Inauthentic behaviors

WTF. From the site “help” page:

Inauthentic behaviors refer to actions that are not genuine or true, often involving deception or manipulation to create a false impression. This can include pretending to be someone else, using fake identities, or engaging in activities that misrepresent one’s true self or intentions.

So… you post a dissenting point of view and they moderate you by saying “you couldn’t possibly mean that, you big faker.”

I’d rather just be banned. This is somehow more insulting.

Is there a club? Can I join?

I saw the original 140 character limit and thought: “I need to be able to write things that amuse, explain, or matter. That’s nowhere near enough.” Sure, “brevity is the essence of wit” but that’s too brief and I’m not that witty.

Sometimes, old machines are survivors. Beware of confirmation bias when trash/thrift-picking cheap systems though. IMO, Thinkpads can be tough as a coffin nail. Including work systems, I’m on number 8 at this point with no hardware failures in sight.

That said, I have a very lightweight Acer that’s about a decade old with the worst keyboard and trackpad ever manufactured. It also performs like a slug, even with Linux on it. Still, it refuses to break so I can get rid of it.

Yesterday we made quesadillas with gluten-free tortillas, kimchi, thinly sliced fried spam, and smoked cheese. All stuff we happened to have in our pantry. This was better than it had any right to be.

I can also make vegitarian maki (sushi), spam musubi, or korean gimbap with a bit more prep work. We also always have Korean sides (pickled radish, cucumber, and more) on hand to throw together healthy meals fast.

If push comes to shove, I can just thaw some ground beef out, season it up, and throw it on rice.

If I’m feeling really lazy: peanut butter straight out of the jar. Don’t @ me.

Disclaimer: I can’t eat wheat, so my whole diet got up and (mostly) moved to Southeast Asia to compensate.

This essay is brought to you by Raid: Shadow Legends.

My boss had Narcissistic Personality Disorder, complete with face-melting off-the-record disapproval of my behavior, followed by “love-bombs” affirming my positive contribution to the workplace, mere days after. This resulted in not so much a rage-quit as taking my first opportunity to exit as fast as possible. And the cherry on top? An open invitation to come back mere weeks afterwards. The pattern was so textbook, that all I had to do was look up NPD romantic advice and search+replace “partner” for “boss” in most cases.

That said, I was pretty mad about how a great opportunity was ruined like this, let alone not as advertised. We’ve all heard “this meeting could have been an email”, well there’s also “this tirade could have been a counseling session.”

It’s worth adding that, if you are arrested, that phone is a treasure-trove of potential liability that will absolutely get used against you. Also, you’re probably not getting it back, so you’re better off without it. Carry cash, a map if you must, and coordinate rally points and fallback locations with your friends ahead of time.

A proper camera is a good tip, but make sure the camera memory and storage card are wiped ahead of time.

just living your life without a phone is getting harder

This is a bigger problem than most realize. Consider the barrier-to-entry for phones, internet access, and charging. Then add cashless payment on top of that. Combined, it creates a new red-line between economic classes, and a rather ugly one at that. At some point, this mode of commerce is going to get selected not for the convenience it provides, but for whom it excludes.

I’ll also add that getting access to a smartphone with total anonymity is impressively hard to do.

I mean, that happens with CloudWatch all the time. It’s the most plausible part about this.

True, but the article is about projects getting de-platformed, so all that goes away under those circumstances. There’s value tied up in all that data, but the codebase itself might be far harder to replace securely if the public repo just vanishes. Better to have at least an alternate offsite backup - on another service even - if all you do is maintain a project-owner-controlled clone.

Plus, I know it’s a small gesture, but some folks might need that tiny push to migrate if they’re already fence-sitting about leaving.

I haven’t always been a fan of Go. It launched with some iffy design decisions that have since been patched, either by the project maintainers or the community. It’s a much better experience now, which suggests that maybe there’s some long-range vision at work that I wasn’t privy to.

That said, Pike clearly has a lot of good ideas and I’m glad Google funded him to bring those to light.

I’ll also say that after finally wrapping my head around Python and JavaScript async/await, I actually much prefer the Goroutine and channel model for concurrency. I got to those languages after surviving C++, and believe me when I say that it’s a bad time when your software develops a bad case of warts. Better to not contract them in the first place.

For anyone that needs to know: it’s criminally easy to set up git for multiple remotes, making a migration from GitHub a lot easier.

Remember that origin is just the default, and you can have any number configured you want.

• View all remotes: git remote -v
• Add new remote: git remote add $name $url
• Push to another remote: git push $remotename $branchname
• Pull from a specific remote: git pull $remotename/$branchname (note the slash)
• Fetch from all remotes: git fetch --all

The first two are just one-time setup, and the rest just get bolted onto your existing workflow. At some point, you’ll want to use git remote move names around, possibly even making origin something other than GitHub. Cheers.

You’re welcome.

I’m not sure if this is c/bmoviebonanza material, but it’s up there. Anyway, that’s a solid community if you enjoy shlocky “how did this happen?!” movies.

Also, just dig through the Cannon Group movie list for more “throw crazy shit at the wall” gems like this. Some are hits, most are misses, and a few are really incredible misses.

Best I can do is Lou Ferrigno as Hercules. Just watch the whole trailer. The monster designs and other set pieces are pretty far out there for the time.

With a helmet like that, may as well cast GWAR and call it a day.

If not generations, then what?

Income, average household size, cost-of-living, religious preference, level of education, geography… lots of ways to slice up that poll data once you correlate each polling place with other data. The key here is that it’s possibly more valid to correlate with information that is closer to the election date than birthdays that were decades ago.

I use a system prompt that forces it to ask a question if there are options or if it has to make assumptions

I’m kind of amazed that even works. I’ll have to try that. Then again, I’ve asked ChatGPT to “respond to all prompts like a Magic 8-ball” and it knocked it out of the park.

so I start a new chat frequently.

I do this as well, and totally forgot to mention it. Yes, I keep the context small and fresh so that prior conversations (and hallucinations) can’t poison new dialogues.

I also will do the same prompts on two models from different providers at the same time and cross reference the idiots to see if they are lying to me.

Oooh… straight to my toolbox with that one. Cheers.

That’s been my biggest problem with the current state of affairs. It’s now easier to research newer tech through an LLM than it is to play search-result-wack-a-mole, on the off chance that what you need is on a forum that’s not Discord. At least an AI can mostly make sense of vendor docs and extrapolate a bit from there. That said, I don’t like it.

When writing code, I don’t let AI do the heavy lifting. Instead, I use it to push back the fog of war on tech I’m trying to master. At the same time, keep the dialogue to a space where I can verify what it’s giving me.

1. Never ask leading questions. Every token you add to the conversation matters, so phrase your query in a way that forces the AI to connect the dots for you
2. Don’t ask for deep reasoning and inference. It’s not built for this, and it will bullshit/hallucinate if you push it to do so.
3. Ask for live hyperlinks so it’s easier to fact-check.
4. Ask for code samples, algorithms, or snippets to do discrete tasks that you can easily follow.
5. Ask for A/B comparisons between one stack you know by heart, and the other you’re exploring.
6. It will screw this up, eventually. Report hallucinations back to the conversation.

About 20% of the time, it’ll suggest things that are entirely plausible and probably should exist, but don’t. Some platforms and APIs really do have barn-door-sized holes in them and it’s staggering how rapidly AI reports a false positive in these spaces. It’s almost as if the whole ML training stratagem assumes a kind of uniformity across the training set, on all axes, that leads to this flavor of hallucination. In any event, it’s been helpful to know this is where it’s most likely to trip up.

Edit: an example of one such API hole is when I asked ChatGPT for information about doing specific things in Datastar. This is kind of a curveball since there’s not a huge amount online about it. It first hallucinated an attribute namespace prefix of data-star- which is incorrect (it uses data- instead). It also dreamed up a JavaScript-callable API parked on a non-existent Datastar. object. Both of those concepts conform strongly to the broader world of browser-extending APIs, would be incredibly useful, and are things you might expect to be there in the first place.

The genius of launching an attack of this scale from an address space that is already jam-packed full of hackers, should not be understated. Id say that, if not for doing it live on stage, law enforcement now has a giant haystack of needles to sift through.