birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
4hr ago
it's clear to me that he has his trigger finger not only outside the guard, but wrapped around the grip
I'll take your word for this and assume that's what's going on. My vision is so bad that I can't tell either way.
birb_cromble
5hr ago
Look at the video -- he's not even holding it in a normal firing position, he's got his hand wrapped around the lower grip.
I have watched the video. It's fast enough and grainy enough that my (terrible) eyes can't make out enough detail to see one way or the other.
It does, however, sound like one report is slightly different than the others. That could be an artifact of how cell phone mics work, but it does make me hesitate to discount the "first shot was an ND with Pretti's gun" theory out of hand.
birb_cromble
6hr ago
They were actually quite novel - the supreme court decided that.
The closest comparison that might make it not be novel, if you squint and ignore details, would be Jacobson, but that covered the states and not the feds, and predates a lot of other important jurisprudence.
Above and beyond that, using OSHA to try and justify it was literally a thing that had never been done before.
birb_cromble
7hr ago
Does anyone have suggestions for indoor exercise when it's insanely cold out? I've been making do with an exercise bike and calisthenics, but they get boring after a while.
birb_cromble
7hr ago
This is a pretty weak attempt at dismissing the possibility. I'll contest that it was the likeliest explanation, as Shakes asserts, but you're making a pretty bold claim in dismissing it.
We know ICE isn't particularly well trained. Are you going to tell me that it's outside the realm of possibility that the agent didn't get his finger stuck inside the trigger guard? It was cold enough that he might not even have felt it.
We also know that Pretti didn't exactly make the best life choices. Are you going to tell me that it's outside the realm of possibility that the holster he was using might not have been a high quality holster with good retention and absolutely no gaps around the trigger guard molding? Are you going to suggest that it's a "conspiracy" to suggest that something like an elastic cord or drawstring might have slipped in there?
That's not even getting into "P320s go off by themselves" memery.
birb_cromble
10hr ago
but do you really think we're doing better than we've been in recent years?
In 2021 I was hours from losing my job because I wouldn't submit to a medical procedure.
Trump hasn't done that to me yet.
birb_cromble
3d ago
I don't think I've ever had a job where my wages have actually increased with anything close to the level of inflation. I usually have to get a promotion (or job hop) to make that back.
birb_cromble
3d ago
I can approach code that I couldn't work on before because of knowledge/skill issue.
Slopacolypse. I am bracing for 2026 as the year of the slopacolypse across all of github, substack, arxiv, X/instagram, and generally all digital media.
I find it peculiar that Karpathy doesn't see a relationship between those two things. I've noticed a trend where the most glowing reviews of AI capabilities seem to be for people who are using it in areas where they, themselves, do not have enough skill to confidently perform the task. At its worst, it's a sort of tool-assisted Dunning Kruger effect that's actually breathtaking if you can decouple enough to look at it in the abstract.
"I clearly couldn't do this thing but I can clearly tell that Grok/Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini did it right" is a hell of a thing. It's already causing real stress on public software security databases. There's a continuous trend that looks something like this:
"I ran $LIBRARY through Claude and it says there was a potential denial of service attack. I asked Claude for a mitigation and it provided this code."
"Can you explain this piece of the code?"
"I asked Claude to explain this piece of code and it said the following."
Other than feeling like a scene from Office Space, it's effectively acting as a denial of service attack on its own. The amount of time necessary to submit something like that without a deep understanding of the problem is considerably lower than the time necessary for a genuine SME to comb through it and judge it on merits.
Hell, if I were a malicious actor I'd probably try to exploit that by shit-flooding the system to buy myself more time.
birb_cromble
3d ago
That could work, but with how sticky wages have been relative to inflation it's a risky move.
birb_cromble
3d ago
I have to ask, where you using any of the terminal based tools for code development (i.e. Claude Code). I know you said you were using Gemini, so I am doubting it was actually Claude Code (although you can run Gemini within CC).
We were using the Gemini cli for that series of tests. I can entertain the notion that Claude code is truly magical, but it's unlikely we'll get more funding to pilot it.
If you think of it as having intention and character flaws, you're going to get frustrated quickly. If you think of it is a very imperfect and probabilistic tool that outputs into non-deterministic solution spaces, you'll get less frustrated and probably think differently on how you prompt it
It's less that I think of it that way and more that I'm trying to describe it for an uninvolved observer. I made the statistical engine comparison just a few paragraphs further up.
birb_cromble
3d ago
This feels like it's a less shitposty and thoroughly expanded version of my "Uber for artisanal cheeses, but on the blockchain" theory that I had.
Our flagship application has seen continuous development since the mid to late 2000s, and it's loosely based on a codebase and product that is considerably older than that. While it has CRUD elements (any application that functions as a long-running service must), it has some fairly extensive components that actually do things with that data in terms of business automation. Those are the areas where all the existing LLM solutions tend to fall apart. Given that they're statistical engines, going farther from CRUD is a very bad thing.
Bravo, Birb! I mean this sincerely. Phrased differently, Birb is saying that once his team provided extra-context documentation, the LLM was performant. However, by doing so, his team pretty much arrived at a state where the fix was obvious and easy.
I'm not sure if I can fully buy into this. It wasn't that we were surfacing implicit context, so much as writing it for a very enthusiastic intern developer with absolutely no sense of self preservation. If we didn't break tasks down to an absurd level of guardrails and hand-holding, it would try to make enormous, system wide changes without any kind of midpoint validation. Sometimes we'd see the reasoning say things like "I have made a large number of changes. I should run unit tests to verify that I am correct", and then it just... wouldn't do it. Any of the server developers could have finished the full task in the time it took us to make the tickets that allowed the LLM to do the job without going off the rails.
birb_cromble
3d ago
It has no cash flow.
For the first couple of years after I bought my house, I let out a room to a friend who was in grad school. It wasn't a ton of money, but it was positive cash flow. Doing that with a rental would be a lot more problematic.
birb_cromble
3d ago
This is fantastic. Thank you.
birb_cromble
3d ago
As somebody who has a mortgage and is considering moving, I think about housing prices a lot. The conventional wisdom seems to be that high home prices are a good thing for homeowners, but I can't entirely figure out why that's true in the general case.
If your home is "worth" 10x your purchase price, you can only use that by selling it or using it as collateral for debt.
If you're selling it, you're either moving into a new purchased property or a rental. If you're moving into a new property, it's likely just as inflated as your current home unless you're engaging in geographic abitrage by moving from Martha's Vineyard to Monkey's Eyebrow, Kentucky. If you're moving into a rental - well, any rational landlord is going to set rates at the absolute highest point the market can handle, and that's informed by home prices. If every housing market in the country took a 50% pounding, I'd likely be better off in terms of relocating than I am now.
I can understand the collateral for debt argument, but I don't know how common that is, as I am a peasant who avoids debt whenever I can. Maybe somebody else here can fill in the gaps on this one.
Given all that, what exactly am I missing here? Why are high home valuations for homeowners considered to be such an unalloyed good?
birb_cromble
3d ago
My father's first mortgage was in the neighborhood of 20% back in the 1980s, but home prices were very low.
birb_cromble
4d ago
AMA I guess
Did you have any personal inklings as to just how fucked things were in the run up to 2008?
birb_cromble
4d ago
If the time horizon were a little longer, I'd try to secure a congressional seat in a backwater district and use a mix of insider trading, shady book deals, and campaign finance embezzling to hit the target.
birb_cromble
4d ago
I think I'm going to go make tender, emotional love to a bald eagle now.
birb_cromble
5d ago
instead of 26%.
Where the heck are you to that rates are 26%?
birb_cromble
5d ago
I pay ahead on my mortgage, and I'm going to say something controversial here.
Sometimes you can do something good, even if there are alternatives that are better. You don't have to violently min-max every aspect of your life. Start with what you can do and are comfortable with doing, and reevaluate later on.
Paying ahead on your mortgage is a good thing. Sure, you could invest the money in something instead and gamble on the gains being higher, but that makes some assumptions. Are you sure you can make the right calls? Can you buy and sell at the right time? Are you confident there won't be any big market downturns like 2001, 2008, or 2022? People will argue that the market wins in the end, but the market is immortal and we aren't. If you aren't itemizing, the value of the mortgage interest deduction isn't there either. To top it all off, the actual money might not be that much different if the mortgage value isn't high, and now you have capital gains to factor in while doing your taxes.
I don't know what your mortgage is, but for me, paying ahead sure was a lot better than doing nothing.
birb_cromble
5d ago
It's a vaguely cartoony, multiplayer WWII simulator where each person plays the role of a single soldier in large engagements. You die a lot, and the game has a fairly unique system of deciding whether you're dead. It's mostly coded by one guy
birb_cromble
6d ago
Try not to wear a sweatshirt with a zipper when you do that. I had a zipper tab-shaped bruise for over a week last time I pulled a roll of shame while I was doing incline bench.
birb_cromble
6d ago
not clear that the sticker-price is something being seriously argued, rather than an opening-bid. It's a... very aggressive argument
Sometimes I feel like I might be the only person on the planet who slogged through The Art of the Deal. This has been Trump's negotiating MO for decades at this point - the only real difference is that this time it's in a court house and not a conference room.
birb_cromble
6d ago
Recently started a Running With Rifles campaign with a bunch of friends. It's great for drop in/drop out play.
I can already do the v-sit. A planche is out of reach for me at the moment, but I can hold a peacock pose for a while. That's a decent goal. Thank you.
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