birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
54m ago
It's not printed anymore, but Grover Cleveland was on the $1,000 bill.
birb_cromble
4hr ago
I'm curious how many folks here were nothing special in elementary and high school but went on to achieve something substantial academically?
The high school I graduated from was in the state top ten for per capita overdoses, vehicle deaths, suicides, and teen pregnancies. I was suspended multiple times, had six weeks of unexcused absences my senior year, and nearly got expelled once.
I graduated from college. It's not much, but it's a win for me.
birb_cromble
5hr ago
Considering how many businesses there are now that refuse to take $50 or $100 bills,
Is this really a thing anymore? I remember it from back in the 90s, but I haven't seen it in practice for years now.
birb_cromble
6hr ago
I dunno if that gorilla was cosmically important, but as a marker of the boundary between one cultural era into another, it works extremely well.
I think that's the heart of what I've been wondering. 2015 - 2017 was a wild ride. Things definitely aren't the same anymore. If it happened today, I can't help but imagine that the aftermath would be far more polarized and ugly than it was at the time.
birb_cromble
6hr ago
It's interesting you mention Kony 2012. It rgas always felt to me like something broke in the world around 2010 - 2013. I can't exactly nail down what it was, the Kony phenomenon definitely comes to mind when I consider it. It was the first time I ever saw social media drive consensus in my social group to such an extent. In some ways, it felt like the prototype of ${CURRENT_THING} activism. It didn't matter that you had never heard about it yesterday - you had to have an opinion on it right now.
birb_cromble
7hr ago
Yesterday marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Harambe.
The White House has remarked on the occasion.
On this day in history, Harambe would have celebrated another birthday. An icon that became part of internet history, American culture, and an entire generation’s timeline.
Gone, but never forgotten. Rest easy to a true patriot. 🕊️🇺🇸
How much credence do you put on the idea that Harambe represented an actual sea change in American culture? At the time, it felt like a joke, but in hindsight, it feels like the first time that internet memeing bled over into real space. A lot of the people making jokes about a gorilla ended up making jokes about a former real estate developer and steak salesman that propelled him into the public eye. Was Harambe a watershed event, or just one where look back and project meaning?
birb_cromble
9hr ago
I picked up Remnant: From the Ashes after a multi year break, and I forgot how much fun it was. More than anything, I love the intentional vagueness of the narrative. Over-explaining is rampant in the medium.
birb_cromble
10hr ago
That warms my heart.
Did it actually kill the project?
birb_cromble
11hr ago
I know it's a joke, but over the years I've begun to understand some of the rage.
The story happens over and over, and it never changes. Someone comes in to a small rural town pushing for a big project. The local leadership hides the project as much as possible and steamrolls any opposition that shows up to meetings. Simultaneously, boosters claim that the project will create a raft of new jobs and generate enormous tax revenue. Regardless of the sentiment of the residents, the project happens, because powerful people have decided that it will be so.
Once the work starts, the lie starts to be obvious. The "jobs" are handpicked contractors flown in from out of state. Nobody local is making money. The externalities start to pile up: roads are destroyed by heavy equipment, utility prices skyrocket, tap water starts to taste oily and bitter. All the while, corporate representatives and local leaders are telling you that none of this is happening. You should ignore the evidence of your own senses. The tax dollars that supposedly justified all of this misery never materialize - the company that owns the project engaged in such complex tax avoidance schemes that they might as well not pay taxes at all. The roads are still trashed, but now the residents are paying for it. The leadership who rammed the project through all "retire" to Florida.
As a private citizen, I don't know how to stop it. It feels like anyone who could stop it ends up on the take. It feels like my options are to go completely off the grid like Uncle Ted, or give up and move to one of the cities that are benefiting from this continuous colonial strip mining of the places I love.
birb_cromble
12hr ago
And the stories about methane in water supply were fraudulent
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1100682108
In active gas-extraction areas (one or more gas wells within 1 km), average and maximum methane concentrations in drinking-water wells increased with proximity to the nearest gas well and were 19.2 and 64 mg CH4 L-1 (n = 26), a potential explosion hazard; in contrast, dissolved methane samples in neighboring nonextraction sites (no gas wells within 1 km) within similar geologic formations and hydrogeologic regimes averaged only 1.1 mg
This study seems to suggest that, at least in 2011, there was a real risk.
birb_cromble
12hr ago
I lived in an area that was part of the shale boom back in the late 2000s, and as a resident, it was pretty miserable.
One of the damnedest things I've ever seen was a fellow town resident setting his tap water on fire. I've never witnessed anything like it before or since. Both the gas company and the town leadership argued that it was a coincidence, and that the fracking wasn't causing any issues with water quality at all.
At this point the story of my life involves me going deeper into the woods, only for loud and polluting industries to follow me.
I think he's painted himself into a bit of a corner, from a storytelling perspective. He's fallen into a pattern that's common in sci-fi and fantasy authors, where in the stakes must rise in each book. They see that readers like a thing, then try to do more of it. I get it on some level - as a writer you want to give the audience what they want. On the other hand, it's not sustainable. Imagine a version of the Odyssey where Odysseus had to personally kick Poseidon in the balls before he made it home.
This book feels like a conscious attempt by Dinniman to scale things back before the escalation reaches the point where he can't manage it anymore. I don't know if I enjoyed it much as a reader, but I think I see the reasoning.
birb_cromble
1d ago
What kind of weight would you recommend for a fairly avid lifter who has no experience with mace exercises?
birb_cromble
2d ago
Square footage, I assume
birb_cromble
2d ago
I'm finally sitting down over lunch to read the decision. What would stop a company from forming 10,000 subsidiaries that jointly owned a single piece of property in common?
birb_cromble
2d ago
A Delaware judge has ruled that corporations have a right to vote. I have not yet had time to read the decision yet, but this seems to upend a lot of norms around voting in the US.
Corporations, partnerships, trusts, limited liability companies, and other “artificial entities” have the right to vote in Delaware elections under some circumstances, a judge said in a novel ruling Tuesday.
Judge Craig A. Karsnitz rejected an ACLU challenge to a charter permitting voting in local elections by the entities that own most of the property in the Town of Fenwick Island, one of several municipalities in the state with similar provisions. Karsnitz dismissed the lawsuit from Delaware’s Superior Court, citing “the principle of one person/entity/one vote.”
My immediate question is what... what the hell? This seems like a fairly bold decision on the part of the judge, and one that normally would not be issued by a state Superior court judge. Is there some kind of inside baseball that I'm missing here? I know that Delaware is very friendly to corporate interests, but this seems like an escalation. Is this a decision that's meant to be overturned?
Spending is $824.69 lower compared to the same day last year.
I was able to badger a reimbursement out of my dental insurance company. I'll be counting that as negative spending once I get that to the bank.
birb_cromble
3d ago
The next platform they investigated was keyed with a lizardman ambush, a volley of darts followed by a retreat into favorable terrain. As written, this involves half a dozen 2HD monsters getting the drop on the party. I couldn’t tell if I was running exploration or surprise rules wrong, because I couldn’t tell what the players should have done differently. I ended up toning down the number of lizards since the party was so small.
Having run some old school adventures, that sounds about right. Those original modules could be absolutely vicious at times.
birb_cromble
4d ago
An old anthology of Lovecraftian Horror. It's interesting to see how views of both the supernatural and technology have changed since its publishing.
birb_cromble
4d ago
That's interesting. According to family, I was non-verbal until I was about three and a half, then immediately started speaking in complete, grammatically-correct sentences.
birb_cromble
4d ago
For a while, Gemini had patched this, but if you said you were driving a truck or changed the distance, it would revert right back to the broken behavior.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Any opinions on the SEC's proposed reporting requirement changes? The section on NAFs, specifically, seems bad for retail investors. It looks like it's reducing reporting requirements for companies that qualify.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Are they lying? Was the kernel made up?
Cases like this, and the erdos problems, are exactly where LLMs shine. Problems with clear and unambiguous reward functions that are difficult to hack are perfect use cases. In the Alibaba case, they likely have an extensive set of characterization tests that guarantee consistent behavior. An LLM with a good harness can pound its head against those tests forever while simultaneously measuring the performance as a success metric. It will never get tired and it won't get sick of doing that kind of work.
There's definitely value there, but I don't know how much value. The combination of technical depth and strong guardrails make for a very schizophrenic kind of difficulty. Doing that kind of work is traditionally either the domain of a plucky junior with too much energy, or an insane wizard who claimed a broom closet as his office.
When we've experimented with that kind of optimization work at my employer, it tends to be very expensive, since most of the results come from the absolute tirelessness of the agent. In comparison, how much are you paying your junior? How much are you paying your wizard, and what is he doing if he's not doing that task? Security scans are a similar thing. Line audits aren't hard, but they're hella time consuming. As model costs rise (and they are rising per task completed when you compare any single vendor over time), it might legitimately be cheaper to throw interns at the problem than LLMs.
At least on the software side, I think there's a reasonable chance that what we're seeing is a temporary pop due to a lot of highly verifiable technical debt deadwood finally getting burned out, and that might not be a constant source of demand.
On the war side, I wish I knew more. The sensitive nature of the topic means that all parties are incentivized to obfuscate and dissemble as much as possible. It might legitimately be an ideal case. LLMs do well when you can accept 95% accuracy, and in something like intelligence analysis, 95% accuracy probably has the spooks all but shitting their pants.
birb_cromble
4d ago
I don't know if there was ever really a transition. It's been something that I've had to consider my entire life.
For anyone out there who has a drinking problem, seek help. If you have kids, do it sooner, rather than later.
Does Finland have a system where high school is different than the US definition? That sounds almost like my first year of college
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