chaos

Thinking through a problem yourself, or taking an idea and putting it into words, is like exercise for the brain. You may think you understand a thing from reading or hearing about it, but it's only when you do it for yourself that you discover what you really know and what you don't. It's the difference between learning what a square root actually is and how to press the square root button on the calculator. It's the difference between learning to drive and learning to turn on self-driving mode. Even if the outcome is the same, the learning experience is day and night.

Once you understand a concept well enough, then using an LLM to get some busy work done or just get a starting point that you can improve isn't all that bad, much like using a calculator after learning pen-and-paper division, but trying to use one while learning is almost certain to hurt your understanding, even if the LLM doesn't outright make a bunch of stuff up.

Some states do it this way. Other states do it all electronically (fewer now than in the past, thankfully). Other states do it all on paper and do the counting with offline counting machines, then spot check some precincts at random. Some do it by mail entirely on paper.

And that's the big reason why this line of inquiry is nonsense. The entire country showed a huge shift to the right, not just the swing states or the states that are more vulnerable. That's 51 entirely separate election systems that you'd have to manipulate, make sure public information about the election matches exactly, and also not go so far that any independent exit polls show anything fishy either. The scale of conspiracy to do it in even one state, make no mistakes, and have no one leak is hard to believe. Doing it across the entire country? You're going to need a lot more than "I feel like the numbers are fishy" to be convincing. The conservatives were wrong when they said 2020 was rigged, and anyone saying 2024 was rigged is equally wrong.

• Don't run a senile old man
• Hold a proper primary so that a popular person gets the nomination instead of someone like Kamala Harris
• Promise material changes that will improve peoples' lives and don't say "we aren't going to do anything different, but the other guy is a fascist so you have to vote for us"

Data that makes no statistical sense. A clean sweep in all seven swing states. The fall of the Blue Wall. Eighty-eight counties flipped red—not one flipped blue.

"When the hurricane blew through, every single window of my house was broken. Surely you'd think at least one would survive through sheer chance. I refuse to believe my windows could've been that breakable, so this is evidence that my house was sabotaged."

Donald Trump outperformed expectations in down-ballot races with margins never before seen—while Kamala Harris simultaneously underperformed in those exact same areas.

It couldn't possibly be that lots of low-information voters who don't give a shit about the rest of the ballot didn't like Kamala and decided to take another flyer on Trump because he was at least promising to shake things up and take action, obviously it's a conspiracy. We made it very clear that the economy was fine, and that if you were feeling financially stressed, no you weren't.

If one were to accept these results at face value—Donald Trump, a 34-count convicted felon, supposedly outperformed Ronald Reagan.

And this is obviously impossible because the author doesn't feel like it could happen. Surely the United States would never elect a bad person, that's not like us at all.

Look, the results were pretty uniform across all 50 states, across all 50 completely isolated and different voting systems. The country took a big swing to the right, in swing states and uncompetitive ones, in states with paper ballots and electronic ones. We told the right this same stuff in 2020, it was true then, and it's true now. Rigging so many elections on the scale it would take to swing the overall results requires an insanely huge conspiracy with no leaks and no mistakes and perfect accounting for the massive number of public statistics and results surrounding elections. If it happened, we'd have more than a handful of conspiracy theorists saying "but these numbers look funny" and until that happens, pay this whole thing no mind.

I live in Minnesota and I've never seen a map app report "snow" or "ice" in the winter, and I've also never heard of ICE doing checkpoints on roads, so I suspect this isn't actually a thing.

My favorite patch (other than "what frame of reference are you using for this and why that one in particular, none of them are more correct than any other") is to just say gravity continues to affect you even as you're traveling in time, effectively holding you in the same place if you're on a planet or in orbit.

... yeah, I mean, that'll do it.

Do you think there's any reason to believe that these tools are going to continue their breakneck progress? It seems like we've reached a point where throwing more GPUs and text at these things is not yielding more results, and they still don't have the problem solving skills to work out tasks outside of their training set. It's closer to a StackOverflow that magically has the answers to most questions you ask than a replacement for proper software engineering. I know you never know if a breakthrough is around the corner, but it feels like we've hit a plateau for the foreseeable future.

It's very good for navigating and editing text quickly, and fantastic for situations like "I need to do the same thing 100 times" with things like macros. Coders are frequently opening a big, complex file, jumping around it a lot, changing big and small parts of it, and doing repetitive tasks. For something more like writing out thoughts for an email, editing them slightly, then being done with that text forever, there aren't as many advantages, you're spending most of your time in "insert" mode which is effectively "normal text editor that people are used to" mode. That said, it's one of those things where when you do get used to it and start to enjoy it instead of being frustrated by how different it is, you start wanting it wherever you have to type anything.

CNAMEs can only point to other domains. Redirects like that would be handled on the HTTP level, so you'd need a web server in the mix that sends requesters to the right place when they try to access the subdomain. It can redirect to anywhere, not just domains you control, so the Bluesky example would be handled the same way as the other one.

Love a language that doesn't care if you're using inputs to get outputs or using outputs to get inputs

They also took away the ability to specify your answer separately from the answer you were looking for from others, so now it's just "did you say the same thing." Which doesn't make any sense for some questions, like "do you prefer a partner that is a) taller than you, b) shorter than you, c) doesn't matter", if you both picked A or B, you aren't a match for this question!