Why are people enthralled by mind flayers compelled to act, and not just post about the act on instagram? At this point you’re just arguing for the sake of arguing, because lord forbid you concede your initial take maybe wasn’t so amazing.

An old anecdote from my alma mater – in an introductory course to discrete math, the professor was teaching combinatorics and began: “Suppose you have an urn with three balls inside colored red, green and blue…” At this point one of the students interjected: “Half the class are electrical engineering majors, how is any of this relevant to our studies?” there was a beat and the professor corrected himself: “Suppose you have an urn with three resistors inside colored red, green and blue…”

The Evolution of Trust

Two govt spooks are hunting a dangerous fugitive who is also a humanities graduate. He escapes into a sprawling maze of tunnels. “It’s hopeless,” one of the spooks says. But the other simply says, “Watch.” then proclaims loudly, “studying linear algebra is important because of its use in stochastic processes and image manipulation.” Before he finishes the sentence, the fugitive emerges back out the tunnel and shouts, “but what’s even more important --” and is immediately knocked unconscious and taken for questioning

Well, it would be a start to let artists sue AI for copyright infringement in some way. If a human can’t hide behind “oh but I draw inspiration from a lot of places, this was an accident” then neither should an AI company. And on the flip side the same way you can’t just accuse someone of infringement because “they must have drawn inspiration from somewhere, everything is a remix”, it shouldn’t make sense to accuse an AI this way. So far we’ve somehow been able to deal with the supposedly intractable question of whether something is plagiarism or not, I reckon we should hold AI to the same standard.

To me vim’s main strengths are

• It delivers the same OK-ish experience no matter what file type or language I’m dealing with. Yeah it’ll never be as good as a dedicated Python IDE for writing Python, but I’d rather know vim than 5 different IDEs for Python, YAML, Dockerfiles, Rust, Latex, whatever I need to deal with today.
• It just edits files and doesn’t hide internal state, intermediate files, etc to make my life ‘simpler’ (notepad is the same, so I guess this is more of a strength vs IDEs). When an IDE fails to align all of its internal moving parts just right to compile a project I know I’m in for an hour of figuring out which checkbox needs to be unticked in what sub-sub-sub-sub-submenu, I like it much better to have a “flat” experience of invoking a command line and getting an error message directly from the tool I am invoking.
• 20dd to delete 20 lines, that’s very neat.

Someone arrange a summit with her and the head of the FF7 soulbonder cult

What is the end game of singling out the EU for human rights abuses? I too would like to fantasize about a future where by taking the EU to task we lift up the entire world into a new age of enlightenment where every single nation is held to a higher standard of morality. In practice, the way people actually work, if this rhetoric succeeds what we’re going to get is total apathy. Hey if France and Germany are morally bankrupt, on what basis exactly do we have any complaints with Russia, China or Saudi Arabia.

Your comment makes me personally angry. After considering several ways of explaining why it makes me personally angry, I’ve settled on telling you about this person I worked with a long, long time ago – let’s call her Anya.

Anya is the model employee per your value system. A risk-taker, a people person, full of gumption and ambition to get ahead. All her life she’s used these skills to project the image of someone knowledgeable, dependable, who is on top of things. So far so good. Unfortunately at one point she realized that she is much more capable at this, by many orders of magnitude, than at actually becoming knowledgeable or on top of anything. To her, learning and understanding the details of a system is a hassle; so why go through the hassle when it’s so much easier to just navigate every conversation about the system, and appear knowledgeable? Why make the effort to improve at the actual job when it’s so easy to judo-deflect every negative incident as actually a positive, or someone else’s fault? She has a gift; being a human, and not a saint, she is compelled to make use of that gift.

Anya is not a bad person. She just takes the path of least resistance – let he among us who is without that particular sin cast the first stone. Maybe she even has the natural capacity to match and exceed the skill level of her colleagues; it’s just that she never will, because what’s in it for her. One way or the other, navigating any problem with Anya on your team is an ordeal. Every step forward involves defusing some part of whatever elaborate web of obfuscation she’d weaved to maintain her image. To be blunt, the thought of people like her being actually in charge of some truly technical system, something that can’t be reasoned with or bullshitted, that will cause damage and cost lives if not handled properly – that thought puts the fear of god in my heart.

So in conclusion, being familiar with Anya, I don’t buy your Randian Dr. House fantasy, this dichotomy of skillful extroverted pushy go-getters who know the job and don’t take no bullshit and ‘tell it like it is’ vs risk averse socially inept introvert moochers. Given the choice between working with Anya on a project or instead working with Anya’s risk averse socially inept introvert colleague who is actually physically capable of articulating the words “I don’t know, I’ll go check” – give me the colleague any day of the week.