Archive Team often uses the Internet Archive to share the things they save and obviously they have a shared goal of saving a copy of everything ever made, but they aren’t the same people. The Archive Team is a vigilante white hat hacker group (well, maybe a little bit grey), and running a Warrior basically means you’re volunteering to be part of their botnet. When a website is going to be shut down, they’ll whip together a script and push it out to the botnet to try to grab as much of the dying site as they can, and when there’s more downtime they have some other projects, like trying to brute force all those awful link shorteners so that when they inevitably die, people can still figure out where it should’ve pointed to.

This, and see also “minmaxing,” the process of optimizing something (usually your character in a game) to get minimum penalty and/or maximum benefit, usually ignoring anything like realism or storytelling and focusing entirely on the stats and numbers.

The .bin and .cue file are the parts of the actual game disc that you want. The .bin file contains almost all of the data and the .cue file contains some extra information about the structure of the CD. All the rest is Internet Archive stuff (and an image of the game cover of course).

To open it, you can convert it to a .iso disk image instead, which any Linux distribution can open as if it were a real CD. This blog post talks about how to do that. The last paragraph about mount you can probably replace with double-clicking the .iso file in the GUI I would guess.

I know TiddlyWiki quite well but have only poked at Logseq, so maybe it’s more similar to this than I think, but TiddlyWiki is almost entirely implemented in itself. There’s a very small core that’s JavaScript but most of it is implemented as wiki objects (they call them “tiddlers,” yes, really) and almost everything you interact with can be tweaked, overridden, or imitated. There’s almost nothing that “the system” can do but you can’t. It’s idiosyncratic, kind of its own little universe to be learned and concepts to be understood, but if you do it’s insanely flexible.

Dig deep enough, and you’ll discover that it’s not a weird little wiki — it’s a tiny, self-contained object database and web frontend framework that they have used to make a weird little wiki, but you can use it for pretty much anything else you want, either on top of the wiki or tearing it down to build your own thing. I’ve used it to make a prediction tracker for a podcast I follow, I’ve made my own todo list app in it, and I made a Super Bowl prop bet game for friends to play that used to be spreadsheet-based. For me, it’s the perfect “I just want to knock something together as a simple web app” tool.

And it has the fun party trick (this used to be the whole point of it but I’d argue it has moved beyond this now) that your entire wiki can be exported to a single HTML file that contains the entire fully functional app, even allowing people to make their own edits and save a new copy of the HTML file with new contents. If running a small web server isn’t an issue, that’s the easiest way to do it because saving is automatic and everything is centralized, otherwise you need to jump through some hoops to get your web browser to allow writing to the HTML file on disk or just save new copies every time.

If you run the Node.js version, that’s all handled for you. It’s only if you want to do the party trick of keeping it all in a single HTML file that you need to worry about a plugin or anything like that. And even then, the server version exports to a standalone HTML file with one or two clicks.

Edit to add: it’s the only substantial Node package I’ve ever seen with zero dependencies. Very lightweight and simple to run.

No. The headsets are disabled when the play starts or when the play clock goes below 15 seconds.

It’s not a fantasy because they’re bad ideas (they’re not) or we shouldn’t fight for them (we should), it’s a fantasy because you’re skipping over any of the actual work that needs to be done to make them happen: convincing more people to join you and demand more. Ask 100 people if the Senate and Supreme Court should be abolished and 99 of them are going to look at you like you have two heads. You can insist that you’re right and they’re all wrong all you want, but unless you work to get more people on your side, you’ll just be complaining into the void and setting impossible standards for politicians so that you can feel smug when they fail to meet them.

It’s a new model this year, as Nate Silver took his with him when he left 538. The new one seems to put a lot of emphasis on “the fundamentals” this far out, that is, it “thinks” that the general environment and economy and such is pretty good for the incumbent and that the polls might move in that direction by the time election day comes along. And since it’s fitted to historical data, it’s also implicitly assuming that this election will be similar to past elections (like, say, including a competent campaign by a candidate who can get out there and effectively communicate accomplishments and a plan for their term).

I personally think those assumptions are pretty clearly wrong this year and so I’m more inclined to base my perception of the race on pure polling averages, which are looking quite bad for Biden.

“The US President might be in cognitive decline” is a massive news story, as is “The only opponent to a fascist is one more bad night away from his campaign completely imploding,” and also “the President’s own party says behind closed doors that he’s in massive trouble, but is sticking with him in public.”

If a minority group is being oppressed or is otherwise motivated to create change and is voting in large numbers, but the majority is apathetic and not bothering to vote, then this system would prevent the minority from changing their representation as “punishment” for something they’re not doing.

It’s also a bit of a “the beatings will continue until morale improves” solution to the problem, if it even is actually a problem. Low turnout is bad, but not because it’s inherently bad not to vote. It’s a symptom of the fact that people don’t think it matters, or that it will change anything, and unfortunately they’re not exactly wrong much of the time. Instead of putting effort into punishing people for not being engaged enough, it’d be better to make systemic changes that empower people and make the government more representative of their interests.

Ooh, interesting. I’m kind of surprised to find that I do feel more comfortable with It/Its actually, not so much because of the logical “promotion and demotion cancel out” aspect, but because it’s two atypical constructions combined, and that almost pushes it out of intuitive meaning entirely for me. I know the context and convention for each one individually but nothing for both of them at the same time, so I think I’m more open to allowing a meaning to be defined that isn’t hierarchical if It assures me that it isn’t. (Pure grammar bonus points in that last sentence where this type of capitalization happens to remove an ambiguity!) For He/Him and She/Her, though, I find it hard to set aside the established meaning because it’s in wide use and has been for quite some time. Maybe that’s a rigidity that deserves to be bent, people push back on the more “out there” neopronouns for similar reasons, but I think it’s likely that most people will instinctively react negatively when encountering this, and it’s going to be difficult for what I have to imagine is a very small group of people to change the general understanding to something more acceptable.

Hmm… this makes me uncomfortable, and although I don’t think it’s internalized phobia or anything like that, I want to interrogate that discomfort to see if I can nail it down.

I do think it’s difficult or maybe impossible to decouple this practice from indications of power for most people. The only instances of capitalized pronouns in common use that I’ve seen are the God and Jesus usage, and in some circles, capitalizing pronouns for a dominant in a role play context. “I” getting capitalized is also there, kind of, but that’s not a power thing because it’s not special, everyone is expected to use it as a language rule. I’ve also seen things like “oh, sure, that’s what They want you to think” or, not quite a pronoun, something like “they want you to fear The Other,” maybe less of a power thing but definitely a signal of additional weight and meaning above and beyond the word’s usual sense.

I think this is the main source of my discomfort, that this practice is currently used almost exclusively at least as “this word is being used in a special and important context, pay extra attention” and going as far as “I am explicitly signaling that the person being referred to is superior.” I don’t use He/Him pronouns for God or Jesus because I don’t belong to those religions and don’t see those entities that way, and I have a fundamental belief in the equality of all humans that makes me uncomfortable putting a person on a pedestal like that.

I feel uncomfortable about it/its pronouns as well for the same reason, I don’t like the idea of dehumanizing or objectifying a person, but in that case I actually have some friends who use them. It’s easier to take a “well, if it makes you happy, it’s no harm to me” attitude if it’s asking for a “demotion” so to speak, I think. The personal connection probably does help too, I don’t know anyone who wants capitalized pronouns myself.

I’ve seen Dan Savage use capital pronouns to refer to dominants when answering letters, but that seems to me like Dan stepping into the letter writer’s scene space and choosing to go along with the “rule” while he’s there giving advice, kind of a “good houseguest” thing. I don’t think that’s something that the rest of us are obligated to do as a rule. I’d push back on a friend insisting that I refer to their dominant with capitalized pronouns, because whatever their relationship is with each other, their dom isn’t my dom, and I didn’t agree to that hierarchy, they did.

I think the other discomfort is more of a language and grammar thing, which obviously is less important than an actual person’s comfort (see also, the old “they is always plural” chestnut) so I’m not going to assert that this is a reason to disregard a person’s wishes, and language rules are subject to change. But in general capitalization is not all that significant in English, which we know because something written in all caps or in all lower case usually has no meaning removed. Words at the start of sentences, proper nouns, and “I” get capitalized, and that’s mostly it. It’s mostly about readability, because ALL CAPS DOESN’T HAVE AS MUCH CONTRAST but when used sparingly as we usually do, important words stand out with a capital letter. “Demanding” that a particular word be used to refer to yourself in the form of pronouns is in the same ballpark as choosing your own name, obviously completely reasonable and acceptable, but “demanding” that special language rules be used about yourself feels a step beyond that. I don’t want to cross into “oh so could you identify as an attack helicopter too” territory, but I do wonder about some of the boundaries on this. Lots of people habitually write in all lowercase, would it be disrespectful to say “oh yeah i saw larry at the empire state building and had a conversation with him” if Larry uses He/Him pronouns? Would Larry be upset about both the name and pronouns, or just the pronouns? I don’t think most people would get up in arms about their proper name getting de-capitalized in that context which seems like further evidence that capitalization isn’t normally a meaningful aspect of the writing, it’s a more mechanical and practical rule, so insisting that for certain people it does need to be made significant feels like more of an imposition to me, and comes right back to the “you need to treat Me as special and more important” feeling that I have.

Okay, after watching the video twice I think I know what the fuck he’s talking about. He thinks that you’ll request a mail in ballot, go to the polls, they’ll say you already voted, and then you triumphantly show the world that you didn’t vote, you still have the blank ballot, and obviously they’ve put in a vote for Joe Brandon under your name, is what they’ve done, those bastards. He has done a terrible job of explaining his plan, aside from it also being a bad plan.

As a former election judge in Minnesota, I can tell you exactly how this would go in real life in that state (where, to brag a bit, we have a very progressive voting system that makes it very easy to vote, all the things Republicans hate). You’d get your mail in ballot, then show up to your polling place with your blank ballot. Then when you ask to vote, they’ll say “yep, sure, come on in” and you can just go in and vote as normal.

(The rule is that even if you request an absentee ballot, you can still cast a vote as normal, and even if you have mailed it in, either they have already counted it and then the registration system will bar you from voting in person, or if you get there before it gets processed and vote in person instead, they’ll toss it out when they get to it.)

Worst case scenario, the election judges see that you’re carrying around an absentee ballot, and they’ll ask you to get rid of it because no one wants ballots floating around a polling place that aren’t valid. That’s the only thing I can think of that would be cause for a Republican to make a ruckus, but… like… yeah, you can’t just bring extra ballots to the polling place. And they won’t scan into the machine because they’re the wrong type. I really, really want to see videos of these people trying to catch the evil Democrats and then just, like, being treated normally though. (Even better if they raised a ruckus and then didn’t actually vote.)

OPML files really aren’t much more than a list of the feeds you’re subscribed to. Individual posts or articles aren’t in there. I would expect that importing a second OPML file would just add more subscriptions, but it’d be up to the reader app to decide what it does.

I think that joke’s been around for a while, but there is the Terry Pratchett line about how if you had a button with a sign next to it saying “pressing this button will end the world, do not touch,” the ink wouldn’t even have time to dry.

The problem is the jokes aren’t funny. Or even really jokes. It’s just the same hateful garbage that you’ll find in any right wing comment section with no clever twist or respect for the humanity of the people being made fun of. It’s all variations on “haw haw, these people are pretending to be something they’re not, ew gross”. It’s not true, it’s not “keeping it real”, it’s not insightful, and anyone who actually knows or cares about the trans community knows that hearing that all the time will drive some people to kill themselves. Maybe even worse than that, it’ll foster that attitude in people even less compassionate that Dave Chappelle, who I don’t think has any particular malice toward individual trans people, but he’s telling those who do that they’re right.

There’s definitely humor to be had about the trans community, just visit any trans meme board and you’ll find it. There are stereotypes and self-deprecation and tons of really dark humor going on. What’s coming out of Chappelle’s mouth isn’t that, it’s just undercooked right wing bigotry.

How many do you think it is, and how much more acceptable is that number than this one?

“There was a particular bad guy near them” and “they all probably have bad opinions about Jews” are not sufficient justifications for indiscriminately bombing innocent people. What if there had been an Israeli leader at that rave? People in both refugee camps and at a music event should be able to exist without fear that they’ll die because they were near the wrong person. One seems to provoke a different reaction than the other for some reason though, and that might be worth thinking about.

These models aren’t great at tasks that require precision and analytical thinking. They’re trained on a fairly simple task, “if I give you some text, guess what the next bit of text is.” Sounds simple, but it’s incredibly powerful. Imagine if you could correctly guess the next bit of text for the sentence “The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is” or “The solution to the problems in the Middle East is”.

Recently, we’ve been seeing shockingly good results from models that do this task. They can synthesize unrelated subjects, and hold coherent conversations that sound very human. However, despite doing some things that up until recently only humans could do, they still aren’t at human-level intelligence. Humans read and write by taking in words, converting them into rich mental concepts, applying thoughts, feelings, and reasoning to them, and then converting the resulting concepts back into words to communicate with others. LLMs arguably might be doing some of this too, but they’re evaluated solely on words and therefore much more of their “thought process” is based on “what words are likely to come next” and not “is this concept being applied correctly” or “is this factual information”. Humans have much, much greater capacity than these models, and we live complex lives that act as an incredibly comprehensive training process. These models are small and trained very narrowly in comparison. Their excellent mimicry gives the illusion of a similarly rich inner life, but it’s mostly imitation.

All that comes down to the fact that these models aren’t great at complex reasoning and precise details. They’re just not trained for it. They got through “life” by picking plausible words and that’s mostly what they’ll continue to do. For writing a novel or poem, that’s good enough, but math and physics are more rigorous than that. They do seem to be able to handle code snippets now, mostly, which is progress, but in general this isn’t something that you can be completely confident in them doing correctly. They make silly mistakes because they aren’t really thinking it through. To them, there isn’t really much difference between answers like “that date is 7 days after Christmas” and “that date is 12 days after Christmas.” Which one it thinks is more correct is based on things it has seen, not necessarily an explicit counting process. You can also see this in things like that case where someone tried to use it to write a legal brief, where it came up with citations that seemed plausible but were in fact completely made up. It wasn’t trained on accurate citations, it was trained on words.

They also have a bad habit of sounding confident no matter what they’re saying, which makes it hard to use them for things you can’t check yourself. Anything they say could be right/accurate/good/not plagiarized, but the model won’t have a good sense of that, and if you don’t know either, you’re opening yourself up to risk of being misled.

There just isn’t much use for an approach like this, unfortunately. TypeScript doesn’t stand alone enough for it. If you want to know how functions work, you need to learn how JavaScript functions work, because TypeScript doesn’t change that. It adds some error checking on top of what’s already there, but that’s it.

An integrated approach would just be a JavaScript book with all the code samples edited slightly to include type annotations, a heavily revised chapter on types (which would be the only place where all those type annotations make any difference at all, in the rest of the book they’d just be there, unremarked upon), and a new chapter on interoperating with vanilla JavaScript. Seeing as the TypeScript documentation is already focused on those exact topics (adding type annotations to existing code, describing how types work, and how to work with other people’s JavaScript libraries that you want to use too), you can get almost exactly the same results by taking a JavaScript book and stapling the TypeScript documentation to the end of it, and it’d have the advantage of keeping the two separate so that you can easily tell what things belong to which side.