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Simon

@mtraven23
> "I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, if they are such [...] this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government."

(Benjamin Franklin, speaking at the constitutional convention on September 17, 1787)

nps.gov/articles/000/constitut

It seems to reflect Plato's belief that democracy tends to degenerate into tyranny. Is that somehow subconsciously built into the system?

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Simon

@cadey

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Xe :verified:

Xe google searches:

that thing apple did with old ipad releases to make the software look like physical objects

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Simon Willison

This is a really neat Python library providing decorator and docstring and type signature based syntactic sugar over my LLM package - I blogged about here: simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/3/s
fosstodon.org/@koaning/1142740

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Thomas Thibault

Le 10 avril je réitère à l'ENSAD le format "Démontage conférencé" (limitesnumeriques.fr/sensibili) : l'occasion de parler empreinte du numérique tout en démontant des appareils électroniques.

Plus d'infos :
ensad.fr/fr/conference-decor-n

Avec @limitesnumeriques

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Adam Leventhal

An Oxide customer encountered a peculiar issue at the intersection of their Oxide network and their broader network. @bcantrill and I were joined by several members of the Oxide team who solved the problem using a combination of tooling, intuition, and dark knowledge. youtu.be/1wBZ39q1I80

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Leshem Choshen

🚨 BREAKING:
@TheAcornAI
just dropped the first
test-time learning pretrained model! 🚀

It learns on the fly, interacts
adapts to you, and outsmarts anything before it.
Oh, and it's OPEN. 👀🔓

The future just got smarter.
#AI #MachineLearning #LLMs
🤖📈

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Simon

@grimalkina with the benefit of hindsight, I *know* that teachers have had a significant impact on both my successes and failures in acquiring knowledge and understanding. But I still often *feel* like it was "all me"! It's a strong cognitive dissonance. Could it explain some of these views? You can't be a lone genius if you stand on the shoulders of "mere" teachers.

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Cat Hicks

So weird how teaching is such a punching bag for tech bros including the ones who sit around trying to cash in the cultural cachet of "caring about education" just as much as the ones who like to cash in on "shitting on education"

I think it's revelatory to ask what makes people's skin crawl and clearly teachers make these guys crawl out of their skins. Like I think this is true on a visceral level for them

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Julia Evans

I am learning some upsetting-to-me things from reading the bash man page, for example that in bash `source blah.sh` will by default search all directories in your PATH for a file called `blah.sh`

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▙ ▉ ▜▘▉ ▚ ▉

The demoscene has become a national UNESCO heritage in Sweden! I was part of making the application, so ofc I think it's great, but I wrote a little bit about how difficult it is to generalize the demoscene. goto80.com/the-demoscene-as-a-

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Simon

@HalvarFlake I have wondered about trying to do this... what did you miss most?

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HalvarFlake

After a 1.5 year period where I tried to use an iPad as my laptop, I have just grabbed my 5 6+ year old Thinkpad X1 Carbon for this trip, and while the battery life sucks, it is nice to have my proper OS back.

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Leshem Choshen

Models have preferences like giving inanimate 📦 stuff to animate 👳
Is it that they just saw a lot of such examples in pretraining or is it generalization and deeper understanding?
alphaxiv.org/pdf/2503.20850
#linguistics #language #LLM #AI

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Bryan Cantrill

Hell is other networks. Today @ahl.bsky.social and I will be joined by Oxide engineers to discuss an incident where our combination with particular networking equipment resulted in a pathological system -- and how it was debugged and resolved. Join us, 5p Pacific!

discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?event=13

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Matthew Green

I just heard that a cryptography professor at Indiana University had his house raided and was fired. Don’t know much more. heraldtimesonline.com/story/ne

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HalvarFlake

@spoltier in countries without service, people of different social classes do not acquire social networks that span societal strata.

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Simon

@HalvarFlake I would be interested to know how / why this is the case. In my limited anecdotal knowledge (Switzerland) the military tends to reflect existing social classes (e.g. people with an academic background are preferred for promotion up the ranks).

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Simon

@grimalkina @analog_ashley I enjoyed this one a lot, and it got me to reflect about my experience in school. I don't think I experienced math anxiety early on (you talk about elementary school being crucial). It feels more like something that crept in gradually. I'm grateful that my parents were not very focused on my grades much if at all, I feel like that helped a lot.
I'm now curious about the cultural influences (I grew up and live in Switzerland). It seems there are some differences wrt how achievement-focused cultures are. (e. g. sciencedirect.com/science/arti), not sure how well-studied that is.

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Simon

Github/Copilot rant ahead 

@ligasser
If you're org admin, you should be able to disable it in
github.com/organizations/<your_org>/settings/copilot/policies

Edit: I've not seen it add itself automatically to PRs yet, that may be some other setting I've not seen.

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