still salty about scientists switching to "CE" and "BCE."
I kind of want to delete the next paragraph, since it's just me ranting, but that's the point of this website.
I okay I literally have watched one video from that one YouTube channel, and it was about how dumb it was that our year system was based on a religious event, and they somehow stretched it into a long video and proposed moving the 0 year back like 20,000, and still can't tell if they were making a serious argument or if they were just ranting and I was supposed to enjoy them complaining about the 0-date being where it is. Anyways I have never watched another YouTube video from them, and I don't feel like I'm missing out.
When you sign up for Tumblr it forces you to choose tags to follow to get your feed started, so I started following #tech. So my feed is
constantly full of Bad Batch fan art, since there’s apparently a character named tech.
Under “Top tech blogs”
The official NASA Tumblr account. Fan art of The Bad Batch where the characters are drawn as horses.
Okay I have another weird programming language idea. Pass-by-value? pass-by-reference? What if you had to choose?
```
// There's no distinction between data types
// You need to use the `new` keyword to create a new object
var a = new 5;
var b = new [1, 2, 3, 4];
// Read as, "c also equals b", b and c are now both pointers to the same mutable data
var c = also b;
c[1] = 0;
print(b[1]); // prints 0, since the underlying array was mutated
// x and a are both 5, but they are the same 5
var x = also a;
x++;
print(a); // prints 6
// Copy keyword makes a copy of the data
var e = copy b;
// Conceptually, moves the data in b into f.
// b is now empty, an invalid reference
var f = move b;
```
Writing this out I think makes it really clear that there are three distinct options. And most programming languages have kind of erratic rules that treat different data types differently.
I think this would make programming a lot clearer.
I don't how to do function calls or other operations yet.
Discord is removing their username#discriminator system and moving to a globally-unique username and a global display name for everyone. I
think it's dumb. The only reason they cite is that it's hard to share usernames and discriminators with other people IRL. That's very true, but I would fix that by adding Snapchat-style QR codes to add friends. Usernames are just so boring. I'm going to go from being @Matthias#4910 to @matthias4910. Woohoo.
One of the nice things about Discord was how low-friction sign up was. You just told them your name and they rolled a discriminator for you, so you wouldn't have to pick a unique username when first signing up.
I mean, it's really like they said 'how can we appeal to more people.' 'we can make our product more similar to other people's.' And they're not wrong, but you're also removing the things that differentiated yourself.
If there's really a problem, you should try fixing it in a new way and see what happens. Choosing to fix in the way that everyone else fixed, while safe, is also really boring.
Zero being a set of numbers, basically the infinitesimals, works extremely well with my theology. Yes you read that right; my understanding
of Christianity is very similar to an obscure branch of mathematics known as the Hyperreal numbers.
Maybe one day I'll elaborate but I'm also extremely skeptical of attempting to post novel religious interpretations, because people have been doing this Christianity thing for a hell of a long time and most takes have already been thoroughly discussed in articles and essays that I'm not willing to read. I will say that my understanding is very similar to Lewis's depiction of hell as being compressed into an infinitely small point, as described in *The Great Divorce*.
Also I should finish watching this video:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dyjlRi8nuw0
I'm really uncomfortable being a leader because I don't like the responsibility for other people's outcomes. The problem is that that
extends to literally any form of giving advice or trying to convince someone that I'm right. I don't want to convince my friend to do something because if they do it and it ends poorly, I feel bad. But that's part of what being a friend is. I can't just let my friend do something that I think is dumb either.
Okay, so imagine you're Kelsier, and ask yourself, "what would Kelsier do in this situation?"
One of the big differences between conservatives and liberals is that if you're liberal you're expected to be liberal in every sense, but
the vast majority of conservatives are
– okay wait I think part of this is a terminally online thing, and most liberals I interact with are online and most conservatives I interact with in-person –
more frequently have beliefs that aren't aligned to a political or social spectrum and don't expect you to agree on all subjects.
You only have to be racist or sexist to be a conservative, but if you want to be a liberal you can't be either. (This is a dumb example but it gets the point across I think.)
One my most interesting revealing moments when growing up was talking to an islamicphobic woman (VD, for those who know her). I pointed
out that I had some Islamic friends. I don't remember what age I was at the time, middle school age maybe. There were a couple kids that would come over and play football or soccer with us on our street. And this woman said to me, and I quote, because I wrote the quote down, "Muslims are not friends with Christians. Those are not your friends."
And this is almost a comically extreme example, because "friends" is such a loosely applied term. But it's an example of a line of argument that is surprisingly common. It goes, in general, 'this group of people is not like us, and so when they say that they feel a certain way, they're really lying, and they're really trying to manipulate you.'
And in the general form, this is super common any time you're generalizing about a group of people. I've heard Christians say, 'Atheists don't know God's love, so they're incapable of loving like we do.'
And I just saw a post from a liberal perspective about how right wing people 'don't love their children in the same way that we do.' Or the classic, 'conservatives don't actually care about children, they just want to make women's lives difficult.'
And for me, this is just a complete non-starter. If your argument is, "those people over there are lying about caring and I actually care" then I just can't take you seriously. I've met way more people who care a lot about the wrong things or who care too much and draw conclusions that are dumb than I've met people who pretend to care in order to manipulate you. And moreover, while individual people may pretend to care in order to manipulate you, I have a very hard time believing that a group of people has been orchestrated in order to pretend to care. It's a lot easier to convince a group of people to care about something, than it is to convince a group of people to *pretend* to care about something.
Coordinated, large-scale, intentional, deception, does not happen.
So if I see someone saying "this group of people is lying to you" I pretty immediately assume that that person is too far gone, and their version of "this group of people" is a "group of people fundamentally unlike us." And I just don't think that groups of people are that fundamentally different.
Anyways, send post.
LaTeX is surprisingly close to the dream of Actually Flowers; a way to semantically describe documents such that any document renders well.
Of course, that isn't actually the goal of Actually Flowers and LaTeX isn't even close to that goal. It's just surprising to me that the comparison can be made at all since they are so different in theory.
Multi-user Linux (or macOS for that matter) in 2023 is a joke.
And that's fine, but we should admit that it's fine and stop trying to secure systems across users when having things functional across users is next to impossible.
Ben Shapiro kind of jumped the shark. As someone who's relatively moderate, I used to appreciate him as a voice of reason on the
conservative side. Unfortunately, I now don't see him as much better than other conservatives. For example, he avoided Trump's cult in 2016 and was always relatively critical of him. He's still critical of Trump, but now seems to be backing DeSantis heavily. I, on the other hand, am not a fan of DeSantis. I think his politics in Florida have been too authoritarian.
95% of light color schemes could be improved by changing the text color to pure black.
(Or indistinguishably close. This site uses #092B3B, which you can tell isn't black if you have a large swatch of it, but in text looks black. The point is that you shouldn't use a dark gray. Light code color schemes will use like #4D4D4D and it looks awful. Not enough contrast.)
Just saw a post claiming that if we had just stayed home for 2 months, COVID would have been eradicated.
Everyone stayed home for a year and wore masks in public for close to two years and it didn't matter. Don't try to retcon that COVID restrictions were too lax or weren't followed.
'If Biden had only implemented a UBI then COVID would be eradicated.' People were going to meet up with friends anyways. I guarantee you COVID was spread through parties and hang-outs more than work, because many companies had and still have mask requirements for customer service workers. Yes it is a failure of the human condition that we cannot live in solitary confinement for 2 months.
At least this is different from the last liberal take I saw on COVID, which argued that wearing a mask is a moral necessity, indefinitely, in order to protect people with immunodeficiencies.
I’m so disappointed in this soup. It looks so good and I’m in the mood for soup but it takes like drinking lemon juice.
In defense of the soup, it is labeled as a lemon soup. I should have foreseen this possibility. It’s got good flavors they’re just overpowered by the lemon. Maybe it will be better once it cools down.
--the earth folds around--. The trees waver, and the windows shake.
the
wind
flows through a
deserted
landscape.
heaps of discarded, once loved, still lovable, fabrics, covering only each other and the ground. Great unscalable mounds, stretching east and west.
The ground rumbles. The discarded bread crust to your right quivers and rocks.
Blue lightening zags across the purple sky, cutting it down the middle. In the distance, the wind carries plastic trash in swirls through the air.
You notice, in front of you, a person kneeling on the ground. They're staring into the distance. Their eyes are blue, but unfocused. The wind whips their dirty-blond hair, but they don't care.
hug care love hold please
let me help you
The wind stops.
The sky turns blue.
The rubbish that was in turmoil grows still.
tears
The trees stand strong. Their roots are deep. They tower over all, unshakable and unmoving.
Hermitcraft TCG is doing a print run. I'm a little sad about that, because it seems to be geared towards people who are used to paying money
to collect cards.
I've never played a trading card game before, never even had Pokemon cards as a kid. But I was enjoying watching the hermits play, because it was pretty chill. Every hermit that was taking it seriously seemed to be able to find the cards to build the deck that they wanted.
When the only way to get cards to play the game is by gambling with your real-life money, that's kind of screwed up in my opinion. That's not a game that I could ever imagine myself having fun playing. Haha I win because I have more money than you and I bought 10 booster packs.
And here's the thing. I'm not saying it's impossible to make a collectable card game that doesn't do that. I'm saying Beef has completely and utterly sold out by encouraging people to spend literally hundreds of dollars to try to get signed, holographic cards. Beef's video is literally 'you have a chance to get a signed holographic card in every pack!' Instead of, 'here's a cheap, fun, game to play with your friends.'
To put that another way, it's not all about the card game itself. I'm having trouble getting over that. Part of the game experience is "how well" you can collect cards to build your deck. And the primary factor that controls how well you can collect cards, is how much money you're willing to spend.
One more time, I think that the fact that there are aftermarket stores where you can buy card packs for other collectable card games is screwed up. I view that aspect of it as a distraction or a necessary evil, with the real challenge being developing your deck strategy and playing the the game well. But Beef and the other Hermits are trying to create an aftermarket ecosystem. They see that as a feature.
Tumblr monetization update: there’s now lore behind the merch store. The fictional Brick Whartey has gone on vacation and the fictional
crabs that manufacture the merchandise have gone on strike.
A publicly traded company has created fictional unionized factory workers in order to convince socialists to buy merchandise that was almost certainly manufactured by real factory workers that are not unionized. Capitalism is amazing!
Tumblr users like crabs and unions. Someone at Tumblr: ‘please buy our merch, it was manufactured by unionized crabs.’
One time I had a teacher who made a big deal about how we were not allowed to use any copyrighted characters or media for our project. And
then he demoed a project from a previous year that was literally just based on *The Martian*. Like the main character's name was Mark Watney and it took place on Mars. And I pointed this out, and the teacher proceeded to explain how The Martian book was originally published online for free under a public domain license, and that the characters were actually public domain. Now, as far as I can tell, this just isn't true. I couldn't turn up any reference to it anywhere. So my theory is that this group in a previous year created a *The Martian* fan project and then when questioned, they gaslit this teacher into believing that it was public domain.
The left fielders. The non believers. The short chubby kids with red hair and freckles and toes that are a bit too long.
The other side of the fence, the upside down painting and, of course, the inside of an elephant.
People that are washed up, too tired, sleeping on the roadside, like an old rusty can on a beach.
Dirt and grime and dust. A little too long since the last success. A little too long since they were clean and popular and fancy.
A little too long before they will be again.
Some people need a little more than a freshening-up. They need a deep clean, a real scrub. They need you to shift your perspective.
Inside out.
Black socks. Broken guitar strings. Dirty headlights. New glasses.
“Hey There Delilah” is such a great song but the production/recording is so uninspired. Put some passion into it.
Edit: Plain White T’s is a rock group, and it’s like I can tell that the song could be a rock song, but it’s not. It sounds like you should be able to sing along to it like you can to “Sweet Caroline.”
Well, tailscale stopped working. The mac app just loads endlessly without connecting. Good job everyone.
Edit Apr 12: I think this was a conflict between Cloudflare WARP and Tailscale. (Both provide VPN-style functionality.) Cloudflare WARP wasn't running, or shouldn't have been running, but it's possible Cloudflare left some configuration dangling or something, which wouldn't be Tailscale's fault.
Rewatch is something that I want to exist so bad, that I would use, but that I just can't enjoy making.
I wonder if I just chose a bad stack, if I should have used Rails. Or if web dev is just kind of inherently tedious for me since I know so much about it.
Unix command line pro tip: Ignore anyone that tells you to run commands like `chmod 755`
`chmod +x ` adds the ability to execute the file (sets the executable bit), `chmod g+w` lets group users write, `chmod go-wrx` removes read write and execute permissions from everyone except the owner (read as a group, other, remove, write, read, execute).
If you understand the underlying permission system, it makes so much sense. And I do not understand why people decide to encode these things as octal??
*Piranesi* is similar in a lot of ways to "The Most Dangerous Game".
Unrelated, one of the things that *Piranesi* does well is that it slips into the realm of fantasy enough to introduce different perspectives, which is something that a lot of literature fails to sell IMO.
Things I will never stop thinking about: The Adventures in Odyssey episode where they bust a child immigrant labor ring.
Adventures in Odyssey is like a children's Christian radio program, where they like learn biblical lessons. Except for "The Other Side of the Glass" arc.
The whole point of the book is that every other Viking values having a big dragon with lots of teeth and lots of fire. And Hiccup is in an entirely different mindset because he is the only one that values understanding the dragons. And you completely undermine that point by giving Hiccup a dragon with more teeth and more fire than every other dragon.
awddwawadawd awda wda wda wd awdawdawd what is a brain
brain bug bye bee bit best before brew butt bin binary. buh boo bfft woolop me
aah oh my. inside and outside turning tables upside down in the temple outside the inside. brrr bar baz. loop. yeah.
Sublime's syntax highlighting is fine because it's designed to be resilient against malformed documents. But wow, there are a lot of cases
that it doesn't handle perfectly. Tree-sitter based grammars are 100% the way to go. Home-baked syntax highlighting and spell check are the biggest drawback to Sublime for me. And they exist, so they check the box, but they're not good.
I'm trying to decide whether I should buy a Sublime license or keep hopping.
A lot of people view escapist fiction as inherently not commenting on our world. They think that since it's describing another world it
cannot be talking about our world.
But to me, a story about a world without children says so much more to me about the role of children in our lives than a story which is about children. And a story about children says so much more about adults than a story about adults.
Wow. Wow.
Piranesi is like honey. It is excellent.
Analyzing it almost seems unfair, since it exists on its own as a work of art. And yet, it stands up to cursory analysis. It reads like a short story of literature, except actually good. It's simultaneously indulgent and escapist, and persuasive and compelling.
But it's not incredible, it doesn't transcend the genre. It knows that it's a story. All it is is a story. It's just a really good story.
Wow. Wow.
Dark is “pivoting to AI” which sounds like 4 L’s to me. I don’t know. Paul is ready to gamble that typing code is going away.
Which just doesn’t make any sense to me because we’ve had Scratch for decades. If you want to not-type-code, you don’t have to. But that is not the problem people actually face.
One of the interesting take-aways from Zig is that Zig does not have conciseness as a goal. It eschews Haskell-levels of implied behavior
and syntax sugar. And yet, since it has modern features and well-designed syntax, and it values simplicity and avoiding cruft, it feels more concise than a lot of languages.
I made corn bread last night and then left it on the counter and forgot about it. Morning after cornbread review:
8/10
Great sweetness, slightly moist, good texture. Could be warm, obviously, and has a little bit of that bitter aftertaste that a lot of cornbreads have.
Also it was made with an egg with a use-by date of Feb 1, so I think “fresh ingredients” is a scam propagated by the food companies to sell more food.
Getting people to agree with you is not “debate” or “logic” it’s “art” and “rhetoric.”
I saw a post that used “American Pie” as example of an artist creating something that communicated a feeling that the listener wouldn’t otherwise have ever experienced. Every emotion that I feel thinking when I think about that plane crash was communicated to me by Don McLean. Reading the Wikipedia page communicates nothing.
OpenAI published scores that GTP-4 got after taking several high-school level exams. It does well on most of them, but the one that
immediately stands out to me is the AMC 10. The AMC is the American Math Contest (10th grade and below). GTP-4 got a 30/150 on the test, which is the 10th percentile. This is much worse than its performance on other tests. (For example, it's in the 89th percentile on the SAT Math subject test.)
To try to understand what's going on here, I'm going to quote part of the grading description on for the test.
> This is a 25-question, multiple choice test. Each question is followed by answers marked A, B, C, D and E. Only one of these is correct.
> You will receive 6 points for each correct answer, ... 1.5 points for each problem left unanswered ... and 0 points for each incorrect answer.
The AMC is supposed to be hard. You are not supposed to be able to answer every question on the AMC, which is why you get points for leaving questions blank. If you left every question blank, you would get a 37.5, and do better than GTP-4! But GTP isn't designed to leave questions blank. It's going to generate a BS, plausible sounding, answer for every single question. Now, if you guessed randomly on every question, with 5 correct answers, you'd get a 30, which also happens to be the score GTP got.
The type of problem solving that you have to do on the AMC is the exactly the type of stuff that GTP has a bad time with. I remember geometry problems that require you to be able to visualize spacial objects in a novel way. As a language model, GTP has no spacial reasoning ability. I think GTP is guessing randomly here, hurting its score.
I'm calling this the AMC-effect. Text generation models would rather hallucinate than not-answer, leading to worse performance in some cases. I think it could be used by teachers trying to detect cheating. They could include a nonsensical, honeypot, question, and instruct students that they don't have to answer every question. Any student who generated BS for this honeypot question is likely to not understand the concepts, or be cheating.
Another weird note: GTP does better when it doesn't have visual input on the AMC 10. Some of these questions are only possible to answer correctly with the diagram. OpenAI says that they replace the image with "IMAGE: with a non-meaningful filename wherever an image would be missing" (Appendix A.4). I think what's happening is that the text-only GTP is opting not to answer these questions, since it knows it's missing information, and leaving the question blank, leading to more points than otherwise.
But here's the weirdest part. GTP-4 does better on the AMC 12, landing in the 50th percentile with a 60/150. Why? This should be a harder test. It covers more concepts. I have no idea why it performs respectably on this test. It kind of throws a wrench in my whole theory.
I'm really curious if/how their prompt for these tests explained that the test taker can leave the questions blank, I think that's an important peice of information.
=> https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08774 The GTP-4 paper (click PDF in the upper right)
=> https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/2022_AMC_10A_Problems The 2022 AMC 10
I know it's presumptuous of me to declare that I alone have figured out the problem with React, but I don't care. The problem with React is
that components work as a way to re-use rendering, and not as a way to re-use logic.
This is the problem that functional-style react and hooks were supposed to address, because you were supposed to be better about writing functional components. In reality, it made the problem worse, because JS developers aren't Haskell developers. They think of functions as a way to re-use business logic. So when React said "components are just functions" people started putting *more* business logic into components, not less.
The other day someone mentioned taking a Myer's Briggs personality test and so I asked them what type they got, and they said something that
started with "N..." And I just had to smile and nod but I wanted to be like 'um acktually, Myer's-Briggs types start with E for extroverted or I for introverted, that's not a valid type.'
I tried to do one Leetcode problem, and I think my code should work. And when I run it in Deno, it works. But in the Leetcode editor the
array spontaneously generates a null value in between the bottom of the while loop and checking the while-loop condition.
Also I haven't eaten anything in like 24 hours. I am having a wonderful day.
Original content was "I think I got banned from HN for posting meta-commentary lol we're rolling boys."
I'm paranoid about being shadow-banned from websites in general, after my experiences on Khan Academy. And I have show-dead on HN on, and there are a lot of people there shadow banned. (If you only post links to your own blog, and never do anything else, you get auto-banned pretty quickly. And those people keep posting links to their own blog, ignorant.)
Anyways, what happened above was that I checked in a private tab if my most recent comment existed pretty quickly after I posted it, and it didn't and I freaked out. It can't have been flagged or downvoted, since I checked quickly. But if you access HN and you're not logged in, you hit a CDN with a cached version of the page. (If you're logged in, it can't cache since it has to put in your username in the top right.) So when I checked again just now my comments showed up, so I think I just needed to give the CDN a minute.
Edit a minute later, it's flagged again.
The post was actually submitted once before with the original title, and it was flagged because "Urgent: Sign the petition now" is a clickbait title, so someone resubmitted with the title "YC is asking for a bailout." But then the title of the second submission got changed to "Urgent: Sign the petition now" since HN hates "editorializing titles" and then the second one got flagged away because that's a clickbait title.
It will be a miracle if HN discussion quality can withstand this event.
The libertarians are having an absolute field day with this one.
'when you gamble sometimes you lose.' 'should've done due-diligence on
the bank' "The crypto people haven't been getting bailouts and it doesn't seem to be hurting the ecosystem" "Don't ask taxpayers to fix your mistakes for you."
The communists are also having a field day. 'the guillotines will be brought out eventually.'
(For the record, the issue in question is that in the following case Chrome *always* picks the ico favicon. I skimmed the Chromium source and can't tell why this is the case, but if there's an ico available I don't think it's possible to get Chrome to use the SVG.
```
<link rel="icon" href="/static/images/favicon.ico">
<link rel="icon" type="image/svg+xml" href="/static/images/favicon.svg">
```
)
I'm going to address it by not shipping a .ico. Sorry IE 8 or whatever.
It's just weird, because I really, really, enjoy both Minecraft speedrunning clip compilations and fantasy books. They are very similar
sources of entertainment in my mind. And mediums are completely different, sure, but the standards are completely different as well. Can you judge a speedrunning clip compilation as a narrative arc of man vs. nature (in the game)? Can you judge a book by as the average quality of a number of individual action moments? Sure, why not.
The prior thought builds on an underlying realization that is perhaps just as profound. Books as a medium are, generally speaking, a lot
"better"; or perhaps, more Literature-y than many other types of media.
People argue *a lot* about the quality of books, but on the whole, the worst published children's book imaginable has more themes, more character development, more moral than any meme or Tweet or Youtube video or TikTok clip.
But that's not an insult to Youtube videos or Tweets. On the contrary, I think it's weird how arbitrary our criteria for judging stories is, because we don't, universally, judge any other media by the same standards.
Talking about books is just so messy because everyone insists on comparing every book to capital-L Literature. And I think that if we let go
of that, then it would allow books to occupy a space in our society more like that of Youtube videos or social media.
At the same time, there's a lot of quality forced into the medium because of people conflating every book with Literature. And maybe if we built an algorithmic feed of stories to maximize engagement, the quality of those stories would decrease.
The problem with clickbait is that if I get clickbaited once, I start assuming everything is clickbait. I have to start ignoring the whole
genre, (assuming that I don't already know who is going to clickbait and who is not). Clickbaiting hurts not only your reputation, but the reputation of the whole category that you're in.
A house sits abandoned
in a forest
surrounded by trees
and leaves
and by dark things unspeakable.
A shadow
looming over the left side of the world,
stealing,
never freeing.
Is importune instant impertinent death a murder? Merely because the innocent were killed in cold blood?
Outside
inside
together for warmth and
safety of others.
Fears and tears.
