I'M A BAT

I'M GAY

It's the technique of running a primary search against some other system, then feeding an LLM the top ~25 or so documents and asking it for the specific answer.

They most certainly do not keep quiet about it!!!

-- a person who has posted about programming on Mastodon

If it helps, I know who you are and will still happily tell you incorrect information about yourself and your profession if asked to!

I read his blog a while and I agree with you.

Overall the Dimes Square guys seem very similar to each other. To me they're interesting in aggregate, described once, but there's nothing to look at beyond the surface. If you read any two blog posts on Mike's site, you know everything about them.

Of course they have day-to-day lives -- every so often one of them releases a book or something, but this has no real purpose -- none of them ever change. It's not like a man with six funny hats becomes more interesting when he acquires a seventh funny hat.

The social pattern Mike is describing seems pretty fast-paced and destructive. They do a lot of signings and court a lot of press attention, and as long as you're still shocked, they're interested in you. Past that, you kind of have to behave exactly like them to get invited, but it doesn't seem like they actually like their own -- I would be really, really surprised if they read each other's books. They just kind of brood next to each other and engage in disaffected, ironic narcissism.

I can see why he'd be valuable to them, though. Mike has his own pattern -- he's clearly learned how to be entertainingly shocked, but only intermittently -- on other occasions he denies them supply, and sometimes he burns them by being a surprisingly coherent critic. He's hard to reach but ultimately attends often enough that they remember him.

If you substitute "affection" with supply in the form of outrage, and leave everything else the same, he's basically a pickup artist.

I suspect that the actions that make up Mike's pattern are deliberate, but when it comes to explaining them, he has zero self-awareness. He's doing it too well for it to be accidental though, as much as there's a lot of denial there, and when he makes comments like the one I've selected, I think that's the mask slipping.

Oh look, another person saying "I know nothing, explain it to me" again and again and again while strongly advocating a specific position.

My personal opinions. Note that I'm not on the NixOS zulip, or a user of NixOS:

• Of course some people are going to be excluded from the committee: it's 5 people.
• I've seen some groups become surprisingly diverse by accident but the groups were generally still run by white men.
• The minorities in groups I was in usually ended up in positions where they had to do emotional labor or damage control for the white men who made the decisions.
• The white men in groups I've been in usually behaved in ways that, to me, implied massive affinity bias. It was possible to shake them from that without dehumanizing them or being rude, but I had to actually be in the room.
• That doesn't make them inherently bad people. Or maybe it kind of does, but only in a conditional sense -- that is, if integrating the group they're in suddenly makes them stop being bad people, then it is a really good idea to do that.

With regard to this specific proposal:

• OK, with a quota of 2, you have three seats that white men are allowed to have.
• If you really need there to be 5 white men, increase the size of the committee to 7. Now you have 5 white male seats, the same as you would if this proposal were not adopted.
• If this is still objectionable to you, then your apparent problem with the quota system is not that it excludes white men.

I am possibly being unfair -- it seems like what Aaron wants is "there should be 5 people on the committee, not all of them should be white men, but that should happen by accident without needing to be set in stone on the Zulip."

This seems vacuous to me: the whole purpose of the Zulip is not to create a selection process -- it's to select a committee one time and then hand over power to that committee. There's, therefore, little distinction between "deciding to vote for X" and "setting a quota limiting the outcomes." There is no process external to the Zulip by which an outcome could happen by accident.

And to say the obvious: I think it's very unlikely a group consisting of 5 white men would have been selected on merit alone. So I would personally be likely to veto any such group based on that. Saying it's a quota offers a fig leaf to people with implicitly biased selection criteria -- mentally I am saying "of course you picked five fucking clones of yourself. Denied."

Holy fuck! That man does not sound like an engineer. Why is he the CTO of anything?

The fascists have been incredibly effective at diverting people to all the conversations that don't matter. It's the same strategy as always -- "be loudly wrong about an insignificant issue and watch the leftists jump to correct you."

Anduril is mentioned once in the NixOS thread and zero times in the aux.computer thread. So let's say I'm not hopeful.

Apparently, if you want to get away with crimes, you should find someone you can rat on and commit them in a way that makes that person highly complicit.

My opinion is that Jesse Lyu is lying about making any significant changes. (Because otherwise the demo wouldn't have worked)

I don't want bad things for him personally, but I want bad things to happen to people who lie in public.

The code is open source with licensing requirements, so I'm therefore hoping someone Jesse has already made a statement to can write him with these requests:

• For GPL2 licensed components such as Linux: Give me your changes in source form.
• For Apache-licensed components such as Android: What files did you change?

I can imagine him responding in three ways:

• "Sure, here is another lie" -- and then he's locked into an answer which will probably make him look clueless as hell
• "We don't think we have to do that" -- and now the Open Source Reply Guy Brigade instantly hates him.
• -- and now, given that a conversation has actually occurred, he looks evasive.

Is there an amount of testosterone that will turn me into a lizardman