Septimaeus
@Septimaeus@infosec.pub
- Comment on How old is the average open source programmer? 22 hours ago:
I would guess there’s an upward slope of young contributors that reduce significantly at post-grad and early career ages (e.g. early-mid-twenties) followed by another upward gradient on a 5-10 year delay that peaks in the late 30s then falls somewhat linearly up to 60s.
The median age of the younger/learning cohort might be 19 and falling. The median age of the established developer cohort might be mid-40s and climbing.
- Comment on Haha SO TRUE! 1 day ago:
Haha nice
- Comment on Haha SO TRUE! 1 day ago:
Whoa lol
- Comment on Haha SO TRUE! 1 day ago:
Dude smh
- Comment on Is it expected to tip for furniture deliveries? 1 week ago:
That’s a good point. There is a type of delivery in the US that’s all-inclusive, where more than one delivery person show up and it’s assumed they bring it in and install it.
Standard delivery though is often some form of freight where final delivery is handled by a local carrier/vendor. Usually they arrive with a commercial delivery truck rather than a van or pantechnicon.
Unloading from the trailer to a loading dock is the easiest. Curb delivery is possible if the trailer is outfitted with a lift or a slide out ramp. But any further and the delivery can become a lot more involved, enough to throw off their delivery schedule.
Drivers often still offer to do it unofficially as a side-hustle, but if I don’t have cash on hand I won’t ask them to do it just as a favor.
- Comment on Is it expected to tip for furniture deliveries? 1 week ago:
Curb/dock drop: no.
Into home: yes, but at that point you’re “tipping” for an additional service usually purchased separately (eg, moving service, appliance installation)
- Comment on Cheeky 1 month ago:
Their genetics have sacrificed nearly every aspect of basic resiliency for maximum speed on the plains. Most of the work caring for horses is keeping them from accidentally killing themselves. Full disclosure: I worked as a stable hand as a child in exchange for riding lessons. Will never ever own a horse.
- Comment on Heavy Mathematical Breathing 1 month ago:
- A chu space is a “binary relation” (aka mapping/function) between two sets. Imagine an excel table.
- Dropping “closure” requirement means a point in the set needn’t be reachable from every other point. Imagine a game of snake, where walling yourself in is possible.
- “Extensional” means each point extends (originates from) another. Imagine leaving a trail of breadcrumbs so you can retrace your steps.
- “Two-valued:” refers to the two sets (see 1), since both are needed to avoid ambiguous extension (see 3). Now instead of breadcrumbs, imagine using a string to retrace your steps, so if you cross an old path you know which one to take.
- Defined dynamically, a chu space is a complementary pair of “continuous functions.” Imagine again the game, where the snake’s position at any frame/tick can be equivalently reproduced by either “everywhere its head has been + its next direction” OR “ the current position of its head + every direction it has moved.”
- Comment on What can I do with US$10K that is a good investment? 1 month ago:
The latter, for Roth IRA.^A^ If you haven’t set one up before, it’s pretty straightforward.^B^
^A^: There is such a thing as a Roth 401(k) which if offered should definitely be your top priority up to employer contribution match.
^B^: Vanguard is often recommended for simplicity and low fees. You can pick your funds when contributing. Typical starting funds are VTI and VOO (or the mutual fund equivalents with slightly lower fees, VTSAX and VFIAX).
- Comment on What can I do with US$10K that is a good investment? 1 month ago:
Roth grows tax-free and has more long term flexibility. It’s better for most.
- Comment on English Ivy 1 month ago:
Depends on adhesive and era but today mostly yes
- Comment on PhD Grads 2 months ago:
I think he meant ‘first’ as in top-most, the one with the preemptive disclaimer.
- Comment on Something’s Poisoning America’s Land. Farmers Fear ‘Forever’ Chemicals. | Fertilizer made from city sewage has been spread on millions of acres of farmland for decades. 2 months ago:
Still I’m inclined to feel for them, the way I felt for people in the UK during Brexit, Canadians when their labor rights are eroded, Russians when their government rigs their elections and media, Chinese when their government persecutes them, and so forth.
I suspect it’s often not a majority of citizens pushing through these harmful policies. Even when it is, I blame lack of education and larger hostile actors who wage war against the masses with misinformation campaigns, election interference, etc.
The point is not that people themselves are entirely free of blame. It’s that human suffering always merits sympathy, and looking for reasons to disregard or rejoice in their just desserts isn’t a helpful impulse.
- Comment on Something’s Poisoning America’s Land. Farmers Fear ‘Forever’ Chemicals. | Fertilizer made from city sewage has been spread on millions of acres of farmland for decades. 2 months ago:
problem is one caused by their own voting choices
Blame. Contempt. Not attacking. Showing you your self.
- Comment on Something’s Poisoning America’s Land. Farmers Fear ‘Forever’ Chemicals. | Fertilizer made from city sewage has been spread on millions of acres of farmland for decades. 2 months ago:
I don’t know any American farmers, but I suspect they have limited options of who to vote for, and even when they diligently vote correctly at every opportunity, their candidates are incentivized to betray them the moment they take office. The more important truth, however, is this:
When some misfortune befalls your fellow man, this instinct to bury pity with contempt hurts you more than it hurts them.
- Comment on Something’s Poisoning America’s Land. Farmers Fear ‘Forever’ Chemicals. | Fertilizer made from city sewage has been spread on millions of acres of farmland for decades. 2 months ago:
Feels good to blame victims at a distance, doesn’t it
- Comment on Something’s Poisoning America’s Land. Farmers Fear ‘Forever’ Chemicals. | Fertilizer made from city sewage has been spread on millions of acres of farmland for decades. 2 months ago:
Us
- Comment on Closure of exponentiation of real algebraic numbers. 2 months ago:
ℕ
- Comment on Are LLMs capable of writing *good* code? 2 months ago:
Theoretically, I would say yes it’s possible, insofar as we could break down most subtasks of the development process into training parameters. But we are a long way from that currently.
- Comment on When A.I.’s Output Is a Threat to A.I. Itself | As A.I.-generated data becomes harder to detect, it’s increasingly likely to be ingested by future A.I., leading to worse results. 2 months ago:
Yeah I read that as a caveat to the larger point, i.e. just acknowledging that there are limited cases where the use of synthetic training data has been shown to be useful.
- Comment on My new company let me join the union on my first day, within their onboarding app 2 months ago:
Of course, union battles are a matter of history. And yes, today the rational agents of global economies often see unionization as a threat, clearly.
I argue that it’s only a threat insofar as it’s a disruptive paradigm. On the whole it’s a more fiscally advantageous schema for all but the monolithic “vertically integrated” international corporations that profit largely from self-dealing (and probably need to be broken up anyway).
You said businesses prioritize “Control” and “Power” over profit — i.e. they are not rational economic agents but despots. It’s a bleak perspective since despots can’t be reasoned with, only overthrown, and moreover it dismisses economic theory entirely.
I’m just weary of the defeatism. I know we’ve been through a lot and many of us are terribly jaded, but giving up is not an option. I want to win.
- Comment on My new company let me join the union on my first day, within their onboarding app 2 months ago:
That is fascinating. It makes a lot of sense. They’re safe to point out when the emperor has no clothes.
- Comment on My new company let me join the union on my first day, within their onboarding app 2 months ago:
OK just so we’re crystal, I’m only interested in fixing what’s broken. I have no time for doomerism, tedious conspiracies, or despair.
- Comment on My new company let me join the union on my first day, within their onboarding app 2 months ago:
At the expense of profit? If control is preferable to operational stability, why do so many businesses use IT vendors?
- Comment on My new company let me join the union on my first day, within their onboarding app 2 months ago:
No joke, I see this becoming more common. They’re even doing it the way I imagined: straight up integrated with onboarding.
Maybe it’s an outspoken prediction, that in the future many more businesses will prefer a unionized workforce, but I think a number of current societal and market vectors would suggest that trend. In particular, consider the variety of HR-related logistics, liabilities, and relational concerns of a modern business that amount to operational overhead. You can likely imagine ways that unions might simplify, stabilize, or fully externalize that friction, such that the increased productivity outweighs higher labor expenses, similar to the way efficiency wages in labor economics can ultimately reduce turnover related expenses. That’s just one way unions could become an attractive solution to employers and employees alike.
At any rate, it’s what I would prefer if I needed to hire W2s, to the extent that I’d be willing to help spin up local chapters if necessary, and it only takes a handful of successful examples to accelerate labor trends.
- Comment on More than 80% of recruiters admit to posting ‘ghost jobs’ to juice their talent pool and business reputation 2 months ago:
So there’s employment in the afterlife?
- Comment on Grant Money 3 months ago:
Of all the losers, you came first
- Comment on What pride flag is that? 3 months ago:
Again her customary greeting was met with awkward silence. Somehow Brenda never learned to break the ice without falling in.
- Comment on Conversing with Mathematicians 3 months ago:
numberwang
- Comment on Here kitty kitty 3 months ago:
lol I forgot he does that! And yes definitely.