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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The tories cut funding from the department that decides whether asylum seekers have their claims granted or denied, so there’s a big backlog of people who can’t legally get a job to support themselves and can’t legally be deported, and feeding and housing them is expensive. The right wing press blames this not on the fact that they’re all in legal limbo until the backlog is dealt with, and not on the fact that decades of foreign policy mean that there are lots of people in danger unless they flee who have English as their only extra language, so would only be able to get a job after asylum was granted if they were in the UK, but instead on the myth that the government is required by things like the Human Rights Act to provide people a life of luxury if they come here and people are coming from safe places for a free multi-year holiday. Because humans are not rational, people believe the myth, and if the myth were true, it would obviously be a good idea to stop providing luxury hotel accommodation at great expense to the taxpayer.


  • You can’t make an LLM only reference the data it’s summarising. Everything an LLM outputs is a collage of text and patterns from its original training data, and it’s choosing whatever piece of that data seems most likely given the existing text in its context window. If there’s not a huge corpus of training data, it won’t have a model of English and won’t know how to summarise text, and even restricting the training data to medical notes will stop mean it’s potentially going to hallucinate something from someone else’s medical notes that’s commonly associated with things in the current patient’s notes, or it’s going to potentially leave out something from the current patient’s notes that’s very rare or totally absent from its training data.


    • Ukraine’s song wasn’t particularly good this year*, which will have made it harder for people to support if they cared about the integrity of Eurovision as a song competition.
    • Some people will just vote for whichever country most recently had a major tragedy and the initial attack on Ukraine was less recent than the initial attack on Israel. They won’t necessarily think about anything that’s happened other than that.
    • The Israel’s contestant survived the October the 7th attack narrative has been pushed pretty hard, so that might have encouraged Israel supporters to watch Eurovision when they’d normally not have bothered. There wasn’t anything equivalent to draw in Ukraine supporters who don’t normally engage with Eurovision.
    • People voting for a particular country are going to have a much easier time than people voting for songs they like - there’s only one Israel, but there are plenty of pop songs to split the pop fan vote.
    • If you watch/listen to a vox pop on the news, there are an astounding number of people who believe either that Israel have only killed armed Hamas combatants, have done a minimal proportionate response solely to rescue hostages, or have the right to ethnically cleanse Palestine because they think Hamas attacked first with no provocation and don’t think ethnic cleansing is bad.

    *the few times I’ve watched Eurovision, I’ve not agreed with the public or jury, so my definition of not particularly good might not be relevant.






  • The feedback in the article was obviously far from perfect, but from the sound of it, “good attempt” could be an actively harmful thing to say. Lots of effort had gone into making the wrong thing and making it fragile, which isn’t good at all, it’s bad. If you’d asked an employee to make a waterproof diving watch, and they came back with a mechanical clock made from sugar, even though it’s impressive that they managed to make a clock from sugar, it’s completely inappropriate as it’d stop working the instant it got wet. You wouldn’t want to encourage that kind of thing happening again by calling it good, and it’s incompatible enough with the brief that acknowledging it as an attempt to fit the brief is giving too much credit - someone who can do that kind of sugar work must know it’s sensitive to moisture.

    The manager can apologise for not checking in sooner before so much time had been spent on something unsuitable and for failing to communicate the priorities properly, and acknowledge the effort and potential merit in another situation without implying it was good to sink time into something unfit for purpose without double checking something complicated was genuinely necessary.



  • Also, the overwhelming majority of USB plugs have the logo on the side away from the plastic bit, and sockets have their plastic bits towards the top of the device. You want the plastic bits on opposite sides (as physical objects don’t like to overlap), so that means that if you can feel the logo with your thumb, that side goes up when you plug it in, and you don’t even have to look.


  • Arch is at least more likely to update to a fixed version sooner, and someone getting something with pacman is going to be used to the idea of it breaking because of using bleeding edge dependencies. The difference with the Flatpak is that most users believe that they’re getting something straight from the developers, so they’re not going to report problems to the right people if Fedora puts a different source of Flatpaks in the lists and overrides working packages with ones so broken as to be useless.



  • If you write cross-platform software, the easiest solution is usually to pretend everything’s Unix. You’ll hit some problems (e.g. assuming all filesystem APIs always use UTF-8 will bite you on Windows, which switched to UCS2 before UTF-8 or UTF-16 were invented, so now uses UTF-16 for Unicode-aware functions as that’s the one that’s ABI compatible with UCS2, and passing UTF-8 to the eight-bit-char functions requires you to opt into that mode explicitly), but mostly everything will just work. There’s no XDG_CONFIG telling you to put these files anywhere in particular, as Windows is Windows, so most things use ~ as a fallback, which Windows knows to treat as %USERPROFILE%.



  • You can jam the Windows UI by spawning loads of processes with equivalent or higher priority to explorer.exe, which runs the desktop as they’ll compete for CPU time. The same will happen if you do the equivalent under Linux. However if you have one process that does lots of small allocations, under Windows, once the memory and page file are exhausted, eventually an allocation will fail, and if the application’s not set up to handle that, it’ll die and you’ll have free memory again. Doing the same under every desktop Linux distro I’ve tried (which have mostly been Ubuntu-based, so others may handle it better) will just freeze the whole machine. I don’t know the details, but I’d guess it’s that the process gets suspended until its request can be fulfilled, so as long as there’s memory, it gets it eventually, but it never gets told to stop or murdered, so there’s no memory for things like the desktop environment to use.



  • Putting "false" in a YAML file gives you a string, and just false on its own gives you a boolean, unless you tell the YAML library that it’s a string. Part of the point of YAML is that you don’t have to specify lots of stuff that’s redundant except when it would otherwise be ambiguous, and people misinterpret that as never having to specify anything ever.


  • Most of the problems can be totally avoided by telling the YAML loader what type you’re expecting instead of forcing it to guess (e.g. provide a schema or use typed getter functions). If it has to guess, it’s no surprise that some things don’t survive the string to inferred type to desired type journey, and this is something that isn’t seen as a dealbreaker in other contexts, e.g. the multitude of languages where the string "false" evaluates to true when converted to a boolean because it’s non-empty.