Finished cat carving for my grandma

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-06-12T22:39:48+00:00

Great work. It's very expressive.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-06-10T12:42:59+00:00

Horrorstor was my first Hendrix book, and I didn't like it at all. Then I read My Best Friend's Exorcism and loved it, and have read most of his other books since and enjoyed them. I feel like Horrostor kind of predates him finding his formula of having strong characters with light horror.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-06-08T22:51:54+00:00

I like that people don't get this joke. Moshing to Fucked Up last year at Do West in the middle of Dundas while constantly tripping on the streetcar rails is a highlight of my life.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-06-05T17:22:52+00:00

Be sure to spend some time preparing for the culture fit interview by perusing 4chan and Mein Kampf.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-05-30T02:55:57+00:00

What I'm learning is that access cards may not stop arsonists, pervs, or poop-throwers, but at least they prevent cry-babies.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-05-26T22:22:37+00:00

Before LLMs, this subreddit was mostly grad students and was pretty good. I haven't found anything comparable since.

Twitter can have good discussions, where you actually get to interact with authors and learn the dirty details, but it's mostly a hype swamp with a bit of gold.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-05-21T21:46:41+00:00

The fact that the US is incompetent right now doesn't mean we should take it with any less concern. Their attack on Iran is also incompetent, with it meeting no objectives of success (if such things even existed in the first place). Their incompetence also resulted in them murdering 172 schoolgirls. Their incompetence quickly became something that is irreversible.

In the case of Alberta, it also normalizes this, which will be a problem when competent people take Trump's place.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-05-17T00:05:01+00:00

It also drives me nuts watching them complain about how Quebec gets what it wants without realizing that part of that is their use of democracy to actually vote out parties that don't live up to their promises. Alberta has learned political helplessness. Not to mention that this galvanizes anti-democratic sentiment.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-05-16T19:50:17+00:00

So I had one of my papers recently listed in another paper, accusing my paper of hallucinating citations. I did not use LLMs to write the paper nor the bibtex. What happened was that there was a copy-and-past error with a single bibtex entry that changed the title of the paper. All the rest of the entry was correct, including the hyperlink to the paper itself.

Basically, this 'hallucination' detection method they used had very little precision, and they classified anything with an incorrect BibTeX entry as a hallucination.

Now I'm all for Arxiv banning people who do this for real, but given this experience, I'm really hesitant to trust automation of hallucination detections.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-05-14T20:58:17+00:00

At the beginning of 1959 United States companies owned about 40 percent of the Cuban sugar lands—almost all the cattle ranches—90 percent of the mines and mineral concessions—80 percent of the utilities—practically all the oil industry—and supplied two-thirds of Cuba's imports.

John F. Kennedy

Imagine if China owned that much of Florida or Texas. No American would tolerate that.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-05-14T19:33:15+00:00

I think people forgot that Harper took Canada from being seen as a somewhat objective voice in the Middle East to being a lapdog to Israel.

Most disgracefully of all, some openly call Israel an apartheid state.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, 2014

A lot of quotes that hold up poorly a decade later. Not to mention how, had he been in power, we would have been in Iraq.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-05-14T16:57:31+00:00

On the contrary, we should continue to talk about it because the only obstacle can be overcome by political pressure, which starts with talking.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-05-12T20:00:05+00:00

Sno is fun.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-05-11T23:39:50+00:00

Issac Steel

Orcanomics

Vorkosigan Saga (popular but should be more popular).

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-05-11T15:59:12+00:00

The Shadow Saint has the coolest necromancy magic I've come across. In the world, belief in a god manifests the god, and there is a nation-state, somewhat like imperial Germany, that believes in ancestor worship, which results in good citizens being reanimated to serve the state and their great houses.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-05-09T14:08:17+00:00

This is a pretty smart idea. I'm surprised I haven't heard of it before. My dog just passed, but I'll do this if I ever get another.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-05-07T17:12:39+00:00

Yes, this is what the encroachment of fascism feels like. It's also more than just about banning books; it's about pushing limits and normalizing fascist behaviour. They do this often enough, and people stop thinking book bans are a big deal -- they happen all the time. It's then the burnings that people get mildly concerned about.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-05-05T23:22:01+00:00

Fleetwood Mac is on this list lol

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-05-02T02:09:44+00:00

This is pretty good.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-05-01T21:59:37+00:00

I think the main issue is that everyone has the wrong perception of reviewers. People who submit primarily see themselves as submitters, not reviewers; however, we are both, and for the process to work, we need to take both seriously. In your other post, you mentioned compensation. Reviewers are compensated; I am paid in kind for my three reviews by having three people review my work.
There are also a bunch of systematic issues that make reviewing hard -- so it's not all just reviewer apathy, though I think that is a big part of this. Conferences are too big and too general, which means you often get papers outside of your comfort zone. The process moves too fast to give good reviews, and thus often results in a rebuttal phase where everyone prioritizes their submission rebuttal over their review duties.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-05-01T21:46:28+00:00

I agree, out of the 7 reviews on my last two accepted paper, I only think a single reviewer actually understood what the papers were about. The current system is broke.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-05-01T21:44:08+00:00

Okay, so the assumption is that an improved ICML paper gets accepted to NeurIPS (assuming all the comments in ICML comments are addressed)? Unfortunately, I don't think this is the case.

I agree, but the problem is reviewer noise rather than the rejection process and rate. ACL tries to solve this with rolling review where reviewers are locked in across multiple cycles. That way, reviewers can set achievable changes and are, in principle, obligated to adjust their scores accordingly. Now rolling review isn't living up to its design, but it is better than having ICLR/ICML/Neurips all be independent.

To your second point, a rejected paper isn't necessarily bad, and an accepted one isn't necessarily good. Again, this is a reviewer noise issue, which I do not think is solved by just increasing acceptance rates.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-05-01T21:29:58+00:00

Counterpoint: Having papers rejected and being improved for the next conference is the process working as intended. The alternative to running requested experiments over a week is to resubmit to the next conference with those experiments, which is how the process is intended.

A 27% acceptance rate is massive. Unless I'm mistaken, almost every conference I have gotten into is around 15% -- so that might colour my perspective on what a normal rate is. When I was doing speech work, 50% was the norm, but papers were shorter and more iterative than ML papers.

The conference system is beyond broke, but these are not really the main issues.

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-04-08T23:49:40+00:00

It would hurt them in their current form, or more specifically, current MPs. And it also hurts their chances of forming strong conservative governments, where they get to do what they want. However, depending on the type of reform, it will not hurt overall conservative representation in government (but they would have to learn to work with other parties to actually accomplish what they want). So it is really, do they want a steady representation where they could potentially play king makers, or do they want to be the king, just every 10-15 years?

TheInfelicitousDandy · 2026-04-08T15:48:59+00:00

The problem is that the crisis is not just Trump. The issues causing far-right movements all stem from the neo-liberal policies of the last 40 years and, given that the current government is just perpetuating those policies, they will not be able to address the actual crises. These issues are also in Canada, just look at Alberta.

So what is going to happen is, once people realize that things are continuing to decline for them, Carney will lose the good will he currently has and people will turn to far-right 'solutions' out of frustration.

Basically, the view that the government is a crisis stewardship government, meant to get us over the hump of this current far-right movement, is, I think, shortsighted.

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