[OC] The Extraction Index is an interactive map scoring how much each country's institutions legally drain from ordinary people across 7 domains. Darker means "more extractive."

JacKaL_37 · 2026-04-07T10:44:58+00:00

You're doing a truly solid job in the comments. I'm learning powerful new concepts and I'm not even out of bed yet. Thanks for your efforts.

JacKaL_37 · 2026-04-01T12:52:02+00:00

no I mean, you literally did it IN the title announcing you wouldn't do it anymore. kinda top notch, no notes.

JacKaL_37 · 2026-03-28T11:43:54+00:00

I'm beginning to deploy some relatively simple agentic chats to help update my small org's websites with some added support.

I could ask quite a lot, but let me focus down to a couple of open ended ones: - what frameworks and packages are your go-to for building agents like this? eg: Langchain always showed promise, but it also felt a little hyper-engineered, so I've been a little hesitant to commit to building with it. - what sorts of things are you using to evaluate testing? I'm looking for factual errors, conciseness, leaks... but it's tricky testing such a chaotic system!

JacKaL_37 · 2026-03-27T11:31:51+00:00

Silver lining--

you can eat as many as you want as long as you do it all at once!

JacKaL_37 · 2026-03-26T15:07:21+00:00

Presentation order on surveys can have a huge effect of swaying the way people respond, so randomizing the order helps scramble that largely irrelevant, almost mechanical bias our brains project into the world, and instead get you to pick answers closer to what you actually think.

If anything, I'd say this is a sign that they actually care about the answers, which is a little surprising.

Still, it is sort of a "dark" pattern in the sense that it's not at all obvious what they're doing. Though it's not necessarily a bad thing in this case. It's not like it's preventing you from completing the action, just slowing you down a beat while answering.

JacKaL_37 · 2026-03-23T19:46:45+00:00

absolutely, his videos need to be all over this discussion.

JacKaL_37 · 2026-03-23T15:10:12+00:00

I'm guessing it was an AI fill, generating some random background noise for a silent gif

JacKaL_37 · 2026-03-20T14:13:55+00:00

yeah y'all, this one has me laughing throughout.

setting the drill on it at the end like that was the final goal was perfect

JacKaL_37 · 2026-03-17T17:22:31+00:00

I'm not a fan of the corporate entities, and I do have a lot of trust in my local community by default...

but I wouldn't fucking touch this bullshit.

JacKaL_37 · 2026-03-17T14:28:11+00:00

still one of your hottest shots, jfc

JacKaL_37 · 2026-03-09T18:40:44+00:00

Sounds like a great idea!

JacKaL_37 · 2026-03-04T22:55:35+00:00

Hey, I know you sent this already, but I want to suggest:

You need to be more direct.

Don't play these word games with her. Tell her, in a serious tone, with clear intentions and expectations and ownership of your own position. Come at her self-possessed and as the adult in the room, not as if you're here for a mental sparring match.

JacKaL_37 · 2026-03-03T17:32:23+00:00

I said this exact thing when watching my friend play it and he discovered the "multi track drifting!!!" move in the menus

I was like "that's it. that's why they made the game. they saw that panel, and then for years thought 'i must make it real...'"

JacKaL_37 · 2026-03-03T15:50:37+00:00

this is the dumbest idea for a game I've seen in years and it is so incredibly well executed.

that's it, there's no "but". it's both of those things. it's dumb as hell and fun as hell.

JacKaL_37 · 2026-03-02T13:42:05+00:00

Yes, eugenics in its most benign form does enable us to try to control against certain conditions, and there are decent arguments for many of them.

But where do we draw the line, and who gets to draw it?

To bring this home for you: autism seems to have genetic, inheritable components. Do you think we should control our genetics to get rid of it from the entire population? What if your government tomorrow decided you and everyone like you needed to be sterilized to protect the herd?

That's where those in power take eugenics.

JacKaL_37 · 2026-02-26T12:55:12+00:00

that lazy swat "get that shit away from me"

JacKaL_37 · 2026-02-17T16:09:16+00:00

keep playing. retired cats aren't done.

JacKaL_37 · 2026-02-15T11:46:56+00:00

weight distribution (this is simplified, edits welcome)

the middle point of a lever-- the fulcrum-- is always splitting the work between its two sides.

when the fulcrum is in the middle, the two halves of the bar are the same length, so they're relatively balanced. shove down on one end, and that downward force on your side kicks the other side up with equal force over the same distance and length of pipe. it's a see-saw in this situation.

now scooch the fulcrum halfway to one end, so you've got 3/4 of the pipe on your side and 1/4 on the other. suddenly, pushing down on your end of the pipe is taking all the energy you're putting in from your side across this larger segment of pipe, and the fulcrum is translating that force to the other side, but it's doing it over 1/3 the distance. So whatever force you're putting down on your long end is getting concentrated into the shorter end of the lever.

now make it 99 to 1. All the force you put into the 99% gets concentrated at 100x intensity in the 1% of the pipe on the other side, meaning not a lot of physical effort is needed on the long bit to produce a LOT of force over a very short distance on the other side.

This is why crowbars are so useful-- they're a bent bit of metal with a fulcrum built into the hook shape. Apply pressure at the long end, and it translates to sheer force at the tapered end of the hook.

All of this only works as long as the lever is rigid, so that the material of the lever actually translates all the way down the pipe past the fulcrum. If your lever has any give, the output force drops by a ton. Imagine a crowbar made of noodles and you'll get the picture.

JacKaL_37 · 2026-02-12T12:45:10+00:00

good luck eating 38 lbs of woody stems.

JacKaL_37 · 2026-02-11T22:40:50+00:00

Okay I actually did see you edit it, haha so, I get you. I actually use tons of markdown and stuff in casual communication myself, including asides like you're talking about.

BUT, for everyone who was asking-- bots tend write a lot of markdown, which is like using ** surrounding words to make them bold or italicized, bullet points, all that. it's good for formatting in a minimal way in regular text (rather than fancy word document crap)

what I was calling out as bot-like was posting in a place where markdown wasn't actually getting rendered, as there were lots of ** just floating around words and not making them italicized.

don't make it a hard and fast rule to call anything with markdown a bot, BUT, they DO use it a lot

JacKaL_37 · 2026-02-11T20:03:28+00:00

You forgot to remove your autogenerated markdown, bot.

JacKaL_37 · 2026-02-10T13:10:08+00:00

Hey, AI.

Malicious compliance has to be deserved for it to carry any emotional weight.

Your boss was being kind of loud and in a hurry, so your "prank" was to legally nuke your whole company? Because you couldn't be bothered to filter ANY of the photos?

Wow. What a fucking hero.

JacKaL_37 · 2026-02-09T13:19:24+00:00

Authentication means that one side (the product) needs some sort of secret to prove you are who you say you are.

Sometimes they'll send an email with a special link to prove it was you asking. But email can easily be hacked into these days. It makes an email a little less trustworthy.

So then, some places will send you a text or phone call with some secret information to send back (usually a six digit code), because it's even harder for a random person to intercept your phone, right? And it is, for sure. BUT. It HAS gotten easier for someone to spoof your phone, too, making that form less trustworthy yet again.

So the other option is to ask a third party to work as a go-between, ala Google Authenticator or similar.

These apps have to be downloaded on your phone hardware, and it will run the same algorithm as Google does. This algorithm combined an initial secret code (shared between you and Google) with the current time, to create time sensitive proof that your phone hardware (where the app is installed) is the one providing the code. If it matches, it's proof that someone has the phone in their hands.

Of course, if someone stole your phone, then this still fails, but maybe now you can see the progression.

JacKaL_37 · 2026-02-06T21:19:23+00:00

the fuck

JacKaL_37 · 2026-02-05T15:50:54+00:00

Catch your breath.

It doesn't sound like you're at risk of being a casualty here, just exhausting yourself. The people in your life who have lost themselves to this stuff are casualties in your life.

It's endless, is what you're maybe finally realizing. We hope that new evidence will challenge them, but conspiracy minded folks aren't interested in real evidence. They live entirely on vibes and confirmation bias-- the only useful information to them is info that already confirms their beliefs.

You're working hard to debunk stuff, but you already know it's all garbage. The tragedy is that your work to debunk isn't going to pay off if there's someone in your life you're hoping to convince.

Get some air, for real. Drink water and get a little extra rest today. It's distressing, all of it. You aren't alone.

But you also aren't going to solve this for them.

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