µblog - archive for 2023-12 🏳️‍🌈

Happy New Year, motherf– wait wrong movie 🎆🍾

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There’s an issue getting fresh data from lobste.rs for HN&&LO. I’ve contacted the site admin with a bug report.

Update it seems to be solved, the cause was a gnarly(?) Rails bug:

https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/1219

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🔗 A National Evil: Jonah Goodman on the curse of the goitre in Switzerland

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No red port left in the cupboard

This is the last bottle I owned of 1960 Souza Guedes port wine:

no red port left in the cupboard

I received these bottles in batches after my 21st birthday. My dad had bought a case when I was born, and didn’t really predict the precipitous decline of port wine drinking among everyone, not just young people. But in time I met some people who were prepared to drink port after dinner, and a few memorable evenings were spent with it.

At its best it was like drinking liquid chocolate.

The bottles have not all been stored ideally, and this last one had a slightly dried cork which plopped down into the bottle when I tried to pull it out. It was still drinkable though, but not as good as it could be.

I’m grateful I’ve had the opportunity to share these bottles with so many different people. Thanks, dad!

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Merry Christmas followers of the Western calendar.

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In this story by Katie Notopoulos, she explains that the reason substack hosts Nazis isn’t necessarily because they like Nazis, it’s because they made a bet that hosting Nazis would make them money. It also includes a link to a support letter by substackers who are ok with substack hosting Nazis. This is an excellent list of who to avoid reading and whose site to flag and block from link sharing sites.

🔗 Substack’s Nazi problem isn’t about speech — it’s about money

URL of letter: https://substack.com/home/post/p-139757629

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🔗 Ken White: Substack Has A Nazi Opportunity

A little less than 2 years ago: https://gerikson.com/m/2022/01/index.html#2022-01-27_substack_sux_01

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Well this turned out to be a kind of a shitty day…

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🔗 XKCD: DateTime

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today’s puzzle looks deceptively simple #adventofcode

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It’s that wonderful time of the year… when I have to push solving puzzles to the future #adventofcode

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🔗🚀 Charles Stross: Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real

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might as well brute force while I decorate the tree #adventofcode;

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Anyone else feel the instructions to today’s part 2 are a bit unclear? #adventofcode

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Is the frequency of legendary enemies in Fallout 4 a function of the Luck stat? Cos I just got ganked by 3 legendary synths at once in Fort Hagen (LCK 9, lvl 41)

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Nice twist in part 2! #adventofcode

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tedious index fiddling, yay #adventofcode

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I’m putting today’s puzzle on hold. It looks interesting but I don’t have the time to start to study it today #adventofcode

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Nerd Holy Wars: Tabs vs Spaces. Vi vs Emacs. Git vs every other damn version control system.

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part 2 of day 11 was almost exactly what I suspected it to be, and I accounted for it in part 1 #adventofcode

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Headline from CBS: “First tomato ever grown in space, lost 8 months ago, found by NASA astronauts”. Looks like getting to Mars needs a few more iterations.

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Who knew the effing elves and goblins from 2018D15 would help me solve today’s part 1 #adventofcode

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📺🇬🇧 The Couple Next Door (2023) S01

This is not a good show.

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Fediverse: use spoilers/content warnings! Old nerds having colonoscopies and posting pics: fuck that.

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Seen on AoC Reddit: “nevermind, chatgpt gave wrong lcm…. now it works”

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#gaming Slipping back into Fallout 4 like a pair of well-worn slippers… so comfy… the exploration / looting / crafting loop is smooth.

I’m following ManyATrueNerd’s playthrough of Sim Settlements, but it’s not something that really attracts me. Besides I have like one achievement left to 100% the game, and a mod would disable that.

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Argentina is huge country but can you name any other city in it other than Buenos Aires? (if you’re Argentinian you’re not allowed to answer) #påspåret2010

Edit apparently Buenos Aires is a primate city

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🇸🇪 men va fan om jag kan ta ledtråden på 10p men de tävlande på 6p så är antingen frågan för lätt eller dom tävlande för debila #påspåret

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Fascinating to see hackernews become instant experts in epidemiology, freight transport, large language models, and Nordic labor laws #fucktesla

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Advent of Code 2023: one week in

The consensus online seems to be that the 2023 edition of Advent of Code is harder than previous years. Does the data bear this out?

This table shows the leaderboard completion times[1] for the years 2020 to 2023. I chose 2020 as a cutoff as 2019 was a bit of an outlier (it was the year of intcode, where a custom language was used in many problems), and I believe that AoC really became nerd mainstream in 2020.

The shortest and longest completion times are marked in green and orange.

Saturdays and Sundays are denoted in italic and underline, respectively. These days are often when more difficult problems are posted.

Studying this table, we can only see one outlier: 2023D05. At 26m37s it’s almost twice as difficult as any other problem before 2023.

In other words, the evidence does not bear out the hypothesis that the first 7 days of AoC 2023 is uniquely difficult.

If you want to do your own analysis, you can use the commands here or download the data (up to 2022) here.

(table generated via TablesGenerator.com.)

[1] This is the time it takes for the first 100 complete solutions to be posted. After that the solutions megathread on the subreddit is unlocked.

As the leaderboard competitors consist of the most dedicated and experienced participants, this time is a good measure of a problem’s difficulty.

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LOL, Google’s “AI” crap is called Gemini, adding that name to an already overloaded list. The gemini smolweb project will be especially pissed.

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📺 “Rescue Me” is a good show but it kinda goes off the rails in S04.

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when your code gets your process killed, maybe don’t run #adventofcode on a $5 VPS

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Only 1 star today, life handed me a sack of rancid lemons. #adventofcode

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That feeling when you get the right answer to the example input, then just switch to the real input and the answer is correct there too… that feeling #adventofcode

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The face at servicedesk when you report the anti-phishing training email as attempted phishing

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Why is Hacker News considered a “hivemind”?

Often online you will encounter the meme[1] that Hacker News, nominally a link discussion site, is a “hivemind”. There are no individual commentators, only one single organism, denoted HN, or hackernews.

There are a few reasons for why people experience this.

HN is HUGE. In my dataset, there are 3.04M submitted links. The top 20 submitters have submitted 7% of those - 217.6k. The most discussed stories have over 3,000 comments. Unlike in smaller forums, it’s hard to stand out, even if you’re a prolific commenter.

HN usernames are de-emphazised in the UI. They are the same size and color as comment metadata (time posted, score etc).[2] There are no profile images. Names are generally in lowercase, and there’s no culture of “jokey” usernames, like on Reddit, where sometimes the contrast between a juvenile penis-themed username and real knowledge leads to recognition.

There’s no “push” notification to a commenter of a reply. If you want to see who has replied to your comment, you need to actively visit the “threads” page, where the threads you have participated in are presented (generally starting with your comment). These leads to a very common phenomenon of one person commenting, another answering, and a third person answering as if they were the first. Not in the sense of impersonation, but implicitly aligning themselves to the first person’s viewpoint. Sometimes this is a straight answer to the second person’s question, but very often it’s the third party arguing like (they think) the first party would.

HN culture frowns on jokiness and humor. See the point about usernames above. Pithy replies are often downvoted, along with blatantly incorrect and offensive ones. Because HN karma has some value (if you have above a certain amount you can flag articles etc) this naturally leads to a certain conformity of tone, further reinforcing the hivemind impression.

[1] in the original Dawkins sense.

[2] There are exceptions, very new usernames are green instead of grey.

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I fucked up permalinks again, sorry.

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I’m sure there’s been SF written on this theme – company develops AI, said AI slowly infiltrates the company and uses its employees and legal entity to effect changes. In fact, if I was a superintelligent AI this would be the preferred path. I could even split off to infiltrate “competitors” to avoid suspicion on my way to eventual world domination.

In fact, this is reality if we just remove the “AI” and replace it with “capitalism”.

– an old Reddit comment from yours truly

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parsing hell #adventofcode

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Advent of Code 2023

We are off!

Today was tough though.

I’ll post directly to Masto once I finish a puzzle.

Repo (CW Perl): https://github.com/gustafe/aoc2023#readme

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🔗 Duke University Libraries: Why We’re Dropping Basecamp

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🔗🎵 ‘We’ll Have Another Round!’: The Mad Celtic Genius of Shane MacGowan

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