skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Clothing, how did they make it? Part I: high fiber. in ~life.style

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I’m missing something. What does that quote mean to you?

    I’m missing something. What does that quote mean to you?

  2. Comment on US tax law is funding the AI infrastructure boom, not creating it in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    While I’m sure the companies are happy to get tax cuts, it’s rather odd to recharacterize a reduced expense as funding when the cash flow is in the other direction. Normally, businesses get money...

    While I’m sure the companies are happy to get tax cuts, it’s rather odd to recharacterize a reduced expense as funding when the cash flow is in the other direction. Normally, businesses get money from either investors or customers and some of that money is paid in taxes.

    Some exceptions: for government contractors, the government is a customer, and there are sometimes government subsidies that actually pay out.

    5 votes

  3. Comment on Clothing, how did they make it? Part I: high fiber. in ~life.style

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Transhumant pastoralists are not ‘true’ nomads; they maintain permanent dwellings. However, as the seasons change, the transhumant pastoralists will herd their flocks seasonally between different fixed pastures (typically a summer pasture and a winter pasture). Transhumance can be either vertical (going up or down hills or mountains) or horizontal (pastures at the same altitude are shifted between, to avoid exhausting the grass and sometimes to bring the herds closer to key markets at the appropriate times). In the settled, agrarian zone, vertical transhumance seems to be the most common by far, so that’s what we’re going to focus on, though much of what we’re going to talk about here is also applicable to systems of horizontal transhumance. This strategy could be practiced both over relatively short distances (often with relatively smaller flocks) and over large areas with significant transits (see the maps in this section; often very significant transits) between pastures; my impression is that the latter tends to also involve larger flocks and more workers in the operation. It generally seems to be the case that wool production tended towards the larger scale transhumance. The great advantage of this system is that it allows for disparate marginal (for agriculture) lands to be productively used to raise livestock.

    This pattern of transhumant pastoralism has been dominant for a long time – long enough to leave permanent imprints on language. For instance, the Alps got that name from the Old High German alpa, alba meaning which indicated a mountain pasturage. And I should note that the success of this model of pastoralism is clearly conveyed by its durability; transhumant pastoralism is still practiced all over the world today, often in much the same way as it was centuries or millennia ago, with a dash of modern technology to make it a bit easier. That thought may seem strange to many Americans (for whom transhumance tends to seem very odd) but probably much less strange to readers almost anywhere else (including Europe) who may well have observed the continuing cycles of transhumant pastoralism (now often accomplished by moving the flocks by rail or truck rather than on the hoof) in their own countries.

    For these pastoralists, home is a permanent dwelling, typically in a village in the valley or low-land area at the foot of the higher ground. That low-land will generally be where the winter pastures are. During the summer season, some of the shepherds – it does not generally require all of them as herds can be moved and watched with relatively few people – will drive the flocks of sheep up to the higher pastures, while the bulk of the population remains in the village below. This process of moving the sheep (or any livestock) over fairly long distances is called droving and such livestock is said to be moved ‘on the hoof‘ (assuming it isn’t, as in the modern world, transported by truck or rail). Sheep are fairly docile animals which herd together naturally and so a skilled drover can keep large flock of sheep together on their own, sometimes with the assistance of dogs bred and trained for the purpose, but just as frequently not. While cattle droving, especially in the United States, is often done from horseback, sheep and goats are generally moved with the drovers on foot.

    [...]

    The availability of iron for tools represented a fairly major change. Iron, unlike bronze or copper, is springy which makes the standard design of sheep shears (two blades, connected by a u-shaped or w-shaped metal span called a ‘bow’ (see the image)) and the spring action (the bending and springing back into place of the metal span) possible. The basic design of these blade shears has remained almost entirely unchanged since at least the 8th century BC, with the only major difference I’ve seen being that modern blade shears tend to favor a ‘w-shape’ to the hinge, while ancient shears are made with a simpler u-shape. Ancient iron shears generally varied between 10 to 15cm in length (generally closer to 15 than to 10) and modern shears…generally vary between 10cm and 18.5cm in length; roughly the same size. Sometimes – more often than you might think – the ideal form of an unpowered tool was developed fairly early and then subsequently changed very little.

    Modern shearing, either bladed or mechanical, is likely to be done by a specialized sheep shearer, but the overall impression from my reading is that pre-modern sheep shearing was generally done by the shepherds themselves and so was often less of a specialized task with a pastoral community. There are interesting variations in what the evidence implies for the gender of those shearing sheep; sheers for sheep are common burial goods in Iron Age Italy, but their gender associations vary by place. In the culturally Gallic regions of North Italy, it seems that shears were assumed to belong to men (based on associated grave goods; that’s a method with some pitfalls, but the consistency of the correlation is still striking), while in Sicily, shears were found in both male and female burials and more often in the latter (but again, based on associated grave goods). Shears also show up in the excavation of settlements in wool-producing regions in Italy.

    [...]

    When thinking about the people involved in these activities, at least in most agrarian contexts, it is often important to distinguish between two groups of people: the shepherds themselves who tend the sheep and the often far higher status individuals or organizations which might own the herd or rent out the pasture-land. At the same time there is also often a disconnect between how ancient sources sometimes discuss shepherding and shepherds in general and how ancient societies tended to value actual shepherds in practice.

    One the one hand, there is a robust literature, beginning in the Greek and Roman literary corpus, which idealizes rustic life, particularly shepherding. Starting with Theocritus’ short pastoral poems (called eidullion, ‘ little poems’ from where we get the word idyll as in calling a scene ‘idyllic’) and running through Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics, which present the pure rural simplicity of the countryside and pastoralism as a welcome contrast to the often ‘sordid’ and unhealthy environment of the city (remember the way these ‘gentlemen farmers’ tend to think about merchants and markets in cities, after all). This idolization only becomes more intense in Europe with the advent of Christianity and the grand metaphorical significance that shepherding in particular – as distinct from other rural activities – takes on. It would thus be easy to assume just from reading this sort of high literature that shepherds were well thought of, especially in a Christian social context.

    But by and large just as the elite love of the idea of rural simplicity did not generally lead to a love of actual farming peasants, so too their love of the idea of pastoral simplicity did not generally lead to an actually high opinion of the folks who did that work, nor did it lead shepherds to any kind of high social status. While the exact social position of shepherds and their relation to the broader society could vary (as we’ll see), they tended to be relatively low-status and poor individuals. The ‘shepherds out tending their flocks by night’ of Luke 2:8 are not important men. Indeed, the ‘night crew’ of shepherds are some of the lowest status and poorest free individuals who could possibly see that religious sign, a point in the text that is missed by many modern readers.

    We see a variety of shepherding strategies which impact what kind of shepherds might be out with flocks. Small peasant households might keep a few sheep (along with say, chickens or pigs) to provide for the household’s wool needs. In some cases, a village might pool those sheep together to make a flock which one person would tend (a job which often seems to have gone to either fairly young individuals or else the elderly – that is, someone who might not be as useful in the hard labor on the farm itself, since shepherding doesn’t necessarily require a lot of strength).

    [...]

    Full time shepherds could – they didn’t always, but could – come under suspicion as effective outsiders to the fully sedentary rural communities they served as well. Diodorus in the aforementioned example is quick to note that banditry in Sicily was rife because the enslaved shepherds were often armed – armed to protect their flocks because banditry was rife; we are left to conclude that Diodorus at least thinks the banditry in question is being perpetrated by the shepherds, evidently sometimes rustling sheep from other enslaved shepherds. A similar disdain for the semi-nomadic herding culture of peoples like the Amorites is sometimes evident in Mesopotamian texts. And of course that the very nature of transhumance meant that shepherds often spent long periods away from home sleeping with their flocks in temporary shelters and generally ‘roughing it’ exposed to weather.

    2 votes

  5. Comment on Any significant changes to Tildes are extremely unlikely in ~tildes.official

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Made me look! Yeah, people are still chatting. There is an AI conference now. (Their word for a forum.) It’s not somewhere I go very often. I didn’t cancel my account out of inertia. Demographics...

    Made me look! Yeah, people are still chatting. There is an AI conference now. (Their word for a forum.)

    It’s not somewhere I go very often. I didn’t cancel my account out of inertia. Demographics are old and older.

    Like Tildes, they are in “cozy mode” and the software doesn’t change.

    2 votes

  6. Comment on Any cool coding languages? in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    What kinds of languages are you interested in? What's your connection to BoredOS? If you want to make your own language, I highly recommend reading Crafting Interpreters, which is a whole book on...

    What kinds of languages are you interested in? What's your connection to BoredOS?

    If you want to make your own language, I highly recommend reading Crafting Interpreters, which is a whole book on how to do it, first in Java and then in C. But you could use any language you want.

    I think if I wrote another interpreter for fun, I'd try writing it in Lean 4, just to see learn more about what mathematicians are up to. (Lean is used for proofs but it's apparently a real programming language too?)

    5 votes

  7. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    I'm still tinkering with my personal link-sharing website, but it's gotten increasingly meta. I've gone back to my devtools roots. It started out because I'd gotten annoyed with how VS Code is...

    I'm still tinkering with my personal link-sharing website, but it's gotten increasingly meta. I've gone back to my devtools roots.

    It started out because I'd gotten annoyed with how VS Code is evolving, with too much AI stuff I don't care about in each new release. I use AI all the time, but it's in Shelley and I don't want it in my text editor anymore. (I liked using Github Copilot for autocomplete at the time, but those days are over.) Also, VS Code doesn't work on my tablet or phone.

    Since I rarely edit files myself anymore either, maybe I don't need a text editor at all? So, I decided to build personal web app for source browsing. That's gone well. I use it about half the time to look at the source and if I see something I don't like, I ask the AI to refactor it. I plan on adding search next, since that's something I still need VS Code for.

    It's reminded me of my early days at Google when there wasn't a good way to search and browse Java code in google3, so I built one as my 20% project. This is much easier nowadays!

    Also, my wife asked for help getting her ancient personal website up to date, working on mobile and moved to a new hosting service with https. I offered to get her set up on exe.dev, but she asked me to do it. So I spun up a VM and I typed requests to the AI for her. We asked Shelley to download all files. It's a static website and needs some templating for common layout, so we converted it Eleventy at the AI's recommendation and got a preview website set up. Since everything is easy with AI these days, I asked it to build a file browser / editor admin website, so that she could edit the files directly, with instant preview. Then we uploaded it to github and from there to Cloudflare Pages (her choice). There was a bit of head-scratching at times but it went well. There's no way we could have done that in a couple days before.

    One of these days I should do the same for my original, abandoned blog.

    3 votes

  8. Comment on Is Flowers for Algernon sci-fi? in ~books

    skybrian
    Link
    It's certainly based on an SF "what-if" scenario. Although, science fiction could often be recast as fantasy if you used a magic spell instead. Or it could be a boon or curse of the gods. It...

    It's certainly based on an SF "what-if" scenario. Although, science fiction could often be recast as fantasy if you used a magic spell instead. Or it could be a boon or curse of the gods. It depends on how you explain how the magical event happens.

    The science in science fiction is often no deeper than a comic book. The story is the thing.

    1 vote

  9. Comment on Compression is prediction in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article:

    From the article:

    I was reading about compression recently when I stumbled upon something crazy: that compressors and LLMs are, at their core, trying to solve the exact same problem.

    In this post, I’m going to walk us through the basics of compression to understand its deep relationship with language modeling. It’s probably going to blow your mind.

    1 vote

  11. Comment on Seedless blackberries and cherries that grow on bushes vie to be the future of food in ~food

    skybrian
    Link
    https://archive.is/CDTOy From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    https://archive.is/CDTOy

    From the article:

    That’s the promise of modern genomics: introducing speed, precision, and the ability to solve multiple problems at once to the glacially slow, haphazard, one-tweak-at-a-time world of crop breeding.

    Pairwise’s triple-threat berries won’t be in US groceries before 2030—even turbo-charged breeding takes time—but they could help jump-start a new agricultural revolution, a high-tech era of designer crops optimized to benefit consumers, farmers, and the Earth. The company is also working on peaches without pits, row crops resistant to a variety of diseases, fruit and nut trees that produce their first harvest within a year or two rather than three to eight, and a slew of other novel products, often in partnership with some of the world’s largest agribusinesses.

    So far, the market for gene-edited food is almost entirely theoretical. Pairwise launched the first Crispr product in the US in 2023, a less bitter mustard green. It said it was discontinuing the product in early 2024 in favor of developing other gene-edited crops. Today, the company has received more than 50 regulatory approvals for five edited crops in nine countries, but it has only one creation for sale, a high-yielding blackberry variety available in limited quantities in Colombia.

    [...]

    But the scientists who founded Pairwise believe their product has a chance to break through because Crispr can help farmers grow healthier and more abundant food in a warming world, with significantly less deforestation, agri-chemicals, or greenhouse gas emissions. The company is already developing an enormous pipeline of new crops customized for higher yields; longer shelf life; better resistance to heat, droughts, storms, pests, or diseases; the ability to grow in different regions or seasons or soils; and various combinations of those desirable traits. It has raised more than $160 million, and ever since its short-lived experiment with non-bitter greens, it has focused on licensing its technology rather than building its own brands. It now has working partnerships with the Big Ag giants Bayer and Corteva, the food companies Mars and Sun World, and an array of universities and other research institutions.

    Just as an electric vehicle doesn’t have to look like a conventional car thanks to a small engine, Crispr has the potential to transform food and farms in unexpected ways. When I visited Pairwise headquarters in Durham in May, I got to see one of the world’s first cherry bushes. Its appearance surely would have confused George Washington, but Pairwise envisions a future where it can help growers produce more fruit with less land compared to standard cherry trees, and will also make it easier to spray and harvest with machines. Pairwise chief executive officer Tom Adams told me that ordinary-looking bush could be the first step towards a more sustainable and economical form of orchard for all kinds of fruit, because the trait that got tweaked isn’t only found in cherries.

    [...]

    GMOs are extremely expensive to develop, which is why giant agribusinesses focusing on big commodity crops largely control them. That setup has prompted widespread complaints from farmers and grocery shoppers alike that they reduce crop diversity and limit choice.

    But gene editing is much cheaper and less time-consuming, which Adams believes will make it a more accessible and democratic technology. Pairwise is working with nonprofits like the Gates Foundation and International Institute of Tropical Agriculture to develop more resilient staple crops like cowpea and cassava that can better withstand pests, diseases, and droughts. Leena Tripathi, a molecular biologist who oversees genetic innovation for IITA, is optimistic about semi-dwarf Crispr yams that will be much less labor-intensive for the African women who usually grow them.

    [...]

    So far, governments around the world have largely accepted Big Ag’s argument that gene editing is essentially an extremely sped-up version of conventional plant breeding and therefore doesn’t need particularly onerous regulation. Even the EU, which has restricted most GMO’s, moved last month to treat most gene-edited crops like regular ones. But regulators have been more cautious of Crispr livestock; the US Food and Drug Administration regulates edited animals as if they were drugs, and has required scientists to incinerate them after studying them.

    [...]

    The British startup Tropic Biosciences is bringing a non-browning banana to market, but most Crispr crops are at least a few years away. Startups will need more funding to make it to market, but those needs come as investments in ag-tech and food-tech have dropped 70 percent since peaking above $50 billion in 2021. The dip is partly due to AI sucking up all the venture capital oxygen, but it’s partly because venture capitalists feel burned by the struggles of former unicorns like plant-based burger startup Beyond Meat and indoor farming pioneer AppHarvest.

    3 votes

  13. Comment on The US is recruiting gamers to solve its air traffic controller shortage in ~transport

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...]

    From the article:

    For more than a decade there has been a shortage of air traffic controllers in the U.S., which has resulted in flight delays and increased risks for air travelers. And the Department of Transportation (DOT) is looking to video game enthusiasts to help fill those gaps.

    The DOT first launched a program in 2025 to recruit gamers. Now Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is extolling the success of that program on social media.

    Reaching out to gamers, he wrote on X, has resulted in the DOT meeting 94% of its hiring goal for new controllers, a record-setting pace. More than 2,000 people have been hired, he said, with candidates “reaching the Academy quicker than any class before them.”

    To be clear, that doesn’t mean those gamers are already guiding actual aircraft through takeoff and landing. Even with the streamlined hiring process the DOT has enacted, it takes two years for a trainee to complete the air traffic controller training program. And roughly one in three trainees drops out before completing the program.

    Still, gamers remain an area of interest for the DOT as it looks to fill empty seats. In a past interview, Duffy said “they problem solve. They’re spatially aware. They do multiple things at the same time.”

    [...]

    While Duffy celebrated reaching 94% of the hiring goal, it’s worth noting that the FAA, in May, cut its staffing target for air traffic controllers from 14,633 to 12,563. It said, at the time, that modernized staffing models were behind the change. But the agency actually increased the amount of time employees spent managing air traffic, to avoid the overtime bills the FAA ran up in 2024, which totaled approximately $200 million.

    1 vote

  15. Comment on What happened: OpenAI and Hugging Face in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I’ve read some of his previous posts and yeah they are a bit much. This one is a decent attempt at writing shorter.

    I’ve read some of his previous posts and yeah they are a bit much. This one is a decent attempt at writing shorter.

    2 votes

  16. Comment on Suggestion for a new label: "Misinformation" in ~tildes

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Yes, saying that people can quit any time does sound like a suggestion that people should quit over this, and that does seem kinda rude. It definitely isn't my intention to say anyone in...

    Yes, saying that people can quit any time does sound like a suggestion that people should quit over this, and that does seem kinda rude. It definitely isn't my intention to say anyone in particular or any group of users should quit. And we should try to fix things for @TaylorSwiftsPickles. Though they did say they were "micro-annoyed," so I hope it isn't too serious :)

    I still want to push back on treating Tildes as overly important. I'm out of touch, but I'd be shocked if Tildes were in the top ten list of important forums for any community. Surely there must be lots of other LGBT or black or Jewish or whatever community websites out there?

    So I'm not really buying the notion that there are few alternatives. But we can still care about Tildes. Maybe Tildes is in the top five for some of us personally? After all we keep hanging out here. That's a different kind of meaningfulness, though.

    Also, it seems like we are talking around our problems. "Minority" is vague (which minority?) and so is "misinformation" (what kind of posts do you hate seeing?)

    I do understand the impulse to vague-post, since people often don't take feedback well, and giving specific examples often threatens to derail the conversation. But the problem is, vague complaints are vague. Anyone could be imagining they're part of the problem and that might be due to their own insecurities. (The other topic you linked to has some people wondering if they're the problem.)

    I'm thinking about how Hacker News downvotes work. A downvote is specific in one way (it's a particular post) and super vague in a different way, so people ask "why the downvote?" On the other hand, what's to be done? You just grumble and move on. It takes a lot less time than replies.

    A label is slightly more specific, but still leaves open a lot of questions. The exemplary tag at least lets people say a few words more about what they liked.

    If we could change Tildes, a "misinformation" label that doesn't actually appear on the post would be a way to collect feedback without affecting the conversation. It could go to a report somewhere... seen by who, the admin? And what do they do about it?

    Since we can't change Tildes itself, an anonymous survey about what sort of posts people consider to be misinformation might be another way to do it.

    9 votes

  17. Comment on Suggestion for a new label: "Misinformation" in ~tildes

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I will quite readily admit to being out of touch and perhaps I'm missing some implications, but I'm not sure what you're getting at. Maybe part of the issue is blurring the consequences of...

    I will quite readily admit to being out of touch and perhaps I'm missing some implications, but I'm not sure what you're getting at.

    Maybe part of the issue is blurring the consequences of misinformation on social media in general (which can be very serious) versus what happens on Tildes?

    If you mean Tildes in particular: many of us like Tildes, but is it essential infrastructure for anyone? It seems like anyone, regardless of privilege, could quit Tildes, or just decide to take a break from it for a while, and people often do?

    Or if you mean, spreading misinformation on Tildes could have harmful effects beyond Tildes, sure it doesn't help, but I don't think we're very influential compared to other, much larger social media websites. Or even compared to individual bloggers or influencers.

    Or perhaps you mean that people on Tildes who actually read articles or comments here will be misled by misinformation? I think a lot of what we discuss isn't "news you can use" that if it's wrong could be dangerous from a personal, practical standpoint. But if it is, then someone should reply explaining why, and perhaps it will be retracted.

    Or maybe something else I completely missed. What implications do you mean?

    6 votes

  18. Comment on Suggestion for a new label: "Misinformation" in ~tildes

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yes, the talk page on Wikipedia is a good example. But we're not maintaining a wiki. Are we maintaining a link collection? Arguably so with the tagging system. An issue with doing that here is...

    Yes, the talk page on Wikipedia is a good example. But we're not maintaining a wiki. Are we maintaining a link collection? Arguably so with the tagging system.

    An issue with doing that here is that the Tildes software is effectively frozen. So, unlike in Tildes' early days, discussing ways to improve the software seems pointless? We can only do things that don't require any software changes, like introducing a new topic tag.

    But I am rather interested in what might be done to improve things, which is partial motivation for building my own personal link-sharing website. There are no community features now, but perhaps I'll get to that eventually. In the meantime, it serves as a staging area and archive for the links I post to Tildes, along with other links I choose not to share here.

    It's tempting to think that if I built my own community software, I could do it properly, learning from Tildes and trying new experiments. But I'm wary of it because I don't want Deimos's job, and I'm not sure I'd be able to build a community anyway. It might just be tumbleweeds? Only a few people follow me in Bluesky, etc.

    Another idea I toy with is releasing the software and helping people set up their own community websites. I think the old blogging ecosystem was pretty good in some ways. But I'm not sure anyone would go for that either? And there is plenty of other blogging software for people to use.

    So, I just build for myself. At least I know I'll use it.

    Regarding shrugging and moving on, this is not possible for social media in general, but it seems very feasible for Tildes? At the extreme, people can just leave and probably nobody will follow.

    What's really not possible is to participate by posting topics or comments without getting replies in disagreement. Really heated discussion will get shut down, but in general, you are going to get replies.

    Which is why on my own website, I'm still thinking about whether or how to implement replies at all. I'd like to get feedback, but only certain kinds.

    3 votes

  19. Comment on Suggestion for a new label: "Misinformation" in ~tildes

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I think it’s a good point that replies often just feed the fire. That’s an argument for doing something else.

    I think it’s a good point that replies often just feed the fire. That’s an argument for doing something else.

    1 vote

  20. Comment on Suggestion for a new label: "Misinformation" in ~tildes

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I would like to see sources too and try to provide evidence myself. But asking often annoys people since you’re giving them homework, particularly if you do it in a low-effort way like “citation...

    I would like to see sources too and try to provide evidence myself. But asking often annoys people since you’re giving them homework, particularly if you do it in a low-effort way like “citation needed.” So instead I might go with something like “where did you learn that?”

    3 votes