nfultz

Rusty's response nailed it imho:

You sling beads to a hook which activates a polecat according to GUPP. Jesse what the fuck are you talking about?

At first this all seems like gibberish, and it is. But I think Yegge is one of those people with an innate and preternatural sense of the power and purpose of naming things—someone who understands that names are marketing and marketing is not always about attracting the largest possible audience. In this case, the best outcome for Yegge is for Gas Town to appeal to a relatively small number of absolute sickos who vibe hard with his personal brand and who can usefully contribute to the project, and also for Gas Town to actively repel looky-loos and dilettantes like me (and probably you), who will only waste his time with a lot of stupid questions like “huh?” and “molecules?” and “did you say seances?” Oh yeah: there are seances. Don’t ask.

By this standard, Gas Town has apparently been very successful.

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/all-gas-town-no-brakes-town

https://digg.com/politics/qxL3rOG/white-house-posts-digitally-altered-image

The White House responded to inquiries about the image alteration by posting a message on X about the enforcement of the law and the continuation of memes.

relaunching with AI podcasts about AI and AI summaries of news about AI deepfakes

who asked for this

New episodes of Missing Cryptoqueen !? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07nkd84/episodes/downloads

Scott Alexander replies to comments Re: Scott Adams

Scott Alexander, former tribune of nerds now says that the sneerclub was right about everything all along? I didn’t expect that, let me tell you.

Several people interpreted me as attacking nerds. I disagree - I think I was attacking self-hating nerds, because nerdiness is fine and you shouldn’t have to hate yourself for it.

ha.

Other than that, further testimonials of the Dilbert -> NRx pipeline.

The pro-natalism book Quiggin is responding to is After the Spike; I got a free copy at work and read it on the plane over break. Mostly longtermism / utilitarianism, but left-pro-natalism is a little different. One of them came to campus to do a book talk last week, most of the audience remained pretty skeptical. Word on the street is that Musk gave them a pretty hefty grant, enough that I got a dead tree apparently...

Internet Comment Etiquette Erik does another grok video

Ok I laughed at the Tim Sweeney bit.

This is a lot more common than you'd think, several posts about abuse like this over at the academia stack exchange. If you think he used your writing, you could file a copyright claim on it since you are the author, not him. Do not waste your time with HR or honor committees, they will not do anything for you, their job is to cover the universities ass, not help. I honestly can't think of a case where going public led to anything more than a footnote on the persons wikipedia page, although it might be good for warning the incoming cohort of students.

If you're really sure about finishing your phd, it's probably pretty hard to xfer to a new school without LoRs, a strong publication record or bringing your own grant, but you might be able to switch depts if they're close enough, eg math <=> stats <=> CS. They might make you do comps / quals again though. But there's a pretty big diminishing returns to years 4+ of a phd, honestly, and I can assure you that there's assholes everywhere. Deans will yell at you too, and I've heard of a couple dept chairs that throw staplers. The tenure track does not incentivise not-being-an-asshole, at all, it is a rigidly hierarchical system and accompanying world view, at least in the R1s anyway.

Looks like he added a notice / disclaimer at the top last night? The talk page has some quality sneers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/2026-01-15/Special_report

Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call h/t metafilter

It's a good read overall, makes some good points about global south.

The hostility to AI tools within parts of our community is understandable. But it's also strategic malpractice. We've seen this movie before, with Wikipedia itself. Institutions that tried to ban or resist Wikipedia lost years they could have spent learning to work with it. By the time they adapted, the world had moved on.

AI isn't going away. The question isn't whether to engage. It's whether we'll shape how our content is used or be shaped by others' decisions.

Short of wikipedia shipping it's own chatbot that proactively pulls in edits and funnels traffic back I think the ship has sailed. But it's not unique, same thing is happening to basically everything with a CC license including SO and FOSS writ large. Maybe the right thing to is put new articles are AGPL or something, a new license that taints an entire LLM at train time.

Wes McKineny - Why Not

EDIT

I mean props for at least self hosting in a home lab instead of inventing Gas Town. But all the annoying parts of software (IE DevOps, mobile development, etc), that's all self inflicted and we could fix the foundations or build better ones, instead of hoping an llm can stack things on top of something inherently shaky.

I’ll be brutally honest about that question: I think that if “they might train on my code / build a derived version with an LLM” is enough to drive you away from open source, your open source values are distinct enough from mine that I’m not ready to invest significantly in keeping you. I’ll put that effort into welcoming the newcomers instead.

No he won't.

I’ve found myself affected by this for open source dependencies too. The other day I wanted to parse a cron expression in some Go code. Usually I’d go looking for an existing library for cron expression parsing—but this time I hardly thought about that for a second before prompting one (complete with extensive tests) into existence instead.

He /knows/ about pcre but would rather prompt instead. And pretty sure this was already answered on stack overflow before 2014.

That one was a deliberately provocative question, because for a new HTML5 parsing library that passes 9,200 tests you would need a very good reason to hire an expert team for two months (at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars) to write such a thing. And honestly, thanks to the existing conformance suites this kind of library is simple enough that you may find their results weren’t notably better than the one written by the coding agent.

He didn't write a new library from scratch, he ported one from Python. I could easily hire two undergrads to change some tabs to curlies, pay them in beer, and yes, I think it /would/ be better, because at least they would have learned something.

Iris gives opencode a spin