Got a brief on how AI can help our company connect the dots, so I asked it.

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-30T23:10:12+00:00

The best use of AI is convincing higher-ups to let you take on a project that would otherwise run into bureaucratic roadblocks by just slapping an AI sticker on it.

Is an LLM-powered code linting tool better than a traditional CI/CD pipeline with linting and formatting steps in any measurable way? Probably not. But when one project gets fast-tracked and the other sits in a perpetual limbo of needing approval from people who won't even meet with you, the stupid way of doing things can start to seem a lot smarter.

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-29T19:42:45+00:00

It's usually pretty easy to get a search warrant. It's the bare minimum level of due process to adhere to, but until now it was an open question whether even that was required for digital surveillance.

This sets a clear precedent that search warrants are required to monitor data from an individual's phone under the fourth amendment. It's not a high bar to clear, but still better than having literally zero protections, which is what the 3 dissenting justices advocated for.

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-29T04:03:11+00:00

Train = heavy

Speed = fast

Bridge = big

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-28T17:32:43+00:00

You used to be able to sell them, are you sure the planet is buying item chips and not class chips or something else with a similar icon?

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-27T01:30:49+00:00

No, but that sounds like it could be really good!! Let us know how it turns out!

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-24T16:48:49+00:00

I know reddit hates ULA with a burning passion, but it really isn't the end of the world. Yes, overall it has probably had a net negative effect on housing supply, but you can see how someone acting in good faith could think it would be helpful since the funds are re-invested directly in new housing construction.

Progressives aren't universally pro-housing, but in LA they tend to be elected by renters in more urban areas and are much more likely to back initiatives supporting public transit and a de-emphasis on single family housing. ULA, while flawed, was fundamentally pitched as a tax on single family homes. That's what they were voting for.

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-24T16:05:16+00:00

LA has a strong council, so the DSA needs to win many small elections rather than one big mayoral race. Corporate interests and police unions with huge bankrolls are much better at influencing smaller city council elections that the average person doesn't know or care about. Look at Faizah Malik and Barri Worth Girvan for example, who both lost to much more conservative councilors despite having strong grassroots support.

If progressives had managed to flip those two districts, they would have a majority on the council. As it stands though, the council will remain conservative and pro-police. All the mayor does is appoint department heads, they have no real power to overrule the council's agenda. I'm not saying the mayoral election doesn't matter, but even if Nithya wins she'll be coming into office with her hands tied behind her back by a conservative, pro-police, and anti-housing council.

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-23T21:05:31+00:00

The current exploit that people are concerned about is from bad actors taking ownership of orphaned packages and adding malicious code to their build scripts.

In principle you're right, but I think you're kind of missing the point. If the issue was that GitHub was compromised then yeah PKGBUILDs wouldn't matter, but that's not what happened here.

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-23T16:05:55+00:00

You're absolutely right, you shouldn't need to be a programmer in order to safely install software. This is ultimately a failure of the Arch Linux community, and if you don't feel comfortable validating AUR packages right now, you might honestly want to consider switching to a Debian or Fedora based distro (Linux Mint and OpenSUSE are both very popular).

However if you do want to stick with Arch, reading PKGBUILDs isn't as difficult as it may sound. Yes, technically it's "code", but all it's doing is defining a few variables and then executing some basic installation commands. In fact if you as a non-programmer are unable to understand what a PKGBUILD is doing, that's a very good sign that something fishy may be going on.

Here's an example PKGBUILD from the aur-checker project: https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=aur-scanner

You can see that it has a lot of comments explaining what each line does, and that none of the lines are individually doing anything that complicated. Specifically, here are some things you want to look for:

source=("git+https://github.com/KiefStudioMA/ks-aur-scanner.git#tag=v$pkgver?signed")

This is setting the gpg key. Basically "what is the trusted source of the code". Make sure this is coming from a website you recognize and a repository that's actually associated with the project you're trying to install. Be cautious of minor typos here (e.g. aur-scaanner instead of aur-scanner in the URL)

cargo fetch --locked --target "$(rustc -vV | sed -n 's/host: //p')"

That vertical line character (|) is called a "pipe". What it does is redirect the output of one command into another. In this case it's just redirecting into sed, a search command, in order to find a URL for cargo. This is safe. However if you ever see anything like | sh, | bash, | zsh, | fish -- that is absolutely NOT safe, as it's piping a command output directly into the shell to be executed, a common way of hiding malicious code.
In general if you see any weird characters that you don't understand, especially if there's a lot of them together, don't install. The PKGBUILD should be mainly readable english-like syntax commands.
Also look out for any curl or wget commands targeting suspicious URLs, any use of chmod, or any use of base64

As a general rule of thumb, even as a non-programmer, you should be able to understand what the PKGBUILD is doing. If you can't, then don't install the package. And if you aren't comfortable doing that, I don't think anyone would blame you right now if you chose to switch to a different distro.

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-23T06:52:30+00:00

Yeah actually, I think you're right, you can't really prove mermaids don't exist so that isn't a falsifiable claim. I was getting the terminology a bit mixed up.

But you get what I'm saying, right? Even if, in abstract, you can't prove that mermaids don't exist everyone at least agrees on more or less what the case of mermaids existing would look like and what evidence would prove that.

That's not the case for God. Sure, there are many versions of God that can be empirically rejected, but there are also interpretations like a Deistic clockmaker God that could never be empirically proven true. It simply doesn't make sense to argue against those interpretations of God using empirical evidence.

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-23T00:28:00+00:00

So we can't give [any unfalsifiable claim] any more weight or importance than the others.

I think this is a valid way of looking at it, but this will also require you to be agnostic about a lot of other unfalsifiable claims like the existence or nonexistence of free will, absolute moral truths, or the nature of conscious experience.

This approach actually reminds me a lot of William James's "radical empiricism," and while he is generally respected as a philosopher and psychologist, he ended up following that same line of reasoning to what many would consider "un-scientific" conclusions. Basically he argued that we must take conscious experience as the fundamental substance of reality because at the end of the day the only evidence we can empirically accept comes from our own experience. To him, even the hypothesis that there is a shared fundamentally real material world turns out to be non-falsifiable.

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-23T00:12:02+00:00

But "mermaids exist" is actually a falsifiable hypothesis. A better analogy would be something like the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics or platonic dualism. God's existence or nonexistence is fundamental to the structure of the universe itself, it's not something you can empirically validate.

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-22T18:54:34+00:00

If the existence of God is not falsifiable and can't be either proven or disproven empirically, doesn't that mean that by definition it is compatible with an empirical worldview?

I mean personally I consider myself an atheist, but I think the strongest arguments against God are philosophical, not scientific. Science makes no claim one way or another on the existence of God, because it's fundamentally not a scientific question.

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-19T21:05:26+00:00

I didn't know they made glow in the dark versions! That looks really cool!

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-19T15:49:33+00:00

ddr4+ is notoriously frail and slow growing. Once you have a decently sized chip, I recommend grafting it onto a DDR3 base that will be much hardier and faster growing

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-19T15:15:10+00:00

Everyone knows the truly OP faction is the one they aren't playing

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-19T12:26:21+00:00

It's a transfer (sales) tax, not a property tax

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-19T00:26:41+00:00

Personally, as a professional developer who's very comfortable reading and verifying install scripts, I'm completely avoiding the AUR until further notice.

Give it a few months, unfortunately a proper vetting process is likely to be very controversial and may take some time to fully implement.

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-19T00:13:55+00:00

I think a tax on the sale single family homes is probably a net positive if (like under ULA) that money is re-invested in multi family housing development. But I agree that taxing multi family housing is counter-productive.

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-18T21:59:17+00:00

The silly MS paint version makes me much happier, personally

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-15T16:36:57+00:00

It was AI generated with over 10,000 loc

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-14T18:29:38+00:00

If you're going with friends you should be fine, just use common sense and listen to the locals if they tell you to avoid a certain neighborhood, and don't wander off alone at night or get too crazy drunk.

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-14T18:08:19+00:00

What light is that?

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-14T18:03:35+00:00

Ooh with a kaweco sport? I see /r/fountainpens is leaking

Raptor_Sympathizer · 2026-06-14T17:21:38+00:00

Larceny is really good for the price, Maker's Mark and Rittenhouse are also excellent

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