fizbin.bsky.social
One of many, many people with this particular "real name".
You might know me from... IDK. College? Did we work together once? Prodigy's old math forum? debian-devel? A certain social MUSH? xoogler slack? "Making Light" comments?
2,374 posts
1,106 followers
131 following
Getting Started
Active Commenter
comment in response to
post
Busy signals are still quite relevant, or should be.
It's what you hear when you and an appropriate number of your neighbors are calling your elected representatives.
comment in response to
post
... I'm pretty sure I know exactly what they think on just about any topic. I'd like to still be able to see that picture of my cousin's kids, or know that someone I knew in high school is getting divorced, but I have eighty variations on generic liberal talking points to wade through first.
comment in response to
post
E.g., I follow people on Facebook primarily to keep up with people I knew in high school or in college as we march on through life.
Now, I have two friends in particular who post *heavily*. And I generally agree with them, and don't find their posts unpleasant by any means, but at this point, ...
comment in response to
post
This effect is part of why I don't understand people who take it as axiomatic that any ordering aside from "every post from everyone in follow, in reverse chronological order" is evil and wrong and cannot possibly be desired.
comment in response to
post
It isn't the threat of being primaried that is keeping Republicans voting in lockstep to confirm Trump's nominees.
They're already afraid of physical violence at the hand of MAGA faithful.
comment in response to
post
Using this belief as evidence for their stupidity ("we know he's stood because he believes... etc") is fine.
However, "reasons people ... are stupid..." is about how the people got to be this way, not why what they believe is very wrong.
comment in response to
post
No, that's a big reason that *that idea* is deeply stupid. That the people who believe that idea are themselves stupid may be a contributing factor to why they believe it, but the reasons some people are stupid enough to believe that idea remain obscure.
comment in response to
post
There's enough awful things in the US's past that if you were telling them to someone who's already shown themselves so ignorant that they didn't know the term "Jim Crow", it's very easy to believe you'd slam into something that sounded unbelievable, or at least wildly exaggerated.
comment in response to
post
I guess?
It's perfectly possible though to mention individual laws without mentioning the systemic effect and leave an uncurious child with the impression that these were disconnected bad things.
Also, we don't know what details of Jim Crow in particular prompted the reporter's disbelief.
comment in response to
post
Most often though you focus on individual bad acts/laws and not on the fact that there was a whole societal system supporting them.
E.g. You mention Ruby Bridges without mentioning _why_ she was the first black student at her school despite Brown v. Board being decided before she was born.
comment in response to
post
Sometimes you don't have time for the one week in February because you've got a schedule to keep to make sure you even make it through WWII by the end of the year.
Sometimes you focus all on the movement, and not on what they were fighting.
comment in response to
post
You ever notice how no one tries to sell a "smart laptop"?
If it's supposed to have computer stuff in it, it doesn't get the adjective. "smart" is only needed when this particular thing *isn't* primarily supposed to do whatever it is that requires it to have software in it.
comment in response to
post
When my parents were in high school, stopping history at WWII made some sense. When I was in high school, it was kind of pathetic to do so. But the fact that my kid's classes stopped there too...
comment in response to
post
AFAICT, the US history taught in US high schools stops at WWII, and has stopped at WWII since the 1960s. If anything is mentioned about Jim Crow it's in a special out-of-sequence lesson on the Civil Rights Movement done in the one week in February when they remember that it's Black History Month.
comment in response to
post
I read that as "didn't know that FDR hit the ground running, and how rapidly the first wave of the New Deal was deployed".
Am I missing something where the writer confesses to greater ignorance?
comment in response to
post
Trump cares about appearing to be a big, powerful man. This is an idiotic idea, but he can't admit to it being an idiotic idea directly.
However, let him think this would help Democrats and he then has a chance to look savvy by killing it, and we don't end up pushing this disastrous idea further.
comment in response to
post
I'm totally okay with giving Trump an out and a reason to save face on this; "we totally could have made Canada the 51st state but they'd only vote for Democrats and we don't want that".
On other things, sure, let him eat the embarrassment of being wrong. But I'm for de-escalation on this.
comment in response to
post
I don't think that "hey, these would be Democratic voters" is a good reason for non-Republicans to embrace this Trump brain-fart.
I do think making this argument often enough so that Trump can hear it is a potentially useful tool in discouraging him from any attempts at follow-through.
comment in response to
post
I didn't think it could get worse than "react just based on the title", but there you are: "react just based on an abbreviation of what the title used to be the instant the article was first published, as preserved in the URL"
comment in response to
post
On the one hand, I get the desire to pile on and say "told you so", because we did, and they are still heavily in "fuck yeah! hurt people!" mode; on the other hand, the person writing this is _so close_ to having a revelation.
This is Niemõller half-way through the last line of his famous poem.
comment in response to
post
Note that even in the "I can use LLMs for this" example, the LLM will still sometimes give me an answer that's incorrect but because I can (and do) check its answer first, I'm no worse off than I was before asking the LLM other than a small bit of annoyance at the wasted time.
comment in response to
post
However, if the question is such that the answer is something that I can't perform an independent check on, I can't trust the LLM's output.
I can _maybe_ ask it to find primary sources and check those out myself, if I'm truly lost on a topic, but I can't even trust its summary of a primary source.
comment in response to
post
How could one, from either the prompt or its answer, know whether this question is one that the LLM could answer?
I have found that LLMs are good only when the answer is something I can cross-check; e.g. "what is the syntax for doing X in programming language Y" (where X is a SMALL THING)
comment in response to
post
Oh also, I see that my reply was attached to the wrong part of the conversation. Oops; I meant it down below, after the "suspend for 30 days" subthread
comment in response to
post
Sure, but I'm not used to any politician ever responding to NOW without at least a week's delay.
comment in response to
post
But it does mean that she only needs to stall for a bit over a week or so. Consultations and public meetings with stakeholders could easily take that long.
comment in response to
post
"РЦТІИ СОМЯАDƎ"
actually reads like "rsttiee somyaaduh", and I'm having to apply non-Russian rules to the last two characters because they aren't Cyrillic (D is straight from the Latin alphabet, and Ǝ is pulled from a Nigerian alphabet)
comment in response to
post
I'm glad you're still here and I'm sorry Kevin isn't.
comment in response to
post
Spam can be eaten straight from the can. Because of this, some people are under the mistaken impression that this is how it should be eaten, and never discover that fried spam slices are much tastier than straight-from-can spam.
comment in response to
post
As someone who studied far more economics than I did told me shortly after the election, "you underestimate how much big money hates the regulatory state"
No, it isn't rational. Big money has an irrational hate for the regulatory apparatus of the state that far exceeds self interest.
comment in response to
post
Elapsed where? Because one of the systems that needs to know what time it is is a piece of embedded hardware that's been sitting in a satellite in geosynchronous orbit for the past five years...
comment in response to
post
Oh no. Is this going to be a deep dive into one of the weirder quirks of recent Science Fiction/Fantasy fandom?
comment in response to
post
Presented without comment, but also without ALT text. Please add ALT text in the future.
comment in response to
post
We're waiting...
comment in response to
post
Further lightbulb: The LLM didn't come clean.
It probably didn't look up and collate that information, but my guess that it didn't has nothing to do with its "admission".
The admission is as much a statistical hallucination as the earlier appearance of sources.
comment in response to
post
Meanwhile, I've been unable to escape multiple notifications that today was going to be/is Valentine's Day because they always mentioned that this past week in the news while they were repeating non-stop the story that EAGLES PARADE FRIDAY! THE WHOLE CITY IS JUST DOING EAGLES FANDOM NOW! GO BIRDS!
comment in response to
post
The explanation is wrong in all the details.
That there's often a "time 0" that happens when data is missing is correct, but nothing else.
comment in response to
post
There were old systems that used a time in 1858 as an epoch value, but I doubt the Social Security DB ever had reason to be on those systems.
It is certainly possible that some programmer(s) coding the system chose 1875 as a "time zero", but that's on them; no external standard used that value.
comment in response to
post
Chances are it is a "default for missing value" thing in the data, which is common, Musk is an idiot.
But also:
MOST OF THE TECHNICAL INFO IN THE QUOTED TWEET IS WRONG
COBOL's epoch time 0 is 1601. ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch_(... )
ISO 8601 sets no epoch, it's about textual format for dates.
comment in response to
post
The reason I can't discount the bad meaning for the question is that we did that once in the past and it was bad and I thought we'd all agreed to never do it again but then why is this question phrased ambiguously so that people might think to do it again and...
comment in response to
post
Kinda curious whether breakmessage.com/calendar.html reacts correctly to the big monitor, or if it needs you to zoom in first before it looks okay.
I think that the "we'll resume at ..." part of breakmessage.com should work properly, but the initial control bit where you set what to say might not.
comment in response to
post
Unless you torrented a South Park episode and got a tiny little image and sketchy audio quality after setting it up to run overnight.
comment in response to
post
I think there's a difference between getting death threats from people you can largely avoid and getting death threats from people you can't avoid because they're mixed right in with your base and are basically indistinguishable from your supporters until they pull out a gun and start shooting.
comment in response to
post
Except for the EITC, which is somehow assistance and a giveaway in a way that the mortgage interest tax deduction isn't.