Carlos Scheidegger

@cscheid.net

246

Followers

125

Following

324

Posts

Principal Engineer at Posit (fka RStudio), building quarto.org

Posts Replies Media

Reposted by

Carlos Scheidegger

Read this, share this widely

I will bang this drum forever: in THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE FREE: THE GERMANS, 1933-45 Milton Mayer interviewed 10 ordinary Germans after WW2 to learn how fascism took hold. There was never a moment when everyone woke up:

Now, bobcat kittens!

How about this owl picture from tonight, huh? That’s owl #3, but now we’re thinking the other two are fledglings and these are much more common western screech owls.

We’re trying to get better #owl pictures right now but can you see what’s cool here? (Click for the full crop)

Here's another owl picture from last night. We stood not 10 feet from it and watch it sleep, wake up, look around for a good half hour. Amazing:

Reposted by

Carlos Scheidegger

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration at all to say the decision threatens the Republic. I might not have said so in 2015, before I saw how triumphantly lawless and autocratic the President could be, and how so many people would applaud it or at least shrug.

My friend and colleague Ken White has written a great thread describing some (but far from all) of the enormous problems with today's decision by Chief Justice Roberts granting Donald Trump criminal immunity on grounds never before accepted by any court. Today's decision threatens the Republic.

Reposted by

Carlos Scheidegger

I can’t believe the Supreme Court just ruled that the president can sleep outdoors in a public space.

real ones remember the stage being set up back in the brooks brothers riot

I've seen enough -- this is the most radical, dangerous, arrogant, out-of-control Supreme Court in American history, and it needs to be treated as such. open.substack.com/pub/kevinmkr...

The Radical Roberts Courtopen.substack.com The current Supreme Court of the United States has just cemented its place in history as the most radical Supreme Court ever. For a century and a half, that dishonor has gone to the antebellum court l...

This, incidentally, would very obviously be "an official act"

What you would do when authoritarianism comes to America is what you're doing right now

Downsizing, day 1

Reposted by

Carlos Scheidegger

One for the syntax folk 🐦🐦

We have a pigmy owl in our front yard, and apparently their AZ population is estimated to be in the low hundreds total! so cool (the video is even better but bsky doesn’t so video boooo)

Chevron deference gone, Trump is likely to win. So we can expect no action on climate, now even more than before. Unfortunately that means the entire planet is to be fucked up. I’ve joked about buying farmland to grow corn in the Yukon. Who knows?

Now taking suggestions for the next country to spend 20 years of my life. Seems like that’s the cadence the universe decided for me

Reposted by

Carlos Scheidegger

Reply to

Chris Geidner

Roberts, overruling Chevron with incredible and unearned hubris: "Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do."

... _and_ they include an AI-generated paper. Art!

The LLM-generated explanations Vigen added this year to his already legendary Spurious Correlations site are a rare example of a purely good application of "AI" https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/1830_popularity-of-the-first-name-cruz_correlates-with_associates-degrees-awarded-in-nurs…

Reposted by

Carlos Scheidegger

einstein sent this to curie in 1911 when she was being harassed by tabloids. it contains everything you’d want in such a letter: (1) your haters are trash (2) you’re a baller, a true queen (3) i have determined the statistical law of motion of the diatomic molecule in planck’s radiation field 🧪⚛️

Just go watch this right now. Trust me. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65F...

Badness 0 (Apostrophe‛s version)www.youtube.com Never before seen pilot episode. Keywords: Types If you see any errors, please post about them in the comment section! Source code, papers, etc.: http://tom7.org/bovex

I have an Argentinian doppelganger that I know of simply because I get email wrongly sent to me once every few years. In the past they were slightly terrifying, like bank loan paperwork. But today I'm pretty sure I got an email from his son about a homework PDF to print. That's oddly heartwarming.

Reposted by

Carlos Scheidegger

Reminder that Aaron Swartz was facing 35 years in prison and financial devastation for trying to programmatically download and open the contents of JSTOR, which led to him taking his own life. But OpenAI is going to scrape all of academia and make billions by plagiarizing it.

New version of chatbot reaches level of function where it responds to all queries by making a little twisty-wrist gesture with pinched fingers and saying “But isn’t it more *complicated* than that?”

Honestly the difference is one of them potentially makes so much money, no way it will eventually be illegal Important lesson: the reason crime doesn’t pay is that if it did, it wouldn’t be a crime (Worth learning the economic reasons eg abolition started getting popular when it did)

Reposted by

Carlos Scheidegger

Mood today

Reposted by

Carlos Scheidegger

Reply to

Yanir Kleiman

No one believes that with regard to the generation of the art. A prompt is not creation. That's like saying speaking your order into the drive-in mic means you cooked your burger and fries.

Universal experience, universal lesson Ask college professors about rateyourprofessor.com :( and my experience there is with a much, much smaller volume Good news the modern tech world collapses all social context! That can’t ever have bad consequences, can it

The only way to maintain any kind of sanity as a public figure is to actively avoid places where you and your work are being discussed. Human beings were not made for the volume of feedback the internet is capable of providing.

HN crew self-censoring Where's the thought crimes crowd now? Lol, lmao The civility police is not just evil, they're also incredibly fucking boring.

Reposted by

Carlos Scheidegger

Relevant image someone shared on the old site a few years ago:

To avoid being Chomsky-ed, everyone needs to send out a message every day that we are, in fact, still alive. More than once a day is encouraged. That will ensure that Bluesky is accurate as to whether people are alive. For purposes of today, at 4:54 Central Time, I am alive.

You might not be aware, but GitHub repository comments are slowly (but increasingly fast) getting overrun with LLM spam. GitHub feels like an "indicator website" for this sort of thing, so you can expect it to be everywhere in, I don't know, 0-12 months?

Reposted by

Carlos Scheidegger

Yes, if you don’t like the choice between Trump and Biden, think of it as picking between Stephen Miller and Pete Buttigieg, Steve Bannon and Deb Haaland, Michael Flynn and Lina M. Khan, Alex Jones and Jessica Rosenworcel, or Brett Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Both sides are not “the same”

Some reduce the 2024 campaign to a contest between two old men, but it's a choice of two slates of federal appointees who'll impact your life in a million ways. Biden has staffed executive agencies with excellent choices who are doing good work. Trump will empower an army of Stephen Millers.

Reposted by

Carlos Scheidegger

As plenty of people have said, the folks holding forth on what to do today to benefit humanity 30,000 years from now are the exact same folks who couldn't see the FTX meltdown coming

This piece is weirdly tortured by the inability to get past the fact that "effective altruism" is an ideology cooked up five minutes ago by broadly ignorant dumbasses (minoring in eugenics) and you can throw it all in the trash without giving up on the concept of making altruistic efforts effective

Opinion | Effective Altruism Is Flawed. But What’s the Alternative?www.nytimes.com The movement can’t answer our deepest moral questions, but it still has wisdom to offer.

Underrated skill for commenters in open source forums: Learn to take the L, my dudes.