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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Sounds reasonable, but a lot of recent advances come from being able to let the machine train against itself, or a twin / opponent without human involvement.

    As an example of just running the thing itself, consider a neural network given the objective of re-creating its input with a narrow layer in the middle. This forces a narrower description (eg age/sex/race/facing left or right/whatever) of the feature space.

    Another is GAN, where you run fake vs spot-the-fake until it gets good.


  • Well, Rust has a lot of string flavors, and I like utf-8 being the norm, but there are a bunch of cases where enforcing utf-8 is a nuisance, so getting string features without the aggro enforcement is nice.

    There’s probably some fruity way to make this a security issue, but I care about ascii printables and not caring about anything else. This is a nice trade off: the technical parts are en-US utf-8, the rest is very liberal.



  • Could ‘push’, yes, as in, “we mentioned it in passing when rock and roll grandpa wasn’t paying attention, so he wouldn’t throw a hissy fit and withdraw from the service”. Oh, you meant to the labels? Ha ha ha, NO. The labels have basically nuclear option veto powers.

    As for changes, well, updates get delivered all the time, for various reasons. (The scratched Turbonegro album being one frequent flyer.) I think a lot of those are bullshit SEO-like reasons, but it is what it is.

    Which artist appears in most frequent releases? I forget, but I think it’s Elvis. Possibly Johnny Cash. Why? Because some material has gone out of copyright in some jurisdictions, and so people have the idea to upload them again in ‘new’ compilations. (The content team don’t even beat these down personally – that’s machine work)


  • I worked on exactly this for a while, a long, long time ago. It turns out to be an annoyingly difficult bag of problems. The record companies don’t really care, they sell (sold, I guess) pieces of plastic. (Idk if they fixed it yet, but the same Turbonegro album kept getting sent with the same scratches, kept getting taken down a while later, for years.) So, good luck trusting them to label anything.

    Puritans are so much more aggressive than sane people that making mistakes one way is much more expensive than the other way.

    Anyway, we ended up trying to work out which tracks are actually the same song, (Easy for you, harder for friend computer, yes?) and then if one of them is marked explicit, they all are, unless marked “radio edit” or “clean”, or whatever. If you think about this for a minute, if one track is labeled “radio edit”, maybe the other ones should be marked explicit…

    It’s a deep rabbit hole, is what I’m saying.

    And the people with the pitchforks are never happy.



  • Ok, TIL there’s a thing called Required, but otherwise, one way to do this is to rename the other part/field/key(s), so that old code reveals itself in much the same way as using a deleted field (because it does, actually)

    Another way is explicitly have a separate type for records with/without the feature. (if one is a strict subset, you can have a downgrade/slice method on the more capable class.

    Lastly, I would say that you need static typing, testing, both. People from static-land get vertigo without types, and it does give good night sleep, but it’s no substitute for testing. Testing can be a substitute for static typing in combination with coverage requirements, but at that point you’re doing so much more work that the static typing straight jacket seems pretty chill.


  • Well, I guess I have two thoughts on that. For one, what you’re probably thinking of is seen as basically qanon freaks. The other is that of course there’s a political right, and of course there is a social conservative current.

    The right has traditionally been a coalition of liberals and conservatives, but the Christian conservatives are actually Christian. (They command a certain degree of respect, even though I don’t agree)

    As for the social conservatives, they’re to a large degree absorbed by either the traditional social democrats (or “total autocrats” as I like to call them) or the nazis.

    The WHAT?

    Yes. The left was so busy suppressing racism (real) that they made it basically impossible to have adult conversation about the problems inherent in eliminating low-education jobs and, at the same time, accepting a lot of illiterate refugees. And as the reality of taking from the middle class boomers (who strongly identify as working class) to fund the result, the nazis were there, and they’re scary huge now.

    Idk, there’s a lot to unpack and explain here, and I’m sure others have other angles, so I’ll leave it at that.




  • It was harder to explain why picking on Python for this is dumb, before gotofail… (Not saying that’s what you’re doing, but it feels close, so this is relevant.)

    For whitespace, my rule is this: If any level of indentation depends on the length of any word or name, you’re doing it wrong. If using a more descriptive name causes indentation where previously there was none, that’s fine, but if moving the opening parens causes the interior to be indented more, less so. (Yes, Golang’s structs)