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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • My favourite theory of time travel is that in the vast majority of timelines, travelling back in time guarantees that events will unfold as they always will, as given an infinite number of timelines in entropy there will be at least one timeline that forms a loop, and from that point effectively every timeline follows that loop. It may even be a multi-step loop, but it’s still a loop and the time travel causes the events that leads to the time travel.



  • And how many millions of people are fairly good at being a software developer?

    I think “fairly good” was an understatement on my part… Tim Berners-Lee got a knighthood for being “fairly good” as a software developer, as he invented the worldwide web. Kier Starmer got a knighthood for being “fairly good” as a public procecutor for handling a number of cases of national importance extremely well. What have you done that has significantly changed the country for the better?

    You’ve got to consider the difficulty/seniority of the job, a general doing a “fairly good” job is more likely to get a medal than a private doing a “fairly good” job who’ll get fuck all





  • I don’t think you understand how it works… An upload:download ratio must average (not simple mean, but that’s because ratios are nonlinear - I can’t recall the mean type but it’s the nth root of multiplying them all together) 1 in a system where all uploads and downloads are logged in the same tracker. It doesn’t matter who the uploader or downloader is or how recently they made their account. That’s what I meant by a closed system.

    An open system would be where you download parts or all of a given torrent via another tracker, and the same with upload. The private tracker only logs what you downloaded and uploaded though it, so your ratio from the perspective of that tracker is different to in reality.

    Even if you ignore the first 5 files or 15GB or whatever for new users, if you have those files then great but do you really want to turn it into a betting game of seeding supply and leeching demand?


  • I was referring to ones which explicitly require you to have a >1 ratio to download files, which do absolutely have leniency when you sign up, but the average ratio is 1 by definition assuming a closed system and so it’s infeasible for the majority to get >1. Often they have freeleach days but that requires you to be around on that day and also download stuff you don’t want to seed it, rather than just slightly reducing the required ratio (also IMO having a required ratio of any form is bad as it encourages people to turn off seeding after that point, generally I’ll seed stuff which has <5 seeders or low availability of parts I have, as seeding them to 100x is way more valuable than seeding 1000 files which have hundreds of seeders all with 100% availability to 1x)

    I accept they want to keep leaches out though, so if they required a ratio of 0.5-0.75 that’d be fine, but from my experience most “entry level” private ones don’t, and most non-entry level ones either have closed signups or a requirement to be signed up with an existing private tracker in which things are either ridiculously over or underseeded with no inbetween, so it’s hard to build up a ratio.


  • LLMs have a very predictable and consistent approach to grammar, punctuation, style and general cadence which is easily identifiable when compared to human written content. It’s kind of a watermark but it’s one the creators are aware of and are seeking to remove. That means if you want to use LLMs as a writing aid of any sort and want it to read somewhat naturally, you’ll have to either get it to generate bullet points and expand on them yourself, or get it to generate the content then rewrite it word for word in a style you’d write it in.




  • Are those the trackers which demand you have accounts with other private trackers before you join or the ones which demand everyone have a >1 ratio to download anything which is impossible by definition, so everyone either gets huge seedboxes, cheats the ratio or has to download niche but big files from other sites and switch out the tracker to artificially up the ratio?

    I’m sure there are actually good private trackers, but I’ve found there are open/effectively open (sign up only with no verification/requirements) trackers with better communities than any restricted one I’ve found



  • I’m saying I have no sympathy for Palestinians who can’t sympathise with other people who were forced from their homes, or Israelis who can’t do the same. They are free to dislike the IDF, but using them as an excuse to hate Jews and/or Israelis is no better than the people who hate all Palestinians and/or Arabs masking or justifying it with their hatred of Hamas.


  • It makes sense to support the Arabs who got displaced from their homes by Israeli settlers, as well as Jews who were forced out of theirs due to their religion and had nowhere else to go but Israel, but if you’re a member of one of those groups and can’t empathise with the other (eg Hamas, IDF and their supporters) then you should get no sympathy at all.


  • Thing is a conscience (and any emotions, and feelings in general) is just chemicals affecting electrical signals in the brain… If a ML model such as an LLM uses parameters to affect electrical signals through its nodes then is it on us to say it can’t have a conscience, or feel happy or sad, or even pain?

    Sure the inputs and outputs are different, but when you have “real” inputs it’s possible that the training data for “weather = rain” is more downbeat than “weather = sun” so is it reasonable to say that the model gets depressed when it’s raining?

    The weightings will change leading to a a change in the electrical signals, which emulates pretty closely what happens in our heads


  • You see humans everywhere you go

    I don’t know if it’s that unless you live in Nigeria, India, SEA etc.

    In high income countries, the cities have grown in population and there’s fewer people in rural areas, so sure you’re going to see people in cities in urban areas and in touristy rural areas during common vacation times, but that’s been the case for ages and for the rest of the time there’s still plenty of easily accessible places where you can get away from people.

    There’s also people capitalising on people wanting to be away from humans so they advertise “retreats” which are full of other humans, but just don’t go there and camp in the middle of nowhere instead and there won’t be humans for miles around


  • So personally I prefer Erlang to Elixir - the language feels more like it was designed around the programming paradigms it supports (message passing, everything’s one of about 6 types for efficient serialisation etc), whereas Elixir feels like “what if we made a language with syntax like Ruby that worked like (and with the backend of) Erlang?” - there are some aspects I like, such as how the vast majority of things, even def, are a function call, and the parameter lists, but it feels very much like there’s a lot of workarounds of the design principles of the language to get it to work

    I also prefer Gleam to Elixir - it brings much nicer functional programming than either Erlang or Elixir and of course typing, which feels very missing from Elixir but not from Erlang, which is far clearer that something is one of very few types and lets you handle multiple types in a very natural feeling way. It also feels more akin to modern “full featured” (as opposed to scripting) languages than either Erlang or Elixir does.

    Basically if you’re learning something for employability, learn Elixir. If you’re learning something for a potential business idea, use Gleam. If you’re learning something for personal projects, see if Erlang is intuitive for you - if it is, I can guarantee you’ll love it, if not, use Gleam.


  • Can code in without code completion or checking the docs: C, C#, Scala, F#, SQL (ms server), js/ts, Erlang, Elixir

    Have a general idea of but may need to check things about the standard library every so often: Kotlin, Python, OCaml, C++, prolog

    Have used in the past but would need to look up the syntax to use again: Go, Rust, Haskell, Java, Gleam

    I’m probably missing some from each category though