4 days Ago
Generating trash pandas with Copilot
Published on in Technology
I was chatting with someone about some picture and I noted that maybe we could find something appropriate.
I prompted DuckDuckGo with “raccoon trash panda digging in garbage can”. It gave me a whole grid of pictures, of which I quickly picked the following as my favorites.
My interlocutor had never really used any of the LLM-based machines before, so I gave GitHub Copilot a whirl. I prompted GitHub Copilot: “Show me a cartoon of a raccoon digging in a trash can with its butt in the air”.... [More]
6 days Ago
Links and Notes for April 26th, 2024
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
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2 weeks Ago
Links and Notes for April 19th, 2024
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
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Freedom as a means of control
Published on in Quotes
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
It’s 2024. How’s it going, JavaScript?
Published on in Programming
This video is from a great channel, which published a lot of great videos a while back. They covered pretty much everything already, but circled back to JavaScript for 2024.
Some choice quotes from the video.
“We push on save.”
“2024 is the year of the serverlesslessness.”
“They say that every year, but this year they’re out of VC funding.”
“Don’t write this down, next week all of this is gonna change.”
This guy just keeps knocking it out of the park. Pretty much everything he mentioned... [More]
The Cosmic Call
Published on in Fun
The article Try it and see by Mark Dominus (The Universe of Discourse) discusses the graphic below, which is part of the “Cosmic Call”, a message to extraterrestrials.
The author says that he told his 11-year-old niece,
““I bet you could figure it out if you tried.” She didn’t believe me and she didn’t want to try. It seemed insurmountable.”
I sent this to a few people in my family.
Hint #1
After a little while, I provided some context. The Cosmic Call is:
“In 1999, two Canadian astrophysicists, Stéphane Dumas and Yvan Dutil,... [More]”
3 weeks Ago
Links and Notes for April 12th, 2024
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Table of Contents
A society without oppression is an illusion…
Published on in Quotes
“Around the mid-1800s humanity began to notice it doesn’t make sense for a small group of rich people to own everything and for everyone else to continually give that group labor, rent and expenses just to stay alive, and ever since then the media, the mainstream culture and the foreign policy of the ruling class have been intensely devoted to aggressively erasing this realization from humanity’s memory.”
Avoid primary constructors in C# (for now)
Published on in Programming
record
instead.The following video discusses the downsides of the current implementation of primary constructors:
To sum up:
- Primary constructors don’t have a
readonly
backing field; you can still assign to it within the type. - You can’t control the visibility of the generated property or backing field.
- You can’t throw exceptions, except in a... [More]
Links and Notes for April 5th, 2024
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
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Gore Vidal’s Storm Warning in 1961
Published on in Quotes
“Ayn Rand’s ‘philosophy’ is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society. Moral values are in flux. The muddy depths are being stirred by new monsters and witches from the deep. Trolls walk the American night. Caesars are stirring in the Forum. There are storm warnings ahead.[1]”
1 month Ago
Links and Notes for March 29th, 2024
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
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Links and Notes for March 22nd, 2024
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
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Links and Notes for March 15th, 2024
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Table of Contents
2 months Ago
Fighting with Fowler on Continuous Integration
Published on in Programming
The article Continuous Integration by Martin Fowler makes many interesting points. It is a compendium of know-how about CI by one of the industry heavyweights, who’s been using it for a long time.
While I found a lot of what he had to say interesting, I did wonder how applicable CI is for the kinds of teams that I know and work with. He makes several statements toward that end that pretty severely limit the applicability of what he calls “true CI” for many, if not most, teams.
I think he should have started... [More]
Links and Notes for March 8th, 2024
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
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Links and Notes for March 1st, 2024
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Table of Contents
Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2024.04
Published on in Movies
These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.
- Mr. Popper’s Penguins... [More]
The law is a backstop
Published on in Quotes
Links and Notes for February 23rd, 2024
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Table of Contents
3 months Ago
The temporarily fortuitous indigent
Published on in Finance & Economy
The article Americans Are Not As Poor As They Think They Are by Thomas Wells (3 Quarks Daily) writes,
“The evidence shows that most Americans are richer than ever, and richer than most people in the rich world – that they consume more, live in larger homes, and so on. They are objectively some of the luckiest people in world history. On the one hand all this narcissistic whining about imaginary poverty is mildly annoying for the rest of the world to have to listen to. On the other hand, it reflects shared delusions about... [More]”
Links and Notes for February 16th, 2024
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Table of Contents
The High Road and the Low Road
Published on in Quotes
Understanding should come before expression
Published on in Quotes
There’s nothing for it
Published on in Quotes
Tucker Carlson interviewed Vladimir Putin for over two hours
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
I listened to the The Vladimir Putin Interview by Tucker Carlson (127 minutes), which is also available as Ep. 73 The Vladimir Putin Interview (Twitter). The article Tucker Carlson Interviews Vladimir Putin by Tucker Carlson (Scheer Post) includes a transcript found on the Kremlin’s website. You have to subscribe to Tucker Carlson to get the transcript from him. Those dirty commies in the Kremlin just gave it away for free.
The interview was over two hours. What follows are just some longer quotes I took from the transcript, with a few notes of my... [More]
Savoir faire vs. Wisdom in Technology
Published on in Philosophy
The Tumbler repost The modern digital divide (Reddit) is about how well younger students really understand their digital devices and apps. This is an interesting story told by a high-school tutor about digital-tool abilities in the current generation of kids. It’s a bit long, but I thought the following conclusions were interesting.
The Internet vs. Apps
It contrasts using the Internet with using apps, which are not at all the same thing.
The Internet is an open place with links and content, accessed... [More]
Turn off autocorrect in Notes app
Published on in Technology
Apple keeps coming up with new things to mess with my typing. I long ago turned off auto-correct, but was surprised to see that my MacOS Sonoma Notes app started not only predicting text, but also auto-correcting it. I do not like this. I turned off auto-correct system-wide for a reason. I would rather correct my typos on my own. Just underline the errors and I’ll get to them. That’s my workflow.
These are my OS-level settings. I know I seem ungrateful to be turning off all of the assistance... [More]
Links and Notes for February 9th, 2024
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Table of Contents
LLM “AIs” are for stuff nobody wants
Published on in Technology
A recent experience at work led me to conclude that the AI revolution will pass most of us by. In mid-December, I fell ill with COVID. I’d updated my status in Microsoft Teams accordingly.
About six weeks later, a co-worker wrote to me, asking whether the status still applied? He hoped not?
I’d forgotten about it, but nothing had reminded me. It’s interesting that I get five mails a week about MS Viva and about Sharepoint Stuff I Might Have Missed, but I don’t get a single hint that my status... [More]