if you ask your interlocutor "are you human?" and it lies, the liability that attaches to that should be existential.

@pluralistic on CFPB: "the common thread running through all these orders is that they ban deceptive practices – they make it illegal for companies to steal from us by lying to us. Especially in these dying days of class action suits – rapidly becoming obsolete thanks to 'mandatory arbitration waivers' that make you sign away your right to join a class action – agencies like the CFPB are our only hope of punishing companies that lie to us to steal from us." https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

What is the best plaintext editor for less technical people?

Like, if a non technical friend was going to edit some config or a bit of boilerplatey code.

Notepad / TextEdit wouldn't be great, but neither would emacs or vim (and they're not going to mess with any IDE).

my main LLM use case thus far has definitely been thesaurus. it's fun to be able to describe the sense of the word i want, not just spider a graph from some related word as with conventional thesauri. and it's nice to be able to ask for more options providing more hints about what i'm after. but it hasn't been a miracle. it only occasionally offers good candidate words i haven't already considered. most are inevitably bad choices or words i've considered. still, on net it's been helpful.

@design_law hypothesis: if everyone learns swedish we will have better economic policy.

N=1, but it's an undeniable empirical regularity.

we use "visitation" to describe what ghosts do to mortals, and what the unincarcerated do to the incarcerated.

there is perhaps something hopeful in the analogy.

does the Department of Homeland Security (or the Department of Defense for that matter) pay a lot of attention to targets like GitHub or Sonatype?

It’s frustrating, what of my old policy-centric conversation does not remain with economists-who-don’t-give-a-fuck still on Twitter has mostly migrated to BlueSky rather than Mastodon. But I don’t know that I trust BlueSky not just to be Twitter with a make-over yet. And it's hard for me to track / decide where to post over multiple microblogospheres, so if I ever do jump into BlueSky, I expect to feel torn, friction, confusion, as I do like the community I've found here.

"If it has to query a backend to load it will one day die." @Chronotope https://aramzs.xyz/essays/the-internet-is-a-series-of-webs/

it used to be that when you write to your senator or congressional representative, you’d always get a response.

usually just a dumb, barely responsive form-letter precomposed about whatever issue you addressed. but still. something.

nowadays i find it is usually nothing. there is just no response, whether the communication is by submitting an online form, or sending certified postal mail.

i know. i am old.

this post could have been a meeting.

[new draft post] Authority minimization https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/06/09/authority-minimization/index.html

"Given I liked the Scala language, and did not like the Scala ecosystem, what else was there to do but to write my own ecosystem?" #LiHaoyi, encapsulating in one sentence how programmers are. https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/12yearsofthecomlihaoyiScalaPlatform.html

(i love scala's ecosystem eclecticism. most of my recent stuff combines Li Haoyi's remarkable libraries with ZIO painlessly.)

#Scala

we forgot eternal summer
would mean the end of spring.

"if there’s no enjoyment or even basic respect, then the civil service will keep hemorrhaging talent." @Alon https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/06/08/quick-note-on-respecting-the-civil-service/

i sure hope we don’t look back and say the same thing about COVID-19. https://zirk.us/@interfluidity/112565919926622726

living is a forever war.

[tech notebook] Should blogs adopt the itunes:category RSS tag? https://tech.interfluidity.com/2024/06/08/should-blogs-adopt-the-itunescategory-rss-tag/index.html

[New Post] May away https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/10003.html