Jonathan Y. Chan

Casey Newton, whose fiancé works at Anthropic, writes in response to Mark Zuckerberg: On Sunday night, HBO aired the third-season finale of House of the Dragon, the stuffy and unrelentingly bleak prequel to Game of Thrones.

I finally found a soul-crushing short story that had been stuck in my head since 2016: Prodigal by Gord Sellar.

Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I’m continually surprised to see the so-called “accelerationists” so excited about open-weight models. … Still, in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex.

The first page of Henry Kissinger’s undergraduate thesis: In the life of every person there comes a point when he realizes that out of all the seemingly limitless possibilities of his youth he has in fact become one actuality.

SonOfLilit and jerkajerk’s fix on Reddit for EPUB files rendering with giant black boxes over the text on the reMarkable worked great for me.

The aesthetic of fen qiang dai wa, or “white walls and black tiles,” defines the traditional residential architecture of the Jiangnan region, located in China’s lower Yangtze Delta.

It is a stain on my fellow well-off non-Donald Trump voters that support for Prop 13 is actually more correlated with class than it is with political affiliation.

These notes are incomplete and are not a review.

Lectio difficilior potior (Latin for “the more difficult reading is the stronger”) is a main principle of textual criticism.

First download the existing tokenizer to .

Lawrence Jones: … it’s not our job; we shouldn’t have to live in fear while they figure out what’s going on.

From Towards a Liberatory Technology by Murray Bookchin, writing under the pseudonym Lewis Herber (emphasis mine): Thus far every social revolution has foundered because the peal of the tocsin could not be heard over the din of the work-shop.

From How Americans Used Time in 1965 by John P.

🎶 Ihni binni dimi diniwiny anytime Ihni binni dimi dini one more time Or ihni binni diniwiny anytime Oh, Ihni binni dini one more time 🎵

Because of you – because you sacrificed so much for a people that you had never met, Iraqis have a chance to forge their own destiny.

…there is credible evidence from the same scholarly sources that articulate the unwillingness or inability of francophone sub-Saharan African nations to embrace these new forms of governance apparently because the status quo serves the interests of the po…

… when reelected, McCarthy gained the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, a position he used, according to biographer David Oshinksy, “to undermine government morale, damage numerous reputations, and make America look sinister in

We have all become very marker-prone, but shouldn’t we nevertheless admit that, in the end, despite all we try to do, the most effective “marker” for any intruders will be a relatively limited amount of sickness and death caused by the radioactive waste?

I was working on an Android app when the virtual device in the Android Emulator on macOS suddenly stopped being able to connect to the network.

This is very simple, but it doesn’t seem to come up when I search.

Gould had a pronounced aversion to what he termed “hedonistic” approaches to piano repertoire, performance, and music generally.

I find that reading a document aloud is a great way to catch grammatical errors or awkward wordings.

Harmony is set in a world where technology makes it possible for everyone to be in perfect physical health.

From the Wikipedia article on the Mosuo ethnic group in China: In Mosuo culture, a myth describes that long ago, dogs had life spans of 60 years while humans had life spans of thirteen years.

From “British logistics in the Falklands War” on Wikipedia: The Argentine government did not wish to “repatriate” its dead, as it considered that they were already in Argentina.

LLMs can sometimes recognize number patterns, but can they explain their reasoning?

You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. — Exodus 22:21, ESV You shall treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself; for you…

There’s nothing particularly complex about this, but a few things surprised me along the way so I figured I’d write up some notes.

The ```math fenced math code block syntax is an alternative to the traditional $$ or \[ syntax for \begin{display} supported by GitHub.

A golden oldie from Rich Lowry at the National Review in 2008: I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me

Photos were not syncing from my Mac to my other devices.

Countries in dark blue grant jus soli without restrictions; all other countries require at least one parent to have citizenship or residency.

I run Phoenix (Rails-like web framework for Elixir) like so: elixir --name foo@127.0.0.1 --cookie bar --erl \"-elixir ansi_enabled true\" -S mix phx.server … then connect IEx (the Elixir REPL) using: random=$(head /dev/urandom | LC_ALL=C tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 |

Go to http://plex.tv/claim/ to create a “claim code”.

1960s-era encryption systems often included a punched card reader for loading keys.

Here’s what I use to reinstall the main branch of the neovim Homebrew package: brew unlink neovim && brew install neovim --HEAD --fetch-HEAD My searches weren’t turning up good results.

Ran across the Toasty Tech GUI Gallery today.

From the Wikipedia article on Hattori Hanzo: He died at the age of 54 or 55 in 1597.

Here’s the copy-icloud-photos script I use to backup my photos stored on iCloud to my Synology NAS: #!

I am Culgi, who has been chosen by Inana for his attractiveness. … Because I am a powerful man who enjoys using his thighs, I, Culgi, the mighty king, superior to all, strengthened the roads, put in order the highways of the Land. … So that my name should…

Previously: One-Paragraph Reviews, Vol.

The iteration order for Elixir maps is not just “undefined” in the sense that there is some order at runtime which you don’t know.

I’d assumed that emoji were all organized into a contiguous Unicode codepoint range, but this is very much not the case!

Going to try and see if this format helps me get through the backlog of reviews I’ve been meaning to write.

You are ChatGPT, a large language model trained by OpenAI, based on the GPT-4 architecture. — OpenAI’s system prompt for ChatGPT Imagine you are an experienced Ethereum developer tasked with creating a smart contract for a blockchain messenger. — a ChatGPT

Received this official-looking document in the mail by virtue of having my address associated with my failed startup.

Just tried to print out a PDF and it’s been an adventure!

If a function is only called from a single place, consider inlining it. – John Carmack From John Carmack on Inlined Code on Jonathan Blow’s blog.

I was excited to learn that S3 has natively supported redirects since 2012.

Given their disdain for the social sciences, certain Silicon Valley venture capitalists have an ironic affinity to unwittingly describing things in structuralist terms.