PokerPirate
13d ago
Thank you especially for the link about the Apportionment Act of 1842. That's exactly the type of reference I was looking for!
PokerPirate
14d ago
Thank you! Reading through the article was very informative. At the end of the article there is a quote from a law professor that this was the "best Supreme Court decision since 1960". I would love a follow on detailed analysis about legal opinions on this court case and the extent to which conservatives/liberals have different opinions.
PokerPirate
14d ago
I really don't understand how we got into this mess of congressional redistricting. We don't "redistrict" state lines every few years to make senate seats "fairer" in any sense. Why didn't congressional districts just follow this obviously parallel pattern using (e.g.) counties? For that matter, why didn't this get left up to a state-by-state basis to determine how congressional seats are apportioned so that some states could gerrymander if they wanted and others could have a fixed-for-forever set of districts? I don't know if this would result in better outcomes, but it would certainly be more transparent and consistent.
I would love it if anyone could provide a detailed history of this whole mess that starts from the articles of confederation until now.
PokerPirate
14d ago
Thanks. I still have lots of questions, but I appreciate the response :)
I didn't know that deacons would work in hospitals; I've only ever met priests there before.
PokerPirate
14d ago
simonw's llm command line tool: https://github.com/simonw/llm and the related tools like ttok and files-to-prompt.
Combined with decent knowledge of the shell, it's very easy to ask very detailed questions about a code base. Here's an example I just pulled up from my ~/.bash_history that I did last night.
$ llm <<EOF
Modify the json schema so that art_characters is a list of strings and identify other areas where this may cause problems.
$(files-to-prompt schemas/*.json_schema)
EOF
The token usage is also trivial. The query above cost <1 cent. I do dozens of these types of queries daily using the most expensive llm apis, and my total usage this year is under $20. Tools like claude code pack a lot more into the context which makes them more expensive and the additional context confuses them.
The only downside to this approach is that you actually have to understand bash syntax to craft good prompts using heredocs/variable substitution/loops/etc. It's about 10 minutes of work to learn the basics, and 10 hours to learn the subtleties.
PokerPirate
14d ago
I understand the importance of sacraments and that's partly the cause of my confusion. I'm just curious about the mechanical details of "on call" and if it's the same level of rigor as other on call professions like doctors. Can an on call priest not go to the movies? Maybe a priest wouldn't go to the movies anyways, but can they be "on call" while they are doing other priestly duties? (What if someone calls them while they are delivering the Eucharist? I assume they wouldn't interrupt a sacrament to take a phone call. But what if they are performing non-sacramental priestly duties like leading an AA meeting? Do they interrupt the AA meeting to take a phone call?) My understanding was always that places that were likely to need sacraments (like a hospital) had dedicated Catholic priests working at the hospital to provide them, and not that the local parish priest was on call in his bed and would be summoned if needed.
An in particular, cell phones did not exist 50 years ago, and the Catholic church survived 2000 years without them. So how did the idea of "on call" actually develop? It just seems like the sort of modernism that an ancient, slow moving tradition would be hesitant to adopt.
PokerPirate
15d ago
Why do priests have on call rotations? Is this like a doctor where a priest can't go to the movies if they are on call because they would have to silence their phone?
At all the protestant churches I've been a member of (some 20 person congregations, some 2000), the pastors are basically always "on call" in the sense that if a member has an emergency they can call the pastor to (e.g.) visit them in the hospital. But the pastors are never expected to walk around with a phone all the time like an on-call doctor would.
I have observed this exact behavior before. Fun story time:
In 2015 I was living in North Korea and teaching computer science over there. Part of my job was to download youtube videos, linux distros, and other big files to give to the students over there. (I basically had full discretion about what to give and never experienced censorship... but that would surely have changed if I had been downloading transgressive material.) I discovered that a single tcp connection could get only about 100 kbps, but if I multiplexed the connection to do the download I could get >1gbps. The school was internally on a 10gps network, and I was effectively maxing out the local network infrastructure. I eventually diagnosed the problem as there was an upstream firewall that was rate limiting my connections. Despite what you might think, the firewall wasn't doing any meaningful filtering of the content (these were https connections, so there wasn't a way to do that beyond just blocking an IP, and basically no IPs were blocked; all content filtering at the time was done via "social" mechanisms). But the firewall did rate limit the connections. The firewall was configured to rate limit on a per connection basis and not on a per user basis, and so by multiplexing my downloads over many connections, I was able to max out the local network hardware. At the time, there was only a single wire that connected all of North Korea to the Chinese internet, and the purpose of the firewall rule was to prevent one user from bringing down the North Korean internet... which I may or may not have done... eventually I started doing my downloads on a wifi connection which provided a natural rate limiting that didn't overwhelm the wired connections.
I suspect that you are observing a similar situation where something in between your source and destination is throttling the network speed on a per connection basis instead of per user basis. My best guess about how this happens is that a device somewhere is allocating a certain amount of resources to individual connections, and by using multiple connections, you are accidentally getting more of the device's resources.
Aside: I am an avid user of LLMs (and do research on them professionally). Non-trivial networking is an area where I would be shocked to find LLMs providing good answers. Stackoverflow is full of basic networking setups, but it doesn't have a lot of really good debugging of non-trivial problems, and so these types of problems just aren't in the training data. The solutions usually require relatively simple debugging steps that build off of basic foundational knowledge, but the LLMs don't have the ability to reason through this foundational knowledge well, and I don't expect the transformer architecture to ever get that reasoning ability.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
FWIW, I appreciate the broad variety of cases you post. I don't think something needs to count as "fun" in a traditional family friendly sense to qualify for the Friday Fun thread.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
We're about to close escrow on a house. What are some fun things you can do with a house you own that you can't do with a house you rent? I'm specifically looking for ideas that small kids (ages 2-7) will find fun.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
Arguing over the definition of "lawyer-brained" is about the most lawyer-brained thing there is. I legitimately can't tell if you're trying to satirize yourself here. Either way, I love it.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
Your classification of honorable/dishonorable is totally foreign to me. Out of all the animals you list, I would have classified dolphins as the most "honorable". Is there really a major culture/ethnicity that thinks eating dolphins is okay but eating octopus is bad? It's hard for me to imagine.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
The Ludditism stems from spending so much time on the computer for work... but here I am on a Friday night replying to a forum post instead of doing luddite things...
PokerPirate
3mo ago
My wife basically arranges all my/our socialization. From my perspective, people just randomly show up and leave. I login to the motte when I'm waiting for the code to compile.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
I thought about it, but then I didn't think the right people would find the PR subthread.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
Thanks. PR submitted at https://github.com/themotte/rDrama/pull/748
PokerPirate
3mo ago
How embarrassing... this was intended as a reply to @WhiningCoil's post https://www.themotte.org/post/2277/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/352249?context=8#context
I never understood how other people make this mistake, but now I realize it's due to a number of confusing interface features. (Or at least they are confusing to this Luddite...)
Mods/Zorba: Maybe the following interface changes could help:
- change the button text for posting a reply from "comment" to "reply"
- remove the ability to make top level posts when you are not "at the top level"; for example, in the link above there should only be the ability to reply since I am "zoomed into" a comment, and not the ability to make a top-level post, since no one should be doing that from the linked page.
I'm pretty sure I could submit a PR that makes these changes if you all are too busy, but I forget where the github repo is at.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
Luddites unite! Anyone else here not own a cellphone?
I don't even own a dumb-phone. If someone wants to talk to me IRL, I insist there be no electrons involved. It goes without saying I'm not very popular :(
PokerPirate
3mo ago
Talk about kids. I assume you don't have kids, but you can talk/ask about theirs. If you can mention being an aunt/uncle in relevant ways, then you've made a good conversation.
If they don't have kids, then they probably have a pet that they treat like a kid and you can talk about dogs/cats.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
Econ majors understand calculus to the same extent that anthro majors actually read the assigned reading...
So for good students in good schools, yes, absolutely; for bad students in bad schools, it's chatgpt all the way.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
(Tenured CS prof here.)
One thing that you're missing is the teaching/research split among faculty. At all of the most prestigious schools, research is the priority and teaching only secondary. I've never heard of a faculty member denied tenure for poor teaching at one of these schools; it's always about their research not being good enough.
This research emphasis means that you won't find any faculty members who want to participate in a scheme like this (of any political persuasion). Your proposed classes would require a lot of extra effort to teach, and generate no career benefits.
As an aside, I suspect you are also wildly underestimating the amount of effort such a class would be to teach. Trying to teach anthropology to an econ major won't go well because the econ major won't know how to read a 300 page book in a week (a typical anthro major at a top-tier school like Harvard will be reading >20 300 page books/semester); conversely, teaching econ to an anthro major won't go well because the anthro major won't have any intuition for calculus (and you can't reasonably teach any micro/macro econ without math). Developing material that actually is engaging for both of these audiences is hard.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
I honestly like rotation schemes like this. There's a reason the military (in basically every developed country) does this. It prevents all sorts of corruption, promotes loyalty to the broader organization over narrow silos within the organization, and develops a generalized competence.
It might be implemented poorly in the UK, but that's not a reason to dislike the organizational system in principle.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
I tattooed my wedding ring. It's a simple black band around the ring finger that looks like a standard ring from any distance. I did it because:
- I like the symbolism that the marriage decision was permanent and there is nothing I can do to undo that decision.
- I do enough work with machines that I didn't want to have to constantly be removing the ring (and risk it getting lost, which it would).
- Expensive wedding rings (even "simple" bands) look gauche to me and I don't like the striving-middle-class aesthetic they represent.
I'm generally wildly against most tattoos, but I think a thoughtful tattoo that actually represents something meaningful is a good choice. Maybe <1% of tattoos I've seen in the wild fit this category.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
I think the great LKY put it far far better than I ever could talking about the true character of Americans
I very much enjoyed your link because I enjoy listening to historical leaders talk about how they see the world and why.
But I don't see this link as a meaningful example of America's flaws. In the video, LKY talks about how a CIA officer tried to bribe a Singaporean security official and why he won't work with America because of the fallout. This is something that all countries would do and have done on 1000s of occasions. The fact that the US did this in a hap-hazard, unskilled way I don't think reflects poorly on the US. If anything, the fact that the CIA was incompetent I think reflects well on the US for not "needing" this type of espionage for most of its history. I expect these days the CIA to be significantly more competent than the 1960s because it has now existed for 80 years instead of 20.
I won't say I look down on someone based on their email... but certain domains make very good fist impressions. An email that is
firstname@lastname.comis an easy way to signal good tech talent.More options
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