skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Fines doubled as teens outsmart Australia's world-first social media ban in ~tech
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Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts
skybrian LinkThe prices are often silly but I think you have to put it aside. Yes, the art market is a racket, but it’s someone else’s money and it probably comes from a rich donor. They can afford it. The...Thinking that a museum spent hundreds of thousands or even millions on a bunch of material that has no depth or meaning
The prices are often silly but I think you have to put it aside. Yes, the art market is a racket, but it’s someone else’s money and it probably comes from a rich donor. They can afford it. The artist’s cost of materials was probably not that high.
If you compare with the amount of money that goes into making bad or mediocre movies, there is plenty of “waste” there too, but usually we don’t think about the cost.
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Comment on Strange creatures cast ashore: salps in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
Some of the gelatinous creatures that wash onto Oregon’s beaches are salps. Though salps resemble jellyfish without tentacles, they belong to a group of animals known as tunicates, commonly called sea squirts. In their larval phase, tunicates possess a primitive backbone structure, making salps more closely related to people than to jellyfish. Stranger yet, we are closer kin to a salp with its rudimentary spinal column than we are to an octopus, an invertebrate mollusk that seems almost humanlike with its playful personality and its remarkable memory, curiosity, and problem-solving skills. Sometimes I stare at a blob of salp goo on the sand and let the bizarre fact that we are cousins in the same phylum bubble in my brain.
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As these gelatinous rocket scientists pilot their way through the sea sucking in water and expelling it, they filter the water for the tiny phytoplankton they eat. Salps are also considered plankton. Even though they are much larger than the microscopic organisms they consume, salps are carried by currents stronger than their jet-powered motion. The word plankton comes from the Greek planktos, meaning wandering. As salps wander the sea grazing on algae, they provide a gelatinous feast for fish, seabirds, sea turtles, and siphonophores like the Portuguese man o’ war.
The salps we see on the beach represent one part of a strange lifecycle that involves both solitary salps and salp aggregations. A solitary salp reproduces asexually by budding a chain of clones that create light. The individual salps in a luminous chain remain attached as they swim; these strands of glowing strangeness can stretch more than fifty feet. The chains of some species form complex shapes such as giant wheels, and even a double helix. Salps that are linked together communicate through electrical signals to synchronize their movements, and a chain of harmonized beings pulses brightly as it snakes or spins its way through the sea.
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When food is abundant, salps clone themselves extraordinarily fast. Their populations explode to take full advantage of the bounty; staggering numbers of salps gobble up vast blooms of algae. A single swarm of salp clones can cover hundreds, or even thousands, of square miles. And because of the constant gene shuffling that comes with the sexual reproduction of salps, when the environment changes, some individuals have the genetics necessary to deal with the shifting conditions.
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Strange creatures cast ashore: salps
15 votes -
Comment on Cambria, California banned fireworks. Then came the dogs. in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
Word has spread among California dog owners that Cambria is an ideal getaway for the Fourth of July. That’s because this small town on the Central California coast, in an attempt to prevent wildfires, has banned fireworks.
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Cambria does not widely advertise itself as a refuge for pet owners on July 4, and the abolishment of fireworks here has actually been a source of frustration among some locals.
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In the breezy evening before the holiday, restaurants were populated by dogs on leashes and in backpacks. Collars jingled in the hotel lobbies. Dogs lazed on balconies and gazed longingly at their owners down on Moonstone Beach, where they are not allowed. (A line in the sand, if you will.)
Melissa Larson, the general manager of the Cambria Pines Lodge, which is so dog-friendly it has added a dog park to its roster of amenities, said that starting in June, the hotel gets daily calls from pet owners asking about fireworks. Karen Cartwright, director of hospitality at the nearby Cambria Shores Inn, said that pet owners even call asking if fireworks can be heard in Cambria from Cayucos, about 15 miles away (they cannot).
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Cambria, California banned fireworks. Then came the dogs.
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Comment on Performers claim unsafe conditions at Casa Bonita in ~food
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
Since April of last year, Shields and Casa Bonita performers have been locked in negotiations with management. The group is asking for better protections for performers who say they got hypothermia and chlorine toxicity from the diving pool, as well as security for costumed performers who say they’ve been grabbed sexually by patrons. The group is also asking for a raise to bring them more in line with the servers, who they say make more. The union says it’s already made concessions at the bargaining table but with little offered in return to improve current conditions and wages.
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When Stone and Parker re-opened Casa Bonita in the summer of 2023, diver Bethel Lindsley was brought in to build a squad of professionals. Lindsley, who both performs at Casa Bonita and oversees the dive team, is a former gymnast and circus performer with live water show experience on cruise lines like Royal Caribbean and The Han Show in China.
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She says the divers at Casa Bonita are either division one collegiate divers or have circus and water performance backgrounds.
Casa Bonita’s dive set up is unique. Performers dive from multiple cliffs as high as 16 feet into a small pool, 12.5 feet deep and 22.5 feet square. They dive solo and in tandem and are required to rock climb to exit the pool.
According to Lindsley, one diver suffered a concussion underwater after a dive. At one point the pool temperature wasn’t regulated properly, and she claims a diver got hypothermia. The team got chlorine toxicity because the chlorine pool levels weren’t getting checked regularly, she also said.
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Performers claim unsafe conditions at Casa Bonita
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Comment on Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding in ~comp
skybrian LinkIn my experience, property-based testing usually finds Unicode bugs. String handling is hard to get right for all of Unicode, and parsing is also pretty error-prone. But for a low-stakes personal...In my experience, property-based testing usually finds Unicode bugs. String handling is hard to get right for all of Unicode, and parsing is also pretty error-prone.
But for a low-stakes personal website that's not internationalized, the Unicode bugs are often using characters that I might not ever use, and I haven't found other bugs with fuzz testing.
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Comment on Ramp data shows heavy AI adopters hire more in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentFirms that are Ramp customers are likely not a representative sample so I don’t entirely trust it, but it does counter the narrative. Also see their previous post on AI spending per employee: [...]Firms that are Ramp customers are likely not a representative sample so I don’t entirely trust it, but it does counter the narrative. Also see their previous post on AI spending per employee:
The top 1% of firms spend $7.45K per employee per month. The top 10% spend $611 per employee per month. The median firm spends just $11.38 – about the cost of a seat on an enterprise ChatGPT or Claude subscription.
And while several high-profile proclamations have said you should be spending as much on AI as you do on a software engineer’s salary…no one is actually doing that. For the top 1% of spenders, per employee AI spend is still less than half the typical monthly salary for an engineer. Not to say that won’t change – AI spend is still rising – but very few firms, if any, are actually doing that.
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The top 1% of firms grew spend per employee 14.1% last month. That said, we previously found evidence firms are increasingly opting for cheaper AI models, including ones from DeepSeek, the Chinese competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic. So while firms are applying cost discipline on the margin, that’s a function of total spend rising, and rising faster than firms’ willingness to switch to cheaper solutions.
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Comment on Ramp data shows heavy AI adopters hire more in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article:From the article:
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Firms that adopt AI grow headcount 10.2% over the two years following adoption, but these gains are entirely driven by high-intensity adopters. Low-intensity adopters see no statistically significant change.
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Entry-level headcount grew even faster. At the companies making the largest AI investments, entry-level headcount grew 12% over the two years following adoption.
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AI adoption and the associated gains are unevenly distributed. AI adopters are already larger, more engineering-intensive, more likely to be venture-backed, and faster-growing than non-adopters. These firms then grow faster upon adoption.
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Ramp data shows heavy AI adopters hire more
9 votes -
Comment on On the US Declaration of Independence in ~humanities.history
skybrian Link Parent“Their ideals were better than they were” seems like a remarkably optimistic way of putting things. Usually, when people point out a large gap between words and actions, they call it hypocrisy.“Their ideals were better than they were” seems like a remarkably optimistic way of putting things. Usually, when people point out a large gap between words and actions, they call it hypocrisy.
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Comment on On the US Declaration of Independence in ~humanities.history
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Fundamentally, it is building to an argument for the validity of independence in four consecutive points. Notably, whereas today, national independence movements often take it as a granted principle that a people ought to be free to make its own government, ought to be free of the domination of another people (the principle of self-determination), the Declaration assumes its reader thinks the opposite. It assumes a reader who accepts that monarchy and empire are both just and natural, for whom the idea of self-determination is at best dangerous nonsense. And that makes sense – almost none of the peoples in the world the framers knew were self governing (notable exceptions for the Dutch and Swiss). Instead, even when a people had their own country, they were ruled, rather than self-governing – by a king or a closed oligarchy (often a hereditary aristocracy), which often felt little if any cultural commonality with their own commoners.
That system was normal and indeed had been normal since antiquity: self-governing polities are very rare in the pre-modern period. It was not only normal, but normalized: centuries of literature and tradition supported the idea that the right and normal way to organize a society was through authority rather than self-governance. So the Declaration has to go to exceptional lengths to show why this monarchy and this empire have ceded any just claim to govern the colonies. In the process, however, it lays down the argument that leads to that modern assumption of self-determination.
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We should also note that what the Declaration asserts are not collective rights, but rather individual rights, an important component of liberalism, but an enormous break with most pre-modern social assumptions, which tend to be communal, rather than individual. Compare for instance the ancient Greek notions of autonomia and eleutheria – autonomy and freedom – which in a political sense were really collective rights, possessed by the polis. An individual Athenian did not really have any rights that the Athenian demos – the people at large – were bound to respect. By contrast, the Declaration is asserting that all men individually possess key rights, including the ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ which is rather an expansion of Locke’s original “life, liberty and property” formulation – to me it includes not just a right to property but also a right to make one’s own decisions, to pursue one’s own goals, to not be a tool of the community. Again, this is a really radical rejection of the way most societies had been organized – as Patrician Crone notes, in pre-industrial societies, “the individual existed for the benefit of the overall group, not the other way around.” The Declaration asserts the opposite: the group (governments) exist for the individual.
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The Declaration was recognized as an incendiary, radical, dangerous document at the time. It was banned or suppressed in some European monarchies – not appearing in translation, for instance, in Russia until 1863 or in Spain until 1868; it was outright banned in Spain’s overseas colonies. And it isn’t hard to see why – the language and ideas of the Declaration, building on European political philosophy that had been ‘in the air,’ so to speak, for some time clearly played a role in the cultural foment that culminated in the French Revolution. A European monarch who worried that the publication of the Declaration might endanger their crown was right to worry.
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Which at last brings us to the bill of grievances. Given the above build-up, you can see why the list of grievances are necessary: the Declaration has tried to establish that if a government is sufficiently injurious to the natural rights of its people, it becomes permissible – even required by duty – for those people to abolish and replace it. But of course then they have to show that the government of King George III was, in fact, so injurious. It is an interesting and clearly deliberate choice to frame the grievances as an indictment against George III in particular, even though the framers knew as well as anyone that many of these injuries were the product of policy set by Parliament. On the one hand, George III could stand in for his government symbolically here, but at the same time, I suspect that part of what the authors of the Declaration are trying to summon rhetorically is the notion of ancient tyranny (thus their use of the word). Of course a tyranny could be of Thirty Men as easily as just one, but the designation of a singular tyrant-king lends the whole list a rhetorical punch. “He has…” is just a lot clearer and more effective than, “the King in consultation with his government and the full support of Parliament has…”
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So I provide below an annotated copy of the bill of grievances, with links to note where our current government is doing many of the very things for which we declared, 250 years ago, that it was not merely right, but a duty to throw off British governance. Of course today we have no need of revolution, because we have elections and so may freely change our leaders or even alter the form of our government without violence.
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It is also, importantly, a day to reflect on the United States, a country of ideas and values – not a nation of blood and soil. It is a day to think about what those ideals are and what we owe them, not in the fuzzy, gauzy, vague sense of flag waving and patriotic music (though those are fun), but in the hard, specific way of articulating what our country is for. And it can be hard: it is obvious to anyone studying American history that the United States did not at its inception live up to the notion that all men were created equal – the founders kept slaves and often behaved cruelly towards Native Americans. Their ideals were better than they were. And where the men failed, the ideals succeeded: the framers failed to abolish slavery, but their ideals eventually – fitfully, with too much delay and bloodshed – succeeded. Their ideals animated the movement for women’s suffrage – even when the Declaration was new, Abigail Adams could note that its principles must logically extend to all women, as well as all men – and the movement for civil rights.
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On the US Declaration of Independence
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Comment on US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentOpenAI giving the government stock for free would not be a bailout. Unless there's money moving in the other direction. Maybe it's more like a bribe, but the question is what would OpenAI get for it.OpenAI giving the government stock for free would not be a bailout. Unless there's money moving in the other direction.
Maybe it's more like a bribe, but the question is what would OpenAI get for it.
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Comment on How to ask for help (in an academic context) in ~humanities
skybrian LinkFrom the article:From the article:
How do you ask for help from people? There is only one principle. Put yourself in their mind. All good communication is grounded in an understanding of the reader’s mind. And so, I have some heuristics I would recommend when you ask for help from people you don’t know.
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How to ask for help (in an academic context)
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Comment on Google must pay record €4.1 billion fine, top EU court rules in ~tech
skybrian LinkI wonder if the EU agrees with that. Will anything need to be changed?"In any event, we adapted our agreements to comply with the initial decision back in 2018 [...]"
I wonder if the EU agrees with that. Will anything need to be changed?
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Comment on What AI does to the minds of novice coders in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentPython started out fairly simple, but it's a pretty complicated language nowadays. Asking an LLM questions seems like a good source of hints as long as you don't trust the answers and verify them...Python started out fairly simple, but it's a pretty complicated language nowadays.
Asking an LLM questions seems like a good source of hints as long as you don't trust the answers and verify them another way.
I think a reasonable approach would be to identify devices rather than people. That is, there should be an easy way for a website to check whether the device used to access the website is child-locked. Then it’s up to parents to make sure that the devices they let their children use have child locking turned on. Also, vendors shouldn’t sell devices to kids that aren’t child-locked.
This is unlikely to work against determined teenagers, but it would help to change the culture so that most children don’t usually have access to websites that don’t allow child-locked devices.