I don't know why, but the fact that a "pro-almond group" exists chuckled me up.
Is that the Almond Front of California, or the Californian Almond Front?
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mikrl commented on Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret source-material.org/amazo... · Posted by u/chhum
mikrl commented on The Storm Hits the Art Market news.artnet.com/market/in... · Posted by u/onecommentman
Non-fungible tokens are not about payment, they are about cryptographic ownership of uniqueness.
>they are about cryptographic ownership of uniqueness
My web browser has a novel and advanced attack on the cryptosystem built into it I have dubbed the right-click-copy-image attack.
I’ve even managed to replicate it on my phone.
mikrl commented on Toronto’s network of pedestrian tunnels worksinprogress.news/p/to... · Posted by u/bensouthwood
Once on a lunch break I walked from St Andrew to King (parallel stations on the horns of line 1) in the tunnels and took the TTC back.
Going overground is usually faster and easier to navigate, buts impressive how far you can go underground.
One of these days I’ll need to try an extreme point hike.
mikrl commented on The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States blog.waldrn.com/p/the-dec... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico
There is a 3rd point, that craftsmanship, machining skills, and logistics experience don’t fall from trees. As the US moves certain “lower” tier manufacturing overseas it can risk losing the experience needed to create tooling for production lines, or the industrial knowledge to build large numbers of ships, etc. The jobs argument on its face falls flat for me, but I think a better justification for it is depth of experience and knowledge being lost.
> I think a better justification for it is depth of experience and knowledge being lost
My favourite example from Adam Smith remains the nail maker. At the time, London factories were churning out iron nails by the bushel, whereas the provincial Scottish blacksmith was able to craft perhaps 10 in a day.
Is it so terrible that no one these days knows how to make nails? That our physical and mental capabilities are put to more productive ends?
That’s how I see these skill sets ‘lost’, national security related industries notwithstanding.
mikrl commented on Fundamental Flaw of Hustle Culture brodzinski.com/2025/08/ai... · Posted by u/flail
This is missing one extremely cynical interpretation.
What if the output isn’t the real goal, it’s having a workforce that thinks more like footsoldiers than professionals?
Of course 2x hustle doesn’t scale to 2x output, you can’t tell me that all these smart people are just ignorant of that. It has to be a different thing getting selected for.
mikrl commented on C++26 Reflections adventures and compile-time UML reachablecode.com/2025/07... · Posted by u/ibobev
What has that to do with the topic? Warren Buffet made billions without any do knowledge about programming or deeper knowledge about computers.
Mansa Musa was so rich he decreased the local gold to silver exchange rate in Egypt by 12% without ANY modern technology!
mikrl commented on Face it: you're a crazy person experimental-history.com/... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
>Otherwise you run into Borges’ map problem—if you want a map that contains all the details of the territory that it’s supposed to represent, then the map has to be the size of the territory itself.
Is this what everyone describes as “the map is not the territory”, or something else? I can imagine some other subtleties of being within a territory that an exact projection might not provide.
>“the map is not the territory”
Personally I never think of this as something specific or quantitative as in fidelity.
In my head it’s more of a statement that the map is a representation, a reference, in the terminology of Stirner a spook or a phantom.
The territory is the thing itself, the visceral thing you exist in/on and can change, feel, experience.
This applies to anything that both exists and is represented, maps and land are just the best analogy.
Even a 1:1 scale map with 100% fidelity will never be the territory.
mikrl commented on AI Friend Apps Are Destroying What's Left of Society currentaffairs.org/news/a... · Posted by u/florisuga
Do the AI friend apps take people out of society or were the people who were using the friend apps not part of society to begin with?
I honestly can't imagine using an AI app to ever qualify as what I would determine to be what I deem a friend.
>I honestly can't imagine using an AI app to ever qualify as what I would determine to be what I deem a friend
Agree, but AI has one massive benefit I’ve seen.
Conversations that I can’t have IRL because the response would be “huh? What are you talking about? I don’t know what that is.”
LLM apps are a fountain of knowledge and can reason well enough to bounce ideas and speculation off of. I can dump all my esoteric conversational topics into it and be engaged without needing to do 5 degrees and work in 3 industries at once, and the massive amount of socialization that would entail.
Maybe there will be a division in my social life, where my IRL human connections are more grounded and homely, and the LLM bears the brunt of my neurodivergent interests.
Best get to retraining those models.
“Brea, bûter en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk”