__MatrixMan__

7 jam yang laludiscuss

Yeah, the cause of death is a shovel or a saw.

__MatrixMan__

7 jam yang laludiscuss

Oh touche. Never been a fan of shoelaces myself but that's a good point.

__MatrixMan__

9 jam yang laludiscuss

I don't take those classes, what would be the point?

__MatrixMan__

9 jam yang laludiscuss

Well to that I'd say, work with your professors to prevent tests that test wrote memorization from being assigned.

__MatrixMan__

9 jam yang laludiscuss

Well, I'm taking OChem next semester, so I guess we'll see.

And to be clear I don't mean "don't study" I just think that it's going to be better to connect each chemical I need to memorize to something I already understand about biochemistry though little research projects. What I end up with might end up looking a fair bit like flash cards, but I don't intend to flash them, it's the making that does it.

__MatrixMan__

11 jam yang laludiscuss

I once took a psychology course with my girlfriend at the time. She and her pals would be up all night studying with flashcards. I'd just walk into class, learn about it, never study, and get A's on the tests.

When they asked me how I was doing it I explained that I'm there to learn understand the topic and I don't give a damn about the test. So I just let my curiosity lead the way, it causes me to ask questions in and out of class, email the professor about them, do my own research and experiments. Despite not letting the test be my guide, this prepared me for the test anyhow.

I'm glad they work for some people, but flashcards to me seem like they provide a shallow kind of understanding. I don't want to remember the equation, I want to be able to derive it in a pinch, and flash cards don't give me that.

__MatrixMan__

14 jam yang laludiscuss

> Who cares about DRY? You don't have to be the one updating the same long conditional in four different files - the AI will just do it for you! Right?

One pattern I've really been enjoying lately has to do with a language called haxe. It's designed to be compiled into other languages (java, python, others). There's this extension called reflaxe which lets you make mini compilers for compiling haxe into pretty much anything.

So if I have anything with duplicate structure... like maybe I want the CLI subcommands to resemble the http API.

    $ foo bar --baz 6 # produces similar output as HTTP GET /foo/bar?baz=6

...and `docs/generated/foo.md#bar` should have documents both the CLI and the http usage. Then I have the LLM maintain a haxe source of truth and then have it compile that source of truth to the other stuff.

Previously I was using OpenAPI spec's and generators for this, but they wound up feeling like a black box that I ended up debugging all the time. The reflaxe setup is much more generic. So you end up with this mountain of generated code, but unlike LLM-generated code it's obviously generated (in .../generated/thingy.py or whatever) and a comment at the top of the file says where to look to learn how it's generated). I'm generating docs this way, accessor functions for database tables and SQL for making those tables, matching clients and servers in different languages... it replaces a lot of purpose built tools with just one, and LLMs are pretty good at it.

So even though the repo is large, the parts of it that are authoritative remain small. I find LLM's manage this boundary much better because it's so crisp an in their face. But they have to be told to do this, otherwise they'll just create context-size problems that they'll later struggle with.

Of course you could do this with yaml files or some such, but unlike yaml, haxe has a type system, you can write tests in it, so the agent can notice fundamental flaws before the generation happens... with yaml those flaws would be propagated into the generated code before they'd get noticed.

__MatrixMan__

kemarindiscuss

There's also your friends and family and neighbors--anyone that you know in meatspace and maybe have a reason to trust explicitly.

__MatrixMan__

kemarindiscuss

I'm not so jazzed on state-issued UBI myself. It makes the state feel like they're special and I think that leads to bad behavior.

We should use money issued by the most trustworthy entity around, whatever it may be at the time, and the state should have to compete for that spot.

__MatrixMan__

kemarindiscuss

I'm not so interested in having an LLM do my bookkeeping for me. But I'm very interested in whether LLM's can unravel the accounting obfuscations that billionaires use to avoid paying taxes on their wealth.

__MatrixMan__

kemarindiscuss

The LLM is, after all, trained on a world with a lot of tax fraud in it.

__MatrixMan__

3 hari yang laludiscuss

Well if you've got two trees and two bushes, and you know one of them is destroying your sewer line but you don't know which one, then you might not want to kill them all just to be sure.

Or in some cases you might not even need to kill the whole plant, just dig a targeted hole and hack off the problematic root. It'll probably take years for a different root to find the same crack in your sewer line and start wedging it open.

__MatrixMan__

3 hari yang laludiscuss

Oh good find. It's nice to know I'm not the only one who has had this thought.

But since modern sailboats don't require knots for reefing, and modern parcels don't require tying, I think the use cases for a square knot are now pretty narrow.

Some times I use them to finish off some lashing because they can be easily tied while keeping tension, but that's about it. It's just not qualified for to be the first knot we teach a tenderfoot.

__MatrixMan__

3 hari yang laludiscuss

My point is that text is a better medium for this anyhow.

__MatrixMan__

3 hari yang laludiscuss

Joining a private space that's set up for steganography, or facilitating such a space either by self hosting or by logging in somewhere as an administrator, is sort of at odds with the nothing-to-see-here approach that steganography takes. An adversary that has compromised one message can then use whatever metadata is intrinsic to that space to suss out which other plaintexts might contain a secret, and which other humans might be exchanging secrets in that place.

The ideal hiding space would be visible to the public, and indistinguishable from a mountain of other material that's visible to the public--especially if they don't have to log in to see it. That way if a message is found, the search for co-conspirators doesn't narrow at all.

__MatrixMan__

4 hari yang laludiscuss

The trouble with pictures is that when you share them online the platform will likely compress them before serving them to others, spoiling your steganography. I think text-in-text is the way to go. Decrypt that recipe for brownies into the actual message. For example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20075

__MatrixMan__

4 hari yang laludiscuss

Perhaps, perhaps.

Though I'd like to propose that it's actually about exploring prohibited alternatives in spite of a failing authority, which is why the "of the caribbean" era pirates were democracy enthusiasts.

__MatrixMan__

4 hari yang laludiscuss

Wouldn't it be cool if we could get to the point where authors (and artists generally) are making more from voluntary direct payments than they are from the platforms?

It would be a great way to demonstrate how broken the funding model is, and all of that money would be money that didn't contribute to the surveillance/censorship tech that copyright is used to justify.

__MatrixMan__

4 hari yang laludiscuss

Ever since I was a scout in the 90s I've been considering how to get in contact with them about discouraging use of the square knot.

The way that loading it crosswise causes it to shift into a double half hitch, turning from a "hold fast" knot to a slipknot... That's funky behavior and should disqualify it from being among the first few knots people learn. If you're using it for its advertised purpose, it's downright dangerous, and the square/granny confusion is just needless pain to discourage a newbie.

If you wanna tie two ropes together and have a less finicky experience, use a fisherman's knot. Which is basically a pair of overhands, each around the other rope.

It's a much more reliable knot for trying two ropes together, lacks the annoying gotchas of the square knot, and for a long list of reasons I won't bore you with here it is a better foundation for learning other knots. (It's no good for drawstrings though, too reliable, no quick release).

__MatrixMan__

4 hari yang laludiscuss

I hope yours keeps working for you. I flushed a lot of blue crystals, but the plant was not deterred.

MatrixMan

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