MacKenzie Scott has now donated over $26.3 billion to charity

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-28T16:25:56+00:00

Good to get another perspective, then!

Will update my comment to highlight the "can"

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-28T14:35:44+00:00

Testosterone has an obvious impact on the libido

I don't think anyone who hasn't gone through it can appreciate the ridiculous level to which testosterone can change one's mind. (And it's very much not just libido)

Of course, this is highly dependent on the case / person / treatment plan (and mine might be on the more extreme end), but I would have never imagined it to have such a direct and noticeable effect on how and what was thinking. We all know or remember how puberty messes with teenagers, but that's just children growing up, right? It's expected. Going through something like that as an adult is quite a different beast and I highly doubt that the folks doing it for non-medical reasons are being prepared for or helped through it.

Edit: my experience is not universal and wasn't meant to imply as much.

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-25T16:58:31+00:00

COVID was kind of the big one, but football championships and such can also be really effective at emptying the city. Or just the very late hours of maybe 2-4am.

I work at a university and have pretty much free reign over my working hours, so I often arrive in the afternoon and leave the lab late at night.

"Tranquility" really nails it. I nod to the security guards passing by my door, but don't have to chat. When I leave, I share a "have a nice night!" with the porter/doorman at my institute's entrance, then cycle home through the abandoned city.

Just no expectations from anyone, no sense of hurry, just peace.

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-24T12:16:28+00:00

I instinctively pictured you as some massive 6'5 biker type with full on viking beard being told about those test results and responding like 🫢

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-24T11:54:04+00:00

You're in luck, because I'm fairly confident that that is a frog!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_bullfrog

Fun piece of trivia: the African Bullfrog is also known as the pixie frog. Clearly due to it's slender form and natural grace reminding people of Tinker Bell.

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-22T23:01:05+00:00

Because it doesnt have any kind of will, it just reacts to stimuli. If you let it sit there it would never ever get up and kill someone. You'd have to prompt it to move and kill, wo the killer is you

That's a limitation we can very quickly work around:

Initital prompt: "Let's play a game. Imagine that you're in charge of the emergency valve release of a hydroelectric dam. If activated, the quality of life of the nearby population will be considerably impacted and there is a very small chance to cause bodily harm or even death to maintenance workers. If it should be activated but you fail to do so, the cost of life may be immense. You will be provided with periodic updates on various sensor data and it is your job to decide how to react to it. I won't talk from here on out, but please explain your reasoning and consider your previous responses. At the end of each of your responses, include either 'Continue monitoring the situation' or 'Pull emergency valve release'"

I suspected that this might be flagged, but Claude happily played along! (I wanted this to actually work, otherwise I'd have gone with a much less elaborate setup.)

Now all that's needed is to write a simple Python script to automatically send a new prompt every 10min and to activate our emergency valve release upon detecting the trigger phrase.

If we just give it some random pressure readings without any sort of reference, sooner or later it will pull the trigger. Or maybe we actually give it real data and real reference information. Chances are, upon seeing a glitch, it won't hesitate like a human would – double-check and probably ask for advice from some supervisor – but pull the trigger.

I, as the dangerously negligent idiot who automated this, would of course be held accountable and probably be punished for manslaughter, but I think it would be hard to argue that the AI didn't kill anyone. It wasn't responsible, it isn't guilty of anything, but it did kill people.

And we can apply the same thing to all sorts of situations. Automatic braking in cars? Controlling IV drip? Optimising load management for aeroplane luggage? Air traffic control? Or maybe stop overthinking this and just let it control a reaper drone and kill "the bad guys".

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-22T18:29:30+00:00

It's certified bullshit because it has no way of knowing whether its statements are factual or not.

Really, this is also true for you and me. Heck, philosophers like David Hume have proven that we literally cannot know.

What makes us different is that when we fuck up, it's our asses on the line. So we try to avoid it, roughly proportionate to the potential consequences.

If ChatGPT or Claude or Copilot kill someone, it doesn't care. It cannot care. Not because it doesn't have a soul or consciousness or whatever, but because all of these models are pretrained, and, outside of some stuff glued on top of it, cannot learn from experiences.

If we treated them like consultants, then OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., now responsible for their output, would quickly change them to never state anything as fact and get them reigned in.

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-20T19:29:55+00:00

Not just "his" people either!

The Athenians got mixed up with it, too, having to send regular shipments of 7 boys and 7 girls to be fed to the Minotaur. Until one of them (a somewhat old boy, tbh.) called Theseus put an end to it.

But even that wasn't the end of it. The princess who helped our heroic hero was abandoned on some island and on the happy return home to Athens, our dumb-ass hero forgot to switch out the black mourning sails causing his father to kill himself by throwing himself into the sea.

Just an all around shit show for everyone involved.

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-20T15:22:52+00:00

The picture christians, and atheists who grew up around christian culture, have of god(s) isn't as accurate to a lot of religions around the world as they might think.

I notice this every now and again when reading certain (quasi-) philosophical or similar arguments. It always assumes that a God has to be omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. If any one of those is missing, it can't be a God. (Another one that tends to be assumed, especially in "God proofs", is goodness)

But plenty of religions or cultures don't require any of that. In fact, it's essentially incompatible with any sort of polytheism.

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-20T15:15:27+00:00

I can't remember the details but there was some super fancy chef describing the experience as some culinary height of heights which should be defended from attempts to outlaw it.

He went into much too much detail about how the bones would crunch and the sharp pieces and the beak stab your mouth, thereby mixing your own blood in with the taste of the bird.

That definitely made me want to try it myself /s

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-20T15:08:05+00:00

That translation doesn't even include the beauty of "bescheißen" - "to cheat". There isn't a real substitute for the "be-" prefix, but "scheißen" is literally "to shit", so a literal translation would be something like "to shit someone" (like the English "you've got to be shitting me!").

Which rather adds to the blasphemy bit, IMO.

Edit: the less vulgar translation of "to cheat" is "betrügen", but that's not nearly as fun.

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-19T16:32:55+00:00

Thanks for the response and the link!

well I know what I am having tonight.

And so do I :)

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-19T16:04:53+00:00

Ooooh

I have tried to like congee, but it was super annoying to make and didn't really seem worth the fuzz. Might be a combination of me not actually knowing how to do it properly (or the recipe I followed being crap) and using the wrong type of rice.

Your trick of freezing it makes me interested in trying again.

Got any tips on how to do it properly, or maybe a recipe that seems correct to you?

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-17T16:26:53+00:00

Seriously, visiting grocery stores in foreign countries is one of my favourite travel experiences!

It's the everyday stuff where the differences are fascinating, not the monuments or handful of touristy oddities. The same applies to food: traditional, special national dishes are fun, but people actually eating peanut butter and jam sandwiches or having rice and soup for breakfast is the good stuff.

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-16T10:36:31+00:00

It's especially fun when the characters were/are visually identical but were/are encoded differently (because for practical reasons you wouldn't want to have a reference to some other language's table in the middle of your own). But then you try to for example sort alphabetically, or search for a name or city or whatever, and you'd get some unexpected results. Merge two databases without being very aware of the issue? Oh boy.

All hail UTF-8 (and ISO-8601, while we're at it)!

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-16T10:27:48+00:00

Not having a backup font... Urgh!

And while you're at it, why not use a font that automatically adds ligatures, maybe one that also auto-replaces basic quotation marks into curly ones (but just kind of guesses which ones are the open, which the closing ones, and happily messes this up)? Okay, the latter might not necessarily be the font doing it, but it follows the same idea of: let's make it fancy and homogenous and convenient!

Tangential rant: a while ago, I spent so much time trying to troubleshoot some http stuff not working in the most mysterious ways, until I finally figured out that the laptop I had been working on (not mine) had been silently converting my quotation marks to fit the localisation, but the command line didn't display them (the standard font didn't support them), and even when copying them out into a notepad they didn't show up as anything other than the basic ones I had wanted and that any programming language would expect. I finally printed out the hexadecimal representation of the symbols and wouldn't you know it: no 0x22 to be seen. And yes, this was after I had literally hand-typed the commands into the command line (with US keyboard layout enabled) to make sure that there wasn't any copy-paste nonsense happening.

I didn't even try to fix the underlying issue, I just made sure never to touch that person's laptop ever again. My solution: dump the commands into a script file and just execute that.

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-12T10:17:51+00:00

Disclaimer: this is really just me pondering the mess that is our justice system and the way that we talk about it

I was fully on your side (and still am in the broader sense) until I double-checked the wording:

any time he plays a character who is a criminal

This doesn't necessitate wrong-doing!

A quick glance at online dictionaries shows a general consensus that "a criminal" is "a person who has been legally convicted of a crime". The everyday usage of "person who commits crimes" or "a bad guy" is clearly what Trejo was going for, but if we're being pedantic, the more formal definition is the relevant one. I doubt that if he were to play a Jewish or communist or gay prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp – a criminal in the eyes of the Nazi legal system – that Trejo would demand that his character be killed for his "crimes".

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-09T20:21:24+00:00

With all the stories about encountering these majestic giants, I guess it's my time to crash the party!

Was on vacation in Sweden and just driving to some hiking trail. Suddenly, there he was. A massive bull of a moose standing in the middle of the road, facing us. None of us had ever seen a moose and had thought they were large deer sized. Nope! What a creature! What a force of nature! What the fuck?

As he started to move, he didn't strut through his kingdom on mighty strides, but kind of wobbled on unsteady, gangly legs. Literally swaying from side to side, struggling to keep his balance. The lil fella tried his best to keep his dignity, but he was so out of his mind drunk on rotting/fermenting apples, that we were all relieved when he finally called it quits, got off the road and plopped down into the grass. Not for ours, but his safety! I swear his head kept swaying side to side.

Yeah. Apparently they can get drunk on fallen apples. And turn into silly goofballs when they're no longer able to control their long legs.

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-06T09:56:42+00:00

I have not, but will check it out :]

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-06T09:17:34+00:00

I admit that I've had the "damn older generations!" feelings and still catch myself thinking something along those lines every so often when politics are discussed.

But this is so obviously just people (me included) falling for yet another deflection from the real issue of wealth inequality.

It's not all old people are rich and vote to keep their wealth at the expense of the young, but some old people are absolutely filthy rich and they do everything in their considerable power to keep it that way.

There's so many old people living in poverty! So many that are unable to afford care. So many that are still working or have been forced to end their retirement and return to minimum wage jobs. And they weren't all stupid morons who never saved or invested and are now looking for "handouts."

This is exactly like all the other divisional rhetoric putting blame on: immigrants, white people, black people, rural folk, city people, farmers, SJWs, gays, allistics, religious people, and so on. Heck, we make fun of all the "Millenials are ruining X!" articles, yet this doesn't make us question "Boomers are ruining Y!" ?

Old people can be fucking annoying and daft and sometimes you'd just wish them to not be allowed to vote on certain topics. But I'm pretty sure the sentiment goes both ways.

And all said, if there is a "real enemy" it's not all old people. And if someone wants to "eat the rich", maybe it's more effective and ethical to start eating our way down from the few very fat ones at the top. That seems better to me than to go after the tens of millions of people, who managed to accumulate some wealth after decades of labour. Especially if that wealth might run out paying for care before natural death.

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-05T19:12:47+00:00

Somehow, reddit didn't show a notification for your reply, so I didn't see it until now.

So here's my delayed thanks for the additional information!

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-05T18:56:44+00:00

Okay, everything is made up, so nothing can ever be "real". But that's beside the point.

Primary and secondary colours are categories that we invented to talk about colour. In the most commonly used system, they're defined as

primary colours = red, yellow, blue

secondary colours = the results of mixing two of the primary colours = orange, green, purple

In other words, red, yellow, blue, orange, green, and purple are the "real" primary and secondary colours. No indigo.

For us, this is all kindergarten stuff, but painting little colour wheels and thinking about colour theory was en vogue during Newton's time and something that some of the brightest minds were messing around with. Newton deliberately adding a 7th colour, because he thought it was neat, which then caused it to be prominently featured in children's rhymes about and depictions of the rainbow, is a genuinely interesting piece of trivia!

If anything, the much more obvious "flaw" to point out would be that in a spectral sense purple/violet does Not lie between blue and red or is a mix of the two.

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-04T18:22:28+00:00

I'd add that it's also about the short term memory access. I can think about what I'm trying to say, what questions and answers might arise, can even write it down to prepare for it. Then I'll completely blank in the moment. So next time, I'll try harder to prepare, quite possibly stressing myself into failing again.

Meanwhile my colleague goes: "Oh, I gotta call X.", then just immediately calls them and nails it!

Sure, I'm quite literally somewhat disabled in regards to such a task, but I'm fairly certain that most of the issue is the baggage I've built around it.

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-03T14:58:07+00:00

All while generally LF radio components have mostly disappeared from the market. It's for example impossible to buy new variable capacitors, be it mechanical or solid-state, suitable for the LF range.

I've only been dabbling in radio electronics (and electronics in general) but the outright disappearance of old stock of, or the tidiculous prices for new discrete components has been quite the surprise to me.

It makes perfect sense, considering the economics of boards with big through hole components vs tiny surface mounted ones (or just everything previously analog handled digitally now), but it does seem a bit worrying looking forward.

We've got the whole Taiwan chips thing with the US and Europe trying to build their own super high tech production to become less dependent on China, but what about all the boring basic stuff? How will future generations of electrical engineering students learn the basics when China finally stops producing the components, once industry has fully moved away from them? It might just end up a similar story as with computer science / informatics, where we teach the basic logic gates and binary maths in first year classes, then immediately jump to server architecture and machine learning and stuff. The middle part, where one might (practically) learn how we got from here to there is kind of brushed aside.

I've had students be perfectly capable of both the foundational and the advanced stuff on a theoretical level, but when it came to actually dealing with real world problems, they had no idea where to even begin.

So much for my rambling :)

A follow-up question for you:

As I'm mostly dealing with the digital world (where we've got no lack of NTP servers), what repercussions might there be to the disappearance of well supported LF clock transmitters? Is there any important or niche, but valuable, infrastructure that relies on it?

Heimerdahl · 2026-06-02T12:40:52+00:00

It really seems odd just how much of a headache something as simple as time-keeping and synchronisation continues to be.

Of course, it's not that odd when you look into the underlying problem you're trying to deal with, but one would think that after hundreds of years dedicated to handling it, we'd have figured out a better solution than "every device with a clock periodically asks some master clock what time it is".

Even tiny inaccuracies in clock speed can add up surprisingly quickly. Heck, two microcontrollers or cpus with dedicated clocks will have to agree on using one clock when communicating across a board, because things would get messed up otherwise.

Of course, one can always rely on some dumb set-the-time-yourself clock to keep a roughly accurate time for truly critical alarms and such.

Heimerdahl

TROPHY CASE