You’re supposed to disable source maps in prod?

Asking for a friend

Better symbol than Pelosi

Was this supposed to be an example, or is this just cruel irony?

And now something much worse than SEO is gearing up to take its place: https://www.engadget.com/researchers-find-just-250-malicious-documents-can-leave-llms-vulnerable-to-backdoors-191112960.html

I use a tiny translucent toy turtle. It’s cute, and I can still see the LED of the power button.

Much safer from cats

Just a reminder that literally every dollar the treasury disburses is spent into existence.

It is impossible for the federal government to run out of money, just like it’s impossible for a scorekeeper to run out of points.

So when they say they don’t have the money — an impossible situation — what they mean is they don’t want to have the money.

This is the power of the deficit myth. Money that you don’t want to spend has to “come from somewhere”. Yet all of the money you do want to spend never suffers that problem.

AI designed it

My thing is: How do people handle stuff that has to be done between 9-5, Mon-Fri?

I tried to switch ISPs on Friday (which was an hour-long ordeal), got to the part where she said “Okay, I think that’s everything I have for you. I’ve got the disconnect screen pulled up, when would you like to —“ and the call dropped.

It’s now Tuesday, and I haven’t found a spare hour during the work day to call again.

I’ve also got a home warranty company telling me to update my claim or they’ll close it, but I need to talk to the receptionist at the plumbers during business hours to get them to resend the invoice.

And then I get stuck in this loop of:

• I have to make these calls today
• I’ll kick butt at work so I have enough time
• I spent the whole time worrying about those calls and didn’t get enough work done
• Now I have one less day to make those calls

Why can’t people handle things over email or a web portal? This is so much unnecessary stress and contortion.

It looks like I’ve been using these terms in some bastardized hybrid of Campbell’s formulation of the hero’s journey and Vogler’s (which is the one I learned in school), so don’t take this as canonical, this is just what I look for:

For me, the “meeting with the goddess” moment isn’t the kinda trivial “this will be important later” exchange like Frodo meeting Galadriel, but an experience of pure joy in the midst of utter sorrow, so like when Moana’s grandma appears as a ghostly manta ray and reignites her determination. In romance stories, this is where the couple gets that perfect date where everything seems effortless and transcendent.

It can take many forms, but the important thing is just that this is a glimpse of what victory could look like, without having actually achieved it yet. It’s a chance for us to see the true, unbridled motivation of the protagonist in a way that doesn’t feel contrived like just stating it to the audience, and it usually has a stark contrast to the horrors that are currently going on in the overall arc of the story. It can be one of the most memorable moments outside of the climax of the fight against the “big bad”.

It’s usually either right before or right after the “all is lost” moment (well, the first one – the one before they really form their initial plan to take down the “big bad” and see that initial plan fail and have to pivot to something that incorporates their mastery of their original self into their new mastery of the supernatural world they dove into).

My take on “atonement with the father” is more conventional. It’s that moment where the hero says “I’m going forward with this journey even if you think it’s foolish, I’ve learned to love myself for exactly who I am in a way that you never could”. If you imagine a scene where someone says “Don’t you dare walk out that door”, and the hero does it anyway, that’s the atonement with the father.

It doesn’t have to be a literal parent or even parental figure. The important thing is just that it shows the hero recognizing that they had previously accepted some artificial constraint on who they were able to be, or what they were able to do, and they’re ready to move past that constraint.

Sometimes this is linked together with a “temptation” moment, where the nay-saying figure has an appealing offer like “Give this up, come home with me and take over the company like you always wanted” or whatever.

The most powerful ones, I think, are less about the authority figure and more about confronting something within the hero themself.

The reason that I like this moment in particular is that it has to be tied to something from their old life, before they started their adventure. So it sets up a contrast for later on, when they’ll have to incorporate something positive from their old life in order to defeat the big bad for real. Here, in this moment before the big battle, they’re discarding something about their old life – what will they choose to keep and emphasize later on?

In Guardians of the Galaxy, Quill rejects the abusive relationship with his father figure Yondu and later on embraces his friendship with his new buddies in order to defeat the big bad. It’s a nice little push-and-pull: he’s becoming more self-reliant, and careful in his social entanglements… but not to the point where he’s forsaking the need for friends and teamwork.

Anyway, those are the two moments I watch for. One that’s a starry-eyed vision of what their journey’s victory could look like, just at the moment where they need that boost. And one that’s a sober self-evaluation and rejection of past behavior. If they do it right, both of those moments should have some kind of echo in act 3, so most of the time I feel like if they nail those two moments the rest of the story is probably gonna at least be good if not great.

Idk, I feel like knowing standard story structure is a way to help you get more understanding out of a story. IMO, a good story is predictable in some ways. If knowing the ending takes all the fun out of it, then it probably wasn’t a very good story.

Also: I generally watch for two specific moments in any movie: the “meeting with the goddess” and the “atonement with the father”. Those two scenes really tell you a lot about what the writer cares about and how they think about their characters.

This is basically what the Luddites were fighting against:

A world where labor has no opportunity to develop skills or use them, no authority over the machinery which dictates the nature of what is made and how, chasing fewer and fewer jobs for less and less pay.

Their solution was to take sledgehammers to the factories. The owners, of course, hired thugs to shoot them. And the politicians ruled that the machines were sort of the property of the crown, and therefore destruction of these machines should be punishable by public execution.

Funny enough, data centers today are considered strategic assets under the protection of DHS. Which is a fancy way of saying: still owned by the crown, still gonna shoot you if you try to negotiate via sledgehammer.

We shut down companies for it though, and what AI vendors are doing is basically selling the ability to turn job roles into “accountability sinks”, where your true value is in taking the fall for AI when it gets it wrong (…enough that someone successfully sues).

If you want to put it in gun terms: The AI vendors are selling a gun that automatically shoots at some targets but not others. The targets it recommends are almost always profitable in the short term, but not always legal. You must hire a person to sit next to the gun and stop it from shooting illegal targets. It can shoot 1000 targets per minute.

come’s

Why have people started putting an apostrophe before every s that happen’s to be the last letter in a word?

The worst is schroedinger’s auditory buffer. (Heisenbuffer?)

If you give me a second to parse what you said, I can reply just fine. If you ask “are you listening?” in an aggravated tone, the buffer gets discarded instantly.

And this is completely orthogonal to whether I was trying to pay attention to your words, cuz I basically can’t process your words directly as you speak anyway.

So I might have an easier time continuing the conversation if I’m mildly distracted instead of constantly overwriting the perfectly understandable stuff from 5 seconds ago with the white noise that I’m hearing in the immediate present.

It’s not all bad

Trump admin suffers blow

Huh. I thought they enjoyed blow.

Technically, that’d be an ‘iff’

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we’ve been too naive. We’ve left children’s digital lives to platforms that never had their wellbeing in mind. We must move from digital captivity to community.”

Powerful words.

Small question: Why are you giving these horrible platforms more leverage over their digital captives instead of just banning them or outlawing the worst parts of their business models?

Having to resolve the same conflict multiple times suggests excess noise in your git history. You might want to pay closer attention to creating a useful git history. It’ll help with any future archaeology, and it’ll also help rebasing go smoothly.