• 11 Posts
  • 122 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 6th, 2024

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  • if you know how to code, you can vibe code because you can immediately see and be confident enough to identify and not use obvious mistakes, oversights, lack of security, and missed edge cases the LLM generated.

    if you don’t know how to code, you can’t vibe code, because you think the LLM is smarter than you and you trust it.

    Imagine saying “I’m a mathematician” because you have a scientific calculator. If you don’t know the difference between RAD and DEG and you just start doing calculations without understanding the unit circle, then building a bridge based on your math, you’re gonna have a bad time.







  • Web pages are not allowed to list your extensions. They can indirectly surmise you have certain extensions based on how your requests differ from expectations. For example, if they have advertisements, but your browser never actually makes any requests to load the images, CSS, JS or HTML for the advertisements, they can deduce you have an ad-blocker. That’s a datapoint they now have to ID you: “has an ad-blocker”

    Now let’s say they have an ad they know AdBlockPlus allows, but uBlock Origin doesn’t. They see your browser doesn’t load that ad. Another datapoint: “Not using AdBlockPlus”.

    Based on what requests go back and forth between your browser and their servers, they map out a unique fingerprint.

    Now you visit another site, and lo and behold, all the same quirks are found. Tada, they now say “hm, probably the same browser,” and start personalizing content. Site use an ad network, so it’s the common denominator, not the sites you visit. The ad networks do the between-sites tracking.

    also, VPN does diddly squat when you login to some service like google, facebook, xitter, amazon, outlook, reddit, etc. You logged in as you. They don’t give a shit you’re logging in from another IP. And if the sites are working with the same ad network, if you’ve ever logged in from your real IP even once, they they just add another datapoint about you: “Sometimes uses a VPN” and that gets tucked away in your permanent record.

    nothing you do online is private. I’m not saying “give up” but it’s pretty bleak and I don’t see it getting better anytime soon.





  • For many recipes that call for sugar as a flavoring agent (as opposed to recipes that require it for structure like hard candy, toffee, peanut brittle, caramel or crunchy cookies, etc.) I find that I can halve the amount of sugar it calls for and it tastes fine to me…and I do like sweets. I’m starting to agree with GBBO that American recipes are far too sweet and just don’t need it, but to each their own.

    HAS SCIENCE GONE TOO FAR!!! idk, i’m just bakin stuff i like man…








  • I have never read Bleak House, nor do I even know the outline of the plot. This is what I’m getting from it:

    LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.

    The scene is London. Michaelmas’ term (shift?) has just finished, and the Lord Chancellor is now sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.

    Implacable November weather.

    The weather is cold, wet and overcast, as one would expect for November.

    As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

    The streets are incredibly muddy, as if the waters of the Biblical Flood of Noah had just receded. So muddy, one would not be surprised to find a giant amphibian frolicking in it up on Holborn Hill.

    Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

    Smoke drifts downward from the chimneys; soft black ash the size of snowflakes coats exposed surfaces. It’s as if everything is dressed in black to mourn the death of the Sun’s warmth and light.

    Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.

    Dogs and horses are covered in the mud up to their eyeballs, and their owners can hardly tell which ones are theirs.

    Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

    Pedestrians fight through the crowded street, their umbrellas bumping into each other, like a seething angry mob. They slip and lose traction at street corners, like the thousands of pedestrians that came before them since the day broke (although “daybreak” is a meaningless term for a day as grey and cloudy as this one.) The mud continues to cake on their boots where the pavement ends, as if the mud was somehow multiplying like money in a rich man’s investment account.