@mjd I liked it when it was Vernor Vinge's "The Cookie Monster". In real life, not so much.

@jmac It belongs on the Lateral podcast, not on a bar.

@mjd @Crazypedia I am pretty sure I heard a podcast episode about her -- but which podcast? It's totally a 99% Invisible story but no, it isn't. During peak pandemic, I listened to a ton of podcasts, but at some point I moved phones and forgot to bring my AntennaPod DB with me and lost a lot of history. Anyway, I couldn't remember her name until I searched, but I remembered the idea.

@mjd @Crazypedia "A self-cleaning building construction comprises apparatus for applying a fine spray or mist of water and/or water and detergent to wall, floor and ceiling surfaces, followed by warm air drying. Floors slope in a direction for removing excess moisture via a drain. Also included are closet apparatus for cleaning clothing, cupboard dishwasher apparatus for cleaning stored dishes, self-cleaning bathtub apparatus, and self-cleaning washbasin apparatus." -US patent number 4,428,08, Frances Gabe

@bkuhn What does "cannot reason" mean? Like, they make a lot of reasoning mistakes? So do many higher mammals (I know I have!). They confidently say wrong things? I think we've all done that! But, like, they can go from premises to conclusions (better than many humans).

re: uspol

@bkuhn @starlily The "fall of Rome" was arguably a centuries-long process (not even counting that the Eastern empire lasted until nearly the Early Modern period). By the time Rome (the city itself) fell, there had been centuries of civil war and major changes in the governance structure (was it "regime change" every time a different general took over as emperor? Those changes were, of course, very often violent). And Rome itself was, of course, an empire -- a centralized power structure maintaining that power at the expense of the folks on the periphery.

If we look at the changes that we object to in the world today, they are often achieved non-violently. Orban's rule wasn't violent (except in the sense that all states are fundamentally violent); it didn't start with a coup, and it didn't end violently either. It would be hard to describe Netanyahu as non-violent (LOL), but, again, he was voted in in a nonviolent election.

"Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to." -Hilary Bok.

Anyway, I think we can see women's suffrage as an example of a (almost entirely) nonviolent change that moved us closer to a egalitarian society under the rule of law. Same for LGBTQ rights. Can you imagine any major news outlet using the term "husband" to refer to a man married to man in 1990? But if you look now, you'll see even right-wing outlets (OANN, Newsmax) using it without scare quotes.

re: uspol

@bkuhn @enobacon @starlily

I would not say that the major changes in the UK, from an oligopoly to a parliamentary democracy, happened without violence, but the ultimate success of universal suffrage was not due to violence. I mean here, the 19th and early 20th century expansion of the franchise to nearly all adults. Sure, the Chartists and Suffragettes both engaged in violent actions and suffered from violent repression by the state, but the changes weren't ultimately made at gunpoint. But it also took something like a hundred years (more if we count the House of Lords changes, which, optimistically, are still a work in-progress). Maybe it's odd to describe it as "regime change", but if you sent a modern Brit back to 1831, they would see the idea that they would be unable to vote because they didn't have enough money as insane and backwards.

Imagine the following change in the US (say, to make Senate seats proportional to state size, expand the House to 6k members, and eliminate the Electoral College). This would be smaller, in some sense. It wouldn't change who could vote. Instead of getting rid of rotten boroughs of seven people electing someone to Parliament, we would reduce the power of a Wyoming voter from ~60x a California voter to (roughly) even. It would be a major enough change to completely reshape American politics (while still leaving huge problems unsolved -- I didn't even mention the Supreme Court, or the administrative state's structural weakness). It could, in theory, happen without violence (I think the odds of change happening by violence are higher, but I don't think those specific changes are what violence would give us). Would that be regime change?

The breakup of the USSR, while not completely nonviolent, was certainly not a violent revolution.

And of course, Indian and Pakistani independence. Partition, of course, involved significant violence, but that's not a story about regime change.

@meoralis Pretty sure I've seen pottery glazes that look like that?

@b0rk @mjd I think hashing is by far the most useful for the working programmer (in some sense -- like, it would be hard to imagine life without https, but I mean, direct use). In addition to integrity checking, deduplication/content-addressed storage, there's password hashing, and, if you are a fan of carbon dioxide, proof-of-work. But admittedly my own experience biases me.

@mjd @b0rk I actually think I at least skimmed that paper, a while ago. But I mean, it's known in the sense that we know that nobody has published a way to do it, and people spend billions of dollars online on the assumption that these operations are difficult. And we further are now deploying PQC on the belief that certain operations will not be difficult for very long given newer technology. It's not a mathematical fact, but an engineering value, like the compressive strength of concrete. But it's subject to change because we live in an adversarial world. So maybe it's more like, I dunno, how deadly a bullet is given current armor. You're taking a math mindset, but that is exactly not the mindset that @b0rk is asking about.

@b0rk I don't understand the math well enough to trust in my understanding of it. Why should reversing certain functions be hard?

The only answer I can give is the same as the answer I give on global warming: scientists say this is the fact of the matter, and I trust their general epistemology.

I can plug in a toaster that I couldn't build, and I can toast with it. So I guess I can understand an interface to something I couldn't build. And I know that there are some toasters that are not worth taking a chance on (I guess the public key equivalent would be designing a novel cryptographic protocol).

re: Catfishing.net trivia game #792

@ranjit @futzle @fsvo I just checked and my hardest correct answer is Susan Kare. I don't know why that's so hard -- she's an absolute icon!

@b0rk The reason to choose example.com is that you're setting a good example for others, who might instead use a real domain in a dangerous situation.

@lahosken @bethwinegarner Is her avatar a snake? Say, a boa?

@waltman @mjd It cites a NYT article, but that article says "nobody seems to be sure" (its other cited sources are silent). Claude couldn't find a primary source either.

@mjd Funny enough, a bitcoin is divided into 100,000,000 "satoshis". Kind of a driving on parkways situation.

@mjd I was also making the same joke (hence the link), but yes, that does make some sense as an actual origin.

@mjd I was also making the same joke (hence the link), but yes, that does make some sense as an actual origin.

@mjd Presumably because they used an early form of bitcoin.

@mjd No, with that explanation I agree.

@mjd @universe_of_discourse I think your lexicographic list of binary numbers is wrong -- it starts 0; 1, but should start 0; 01; 001; ...

@mjd @chris__martin I find that doctors at One Medical are dramatically more willing to give you Y or Z if you ask. Like, it's a ten minute appointment; you had better go in with plans Y and Z in hand. But if you do, they are well aware that you've chosen One Medical for a reason. It's not 100%; I got the shingles vaccine early but Danielle didn't (until a week later when coincidentally the One Medical doctor I had used moved to be the in-house One Medical person at her company, at which point, problem solved). Similarly, for psychiatric meds, someone whose job description is "medication management" will be more willing to let you bring your own suggestions.

But yes, it's crazy that you have to know tricks like this to get the bare minimum level of care.

@ranjit @vapaad More cat is more love.

@mjd Empirically, it's 51

@igb I think the Enterprise version is called the universal translator.

@igb I think the Enterprise version is called the universal translator.

@johns Attn @bkuhn In re my email, this is one example of something that one could whack together with a LLM in a few days. (In re John's actual question, it looks like there are a bunch of web-based ones like Odoo or OSPOS, which, well, I guess? But a desktop one would be so much nicer).

@bkuhn @jalefkowit @wwahammy

Coming from a not bad family, I think there are things we can teach our kids about adulting. Like, how to budget. Or how to think about debt. Or when it's worth asking for an exception to a rule (or just ignoring the rule). What a good relationship looks like. Or how to manage being neurospicy.

@chrissie_c Supposedly NordVPN.

@mjd I think this is another example of my theory that there are two types of people: those who embrace things of the class Cooper Coupe, and those who don't. The rank "General of the Army" was invented because otherwise George C. Marshall would have been Field Marshall Marshall. I would have jumped at that chance. Marshall didn't. (Of course, now I can't think of any other instances of this, but I'm sure I have some somewhere).

@mjd The New Yorker's Shuffalo isn't quite that, but it's similar.

@mjd @mcahalane The dissents' whole argument about not being subject to a foreign power was incomprehensible to me. There were Black people alive in 1868 who had been born outside the US. Why wouldn't those people have been considered to be subjects of whatever polity they were born in? And thus, wouldn't their children be in the same situation as children of immigrants today?

@bmd Thanks for the feedback.

I think it gives you a pop-up when you've got it solved; if you're not seeing that, please let me know what browser/OS and send me a screenshot. I'm not sure about typing -- there's a little thing where sometimes you've got to use the correct "O", but I don't know that it's a good thing, so maybe I should just forget that and allow typing. Kind of tricky to figure out how typing interacts with the drag/drop, but probably possible.

Anyway, too-much-dragging aside, how do you like it?

@lahosken You can use each letter at most once, but they are in order. So, if the words are MORX and FLEET, you might be given MFOLREETX. You know that M is the first letter of one of the words.

(If you have red-green colorblindness, the UI will be harder to understand; I intend to fix this somehow but haven't quite gotten to it)

@mjd From episode 193 of the Lateral podcast, wet vs electronic.

@mjd I know what Peano numbers are, and could roughly do arithmetic with them. So I would not need an explanation, I think.

@bkuhn @seabass I am a beneficiary of this -- I was a total rando, 20 years old or so with no accomplishments, who approached Bradley at a conference. We ended up going to dinner, and somehow this led to him hiring me at FSF.