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wwfn

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bubbles.town
3 points·by wwfn·bulan lalu·1 comments

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wwfn
·23 hari yang lalu·discuss
I think they're both "negative parallelism" constructs. Either way, neither are new.

The prose on https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/its-not-just-data-its-pos... changed how I think about it: the framework is useful for reasoning, not lazy writing. This bubbles.town submission's title could be light evidence of negative parallelism's utility. (Or, more likely, just the stochastic nature of what's popular when)
wwfn
·24 hari yang lalu·discuss
Excited to see this get traction! Federated voting and comments on top of RSS has an indie-web elegance to it.

Indulging in meta-commentary: The HN submit history for bubbles.town is interesting. Took 7 tries to reach the front page. The final viral title resembles the supposed-LLM-tell "X not Y." Coincidence or evidence that the models touch on a useful way to communicate ideas. (I only looked because I submitted the one 2 weeks ago.)

   436 points  3 days ago   Hacker News but for independent blogs
     3 points  4 days ago   Bubbles – community-ranked feed of blog posts
     3 points 13 days ago   A community-ranked feed of blog posts from curated sources
     3 points 20 days ago   Bubbles – an HN-like link aggregator for the non-tech internet
     1 point  28 days ago   Bubbles: Blog Post Discovery
     4 points 50 days ago   Bubbles
     6 points 75 days ago   Bubbles – HN-like frontpage for personal indie blogs
wwfn
·bulan lalu·discuss
fediverse authenticate voting for articles in feeds enumerated on https://bubbles.town/blogs.opml

Every blog post on Bubbles gets a corresponding post on @[email protected].
wwfn
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Absolutely! And the list.pop version is multiple orders of magnitude slower. But I took the prompt to be asking for in-place modification of the existing list. Comprehension does not do that.
wwfn
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Ahh I didn't see the full original prompt -- it's overflowing into a horz scroll for me. I thought it was the "critique loop" that injected the *args requirement. I guess garbage in, garbage out. Still unfortunate example to use.
wwfn
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Tangential (but topical in that "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing" is also on the front page):

Is the generated python code in the example wrong?

The prompt

> Develop a Python function that removes any falsey values from a list. Return the modified list without creating a new one.

Is answered with list comprehension, which makes a new list and leaves the original unmodified (never mind that the *args input necessarily can't be a modifiable list?)

   def remove_falsey_values(*args): return [val for val in args if val]
Whereas I'd expect something like

    def remove_falsey_values(l):
          for i in reversed(range(len(l))):
               if not l[i]: l.pop(i)
          # returned list is linked to input l 
          return l

    a = [1, 0, False, 'foo']
    x = remove_falsey_values(a)
    x[0] = 2
    print(a) # [2,'foo']
wwfn
·5 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Can you say more? Guile's the only scheme I've tried (attempts at packaging for Guix). Debugging has been difficult, but I figured it was me struggling with new tools and API. Does racket have better facilities for introspection or discovery at the REPL?
wwfn
·5 bulan yang lalu·discuss


  * I suspect many existing and reasonable regulations do not meet that "simply caught" classification. @rconti's comment above[1] gives some examples of regulations on process that are not observed in the output (food, child labor). I'll add accounting, information control (HIPAA, CUI, etc), environmental protections.

  * Newsroom staff is incentivized to enforce the regulation. It protects their livelihood. From the article: 
  > Notably, the bill would cement some labor protections for newsroom workers 

  * Mandatory AI labeling is not impossible to enforce. At worst, it requires random audits (who was paid to write this story, do they attest to doing so). At best, it encourages preemptive provenance tracking (that could even be accessible to the news consumer! I'd like that).   
One reason for the regulation is we fear hallucinations slipping into the public record -- even if most LLM usage is useful/harmless. Legal restrictions ideally prevent this, but also give a mechanism for recourse when it does happen.

Say a news story goes off the rails and reports a police officer turned into a frog [2] or makes up some law[3]. Someone thinks that's odd and alerts whatever authority. The publisher can be investigated, reprimanded, and ideally motivated to provide better labeling or QC on their LLM usage.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46915463 [2]: https://www.wate.com/news/ai-generated-police-report-says-of... [3]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/judge-fines-lawyers...
wwfn
·5 bulan yang lalu·discuss
> passing laws that only apply to people who volunteer to follow them

That's a concerning lens to view regulations. Obviously true, but for all laws. Regulations don't apply to only to what would be immediately observable offenses.

There are lots of bad actors and instances where the law is ignored because getting caught isn't likely. Those are conspiracies! They get harder to maintain with more people involved and the reason for whistle-blower protections.

VW's Dieselgate[1] comes to mind albeit via measurable discrepancy. Maybe Enron or WorldCom (via Cynthia Cooper) [2] is a better example.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCI_Inc.#Accounting_scandals
wwfn
·5 bulan yang lalu·discuss
That looks demonstrative! For those that don't want to click, from Aug to Feb S&P is up 10%. "Software - Applications" is down 21%.

But in this context, is Uber[9% weight, down ~4% YTD] a transportation company that roles it's own software for competitive advantage? I think other's in the composition are similar. The takeaway is maybe that the tech landscape is changing or LLMs have spooked investors and they're running without direction. But that doesn't necessarily speak to bespoke software uptake (already) cutting into profits(?) Uber would be fine in that case?
wwfn
·6 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Hopefully not too offtopic: why so much boilerplate?

I see most would-be-boilerplate code refactored so the redundant bit becomes a small utility or library. But most of what I write is for research/analysis pipelines, so I'm likely missing an important insight. Like more verbose configuration over terse convention?

For code structure, snippets tempting[1] ("iff[tab]" => "if(...){...}") handles the bare conditional/loop completes in a more predictable way and offline/without a LLM eating into RAM.

[1] https://github.com/joaotavora/yasnippet; https://github.com/SirVer/ultisnips; https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editing/userdefinedsnippe...
wwfn
·6 bulan yang lalu·discuss
If looking for local email, why not a traditional client (thunderbird, claws, even outlook) or the more flexible/cli friendly maildir and notmuch? There are a bunch of front ends, including WebUIs https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/

Is what you're looking for a pretty good fit for how email was originally used? Or am missing something obvious
wwfn
·6 bulan yang lalu·discuss
do you share your top-24 anywhere?
wwfn
·8 bulan yang lalu·discuss
What keyboard are you using? one where å Å ∆ F12 are easily accessible?

Is there a good interface to (GUI?) openscad from termux?
wwfn
·8 bulan yang lalu·discuss
https://freedoom.github.io/ does that for the still proprietary DOOM assets. Though the DOOM engine itself is open source, so a slight different situation than Command and Conquer.
wwfn
·8 bulan yang lalu·discuss
I would have thought supporting libcurl and libxml would also be in a company's self-interest. Is that companies do this for GPL'ed linux kernel but not BSD evidence that strong copyleft licensing limits the extent to which OSS projects are exploited/under-resourced?
wwfn
·8 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Wealth generated on top of underpaid labor is a reoccurring theme -- and in this case maybe surprisingly exacerbated by LLMs.

Would this be different if the underlying code had a viral license? If google's infrastructure was built on a GPL'ed libcurl [0], would they have investment in the code/a team with resources to evaluate security reports (slop or otherwise)? Ditto for libxml.

Does GPL help the linux kernel get investment from it's corporate users?

[0] Perhaps an impossible hypothetical. Would google have skipped over the imaginary GPL'ed libcurl or libxml for a more permissively licensed library? And even if they didn't, would a big company's involvement in an openly developed ecosystem create asymmetric funding/goals, a la XMPP or Nix?
wwfn
·3 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Yeah! On the actual notetaking side: I think I stumbled into a less deliberate "interstitial journaling" paradigm (a la roam research?). I setup the journal plugin to create a file per week from there keep a list of links to project specific files (hierarchies like :tools:autossh, :studies:R01grant:datashare). I also backlink from the project file to the journal file. So each page looks like a log. I try to aggressively interlink related topics/files.

I have an ugly and now likely outdated plugin for Zim to help with this. There's a small chance the demo screenshots for it help tie together what I'm trying to say. https://github.com/WillForan/zim-plugin-datelinker

On the tech side: My work notes (and email) has shifted into emacs but I'm still editing zimwiki formatted files w/ the many years of notes accumulated in it Though I've lost it moving to emacs, the Zim GUI has a nice backlink sidebar that's amazing for rediscovery. Zim also facilitates hierarchy (file and folder) renames which helps take the pressure off creating new files. I didn't make good use of the map plugin, but it's occasionally useful to see the graph of connected pages.

I'm (possibly unreasonably) frustrated with using the browser for editing text. Page loads and latency are noticeably, editor customization is limited, and shortcuts aren't what I've muscle memory for -- accidental ctrl-w (vim:swap focus, emacs/readline delete word) is devastating.

Zim and/or emacs is super speedy. Especially with local files. I using syncthing to get keep computers and phone synced. But, if starting fresh, I might look at things that using markdown or org-mode formatting instead. logseq (https://logseq.com/) looks pretty interesting there.

Sorry! Long answer.
wwfn
·3 tahun yang lalu·discuss
I'm thinking unpopular could mean the tech is polarizing or frequently dismissed/overlooked.

  * APL -- I haven't dedicated the time to learning in part because there's little support where I normally work. I'd love for APL to have be adapted like a domain specific language a la perl compatible regular expressions for various languages (april in common lisp, APL.jl in julia).
  * regular expressions. https://xkcd.com/1171/
  * bugs/issue tracking embedded in git https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug/
But I'm more excited for things that fall into the niche/lesser-known side of of unpopular. I love finding the little gems that change how I organize or work with the system.

  * "type efficiently by saying syllables and literal words" https://sr.ht/~geb/numen/
  * I use fasd[0] 'z' alias for jumping to previous directories in shell every day.
  * Alt+. in shell (readline, bash) to get the previous commands last argument is another ergonomic time saver that I think is relatively obscure. I have a bash wrapper to combine that with fzf for quick any-previous-command-argument  fuzzy search and insert [1]
  * zimwiki [2] (and/or a less capable emacs mode[3]) for note taking has served me well for a decade+
  * DokuWiki's XML RPC [4] enables local editor edits to a web wiki. I wish it was picked up by more editor plugin developers. (cf. emacs-dokiwki [5]) 
 * xterm isn't unpopular per say, but I don't see sixel support and title setting escape codes talked about often. I depend on a bash debug trap to update the prompt with escape codes that set the terminal title [6]
* are clipboard managers popular? I get a lot out of using https://github.com/erebe/greenclip

[0] https://github.com/clvv/fasd [1] https://github.com/WillForan/fuzzy_arg [2] https://zim-wiki.org/ [3] https://github.com/WillForan/zim-wiki-mode [4] https://www.dokuwiki.org/xmlrpc [5] https://github.com/flexibeast/emacs-dokuwiki [6] https://github.com/WillForan/dotconf/blob/master/bash/PS1.ba... -- bash debug trap to update prompt with escape codes that set the title to previous run command -- to eg. search windows for the terminal playing music from 'mpv'