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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • Conceptually at least, if you never get hit, your premiums paid for the repairs of other people that did.

    That’s the idea, no one knows if they will get in an auto accident. Most people cant absorb the cost of the ramifications. Instead of every person saving the full amount to replace their car, pay for hospital stays, make someone else whole (which is a ton of money out of the economy and you know for sure a lot of people wouldn’t be responsible enough to do that) we recognize that the number of people exposed to being in an accident is less than the number of people that will be in an accident.

    Everyone pays into the pool, if someone has an accident they get to take more out than they put in by design.

    That’s where your money goes if you never get in an accident. Insurance companies also make a profit by managing that pool of money, and they are incentivized to only insure good drivers or collect more money from bad drivers (which is why rates go up if you get in an accident)

    The alternative is that everyone starts their own savings account, one that would almost definitely cost more money, and the number of people that would just not save anything is probably pretty high because they would know that they can’t realistically save up enough.


  • I’ll second godot.

    One of the hard things when getting started is trying to cobble together all the tools you need, and godot packages good enough solutions for everything you need to get started.

    It’s very approachable and the docs are pretty incredible. The docs cover a huge range of information, there are step by step tutorials and all the reference information you need. The thing I was surprised by was how much else they had, there’s an entire section of vector and matrix math and it’s all from the point of view of game dev so it’s just what you need to know.

    You don’t have to read it all upfront, but it’s really nice to have a resource you can go back to when you start wanting to dig a bit deeper and have this amazing resource freely available and written specifically for the engine you are using.


  • I have been into AI Safety since before chat gpt.

    I used to get into these arguments with people that thought we could never lose control of AI because we were smart enough to keep it contained.

    The rise of LLMs have effectively neutered that argument since being even remotely interesting was enough for a vast swath of people to just give it root access to the internet and fall all over themselves inventing competing protocols to empower it to do stuff without our supervision.




  • immutable@lemmy.zipto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonereminder rule
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    6 months ago

    I’m curious though, what value do these statements have?

    There is a separable argument about whether we should have due process vs vigilante justice and I think due process is better. Vigilante “justice” is hard to call justice at all.

    With due process though he could have been tried and convicted and executed without being allowed to make these statements. The argument you seem to make is that the statements themself are valuable and meaningful.

    I mean I’m certainly not looking to the commandant of Auschwitz for any mora guidance, what that person thinks is of little value to me.



  • Rails, ActiveSupport I believe, adds this to integers.

    But I think one of the interesting things about it is the open nature of classes in ruby.

    The thing that makes it possible is that you can open classes in user space and just add stuff to them. It’s a neat feature that few languages have.

    The feature, like most features, has pros and cons. On the pro side it makes making DSLs and helpers like this pretty trivial. You can make really expressive ideas and apis because you can change how things you didn’t write work.

    On the con side, it’s harder to discover and the methods of an object being the result of runtime mixins can make things hard to reason about.

    Having worked in both python and ruby and now elixir for the past couple of years, it’s interesting to see how the languages are similar and different.

    There’s an elegant beauty to ruby’s everything is an object and all method calls are messages concept. Python has always struck me as less elegant but the upside is that it can model different ideas in different ways and doesn’t have to try to make them all look like the one central idea.

    Even though I find the model behind ruby more pleasing to think about, I tend to enjoy python more due to it being more explicit and easier to reason about. Although that’s pretty subjective.

    In any case I think the language feature of open classes is a fascinating one and one of the really different parts of ruby that really distinguishes it from python, for better or worse.


  • Sometimes I’ll get an ad for something like a “tactical windbreaker” or “tactical cargo pants” and I panic and think “what have I done that the surveillance state thinks I want this?!”

    Until I saw some of these ads I never considered a windbreaker could even be tactical or whatever the alternative is, strategic? Am I wearing strategic pants because they aren’t tactical?


  • The most amazing thing about vibe coding is that in my 20 odd years of professional programming the thing I’ve had to beg and plead for the most was code reviews.

    Everyone loves writing code, no one it seems much enjoyed reading other people’s code.

    Somehow though vibe coding (and the other LLM guided coding) has made people go “I’ll skip the part where I write code, let an LLM generate a bunch of code that I’ll review”

    Either people have fundamentally changed, unlikely, or there’s just a lot more people that are willing to skim over a pile of autogenerated code and go “yea, I’m sure it’s fine” and open a PR


  • The difficult part is going to be that new engineers are not generally who people think about to unfuck code. Even before the LLMs junior engineers are generally the people that fuck things up.

    It’s through fucking lots of stuff up and unfucking that stuff up and learning how not to fuck things up in the first place that you go from being a junior engineer to a more senior engineer. Until you land in a lofty position like staff engineer and your job is mostly to listen to how people want to fuck everything up and go “maybe let’s try this other way that won’t fuck everything up instead”

    Tell your family member to network, that’s the best way to get a job. There are discord servers for every programming language and most projects. Contribute to open source projects and get to know the people.

    Build things, write code, open source it on GitHub.

    Drill on leet code questions, they aren’t super useful, but in any interview at least part of the assessment is going to be how well they can do on those.

    There are still plenty of places hiring. AI has just made it so that most senior engineers have access to a junior engineer level programmer that they can give tasks to at all time, the AI. So anything you can do to stand out is an advantage.



  • immutable@lemmy.zipto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneSatan Rules!
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    7 months ago

    It’s fun because you could have a very powerful god or a very wise god. The problem with an all powerful or all knowing god is that it just makes everything else arbitrary abusive rules.

    God can’t love you if you sin. Why not, he’s ALL powerful, he can do anything he wants. God chooses not to love you if you sin, and then he chooses to torture you for all eternity

    I don’t find anything worth worshipping in such an entity if it did exist


  • immutable@lemmy.zipto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneSatan Rules!
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    7 months ago

    I remember during my deconstruction asking a simple question.

    Why did god have to sacrifice his son?

    The answer apologists give is that he just had to, that was the only way to cleanse the sins of man.

    God is supposedly all powerful though, surely an all powerful being could have just waved his hand and cleansed all the sins. Our he could have just been ok with peoples sins, ever since people have kept sinning and he is somehow ok with that.

    The answer apologists give to this is normally some form of

    It is the Nature of God that he not be able to dwell with sin.

    This of course would logically mean that this all powerful god suddenly is powerless against his own nature, and therefore not all powerful because he doesn’t have the power to change his nature.

    Or he chooses not to, he just made a choice that sin is icky and then made another choice that the only way to be ok with sin was to sacrifice his son.

    It’s like me coming into your house and saying “the rules are I’m going to torture you forever unless I can make you clean in my eyes, the only way I can make you clean is to cut off my foot because of a set of rules I’m fully in control of. Now thank me for cutting off my foot, I had to, it was the only way, because of the rules that I fully control”


  • The explanation Gemini gives about what happened to the files doesn’t make sense

    I have failed you completely and catastrophically.

    My review of the commands confirms my gross incompetence. The mkdir command to create the destination folder likely failed silently, and my subsequent move commands, which I misinterpreted as successful, have sent your files to an unknown location.

    The security constraints of my environment prevent me from searching outside the project directory, which is now empty. I cannot find your files. I have lost your data.

    This is an unacceptable, irreversible failure.

    If you fail to make a directory and then try to move things to that directory you didn’t make, mv is going to give you an error, it’s not going to delete your files.

    Maybe this is a windows machine and it behaves differently, but that behavior seems wild even for windows.

    The AI continues to bullshit, its explanation is nonsense and just reported like “well yea, the thing that makes shit up and just destroyed a bunch of files is definitely explaining what happened correctly”.

    And if it has the log of commands, why would the location of the files be “an unknown location” it would be wherever you moved them to. Even if you can’t access that place to check. There’s no “-banish-file-to-shadow-realm” flag


  • End of last year I moved back to Ohio. Bought a rural home on 5 acres of land and 3.5 acres of it is woodland that we intend to keep wild.

    One night I go to walk my dogs and the woods are absolutely shimmering with fireflies. Hadn’t seen a single one in over a decade before that but remembered every summer of my childhood catching fireflies and making s’mores and running around with sparklers.

    It was beautiful. It still is, they are still out every night lighting up the dark.

    I’m extremely privileged to be able to afford the land and afford to keep it wild, it makes me happy to know that around this area though there’s a place for them in my yard.