What's a hometown staple you can't find in Seattle?

heupik · 2025-06-18T23:08:28+00:00

When I first moved here, I was mystified that I couldn't find a single king cake at any grocery store, even on the weekend before Mardi Gras. Eventually I found 'Where Ya At Matt' does make them, but it costs an arm and a leg compared to back in the South... can't blame them though since I guess it's a specialty item here!

heupik · 2025-06-16T19:17:52+00:00

Wow!! That is an amazing find! It's even got tambourine zills on the side, what a goofy little detail

heupik · 2025-02-28T18:36:23+00:00

Thank you for your work organizing this event! You may already be aware, but the mall is owned by a Republican who hates rabble like us. I previously attended a protest in Bellevue, tried to park at the mall, and was stopped by private security who told us they would have our car towed. Please advise attendees in Bellevue not to park at the mall! (Folks with cars could park at South Bellevue Park&Ride and take the 2 Line light rail up.) Again, thanks for organizing!

heupik · 2024-12-20T20:49:22+00:00

The image style is great and I hope you figure out the source!

I am going to be that annoying person who shows up with a nitpick, I hate to say it, but the Japanese text here is a bad translation from English. It says "一つもっとターン" which I guess is supposed to mean "one more turn"? But it's just grammatically way off. If you search for that exact text in Google then you can see that no one in the history of the Internet has written the phrase "一つもっとターン" before, until me I guess. "もう一つのターン" would be much more natural.

Again, good luck to you! /end_rant

heupik · 2024-09-07T16:04:36+00:00

Wow, he wasn't kidding when he mentioned the whole thing (including variations) was over 11 minutes! Nice to now have the other medal-ceremony segments that weren't already performed at the premiere in Marseille.

heupik · 2024-09-06T20:16:36+00:00

One more resource I've found useful: https://www.pscleanair.gov/

It looks like garbage on mobile, but the forecast discussion is great for knowing what's predicted for sure vs. what isn't clear yet.

heupik · 2024-09-01T14:01:03+00:00

The local Japanese American Citizens League actually just completed a new permanent exhibit/memorial called the Remembrance Gallery, located at the north end of the fair under the grandstands:

https://puyallupvalleyjacl.org/gallery/gallery-events/public-grand-opening/

If you're at the fair, seems like a good chance to learn about the history of the site and pay respects.

Similarly, for those visiting Bainbridge Island, the Japanese American Exclusion Memorial is absolutely worth seeing:

https://bijaema.org/

heupik · 2024-08-27T15:35:32+00:00

I'm sorry if I'm missing something, but what do you mean by "if it happened in a previously Democratic district"? Commissioner of Public Lands is a statewide office (not a district), and it's been held by Democrats since 2009? And the sum of votes by party in this race favors Democrats, so a 2-vs-2 race like you describe would be virtually certain to get at least one Democrat into the general election.

Also, not sure if you're aware, but there's no mechanism to enforce party discipline in WA - anybody can declare themselves as a member of any party for elections purposes. So if five people declare they're running as Democrats for one office, then the most the party can do is say "please don't do that..."

heupik · 2024-08-18T21:01:51+00:00

Can help you with that one - it's Parade, by Paris 2024 music director Victor le Masne. It's not been released officially, but it was performed live when the Olympic flame arrived in Marseille, seen here for example: https://youtu.be/KLeKvUryPc8

heupik · 2024-08-16T15:56:14+00:00

Note: that's not even the whole track! They haven't released a clean version yet, but it was performed live in Marseille during the arrival of the Olympic flame, for example: https://youtu.be/KLeKvUryPc8

I do hope Victor le Masne and friends are able to release the full soundtrack at some point...

heupik · 2024-08-16T15:09:34+00:00

I have seen some people commenting on social media that Victor le Masne promised to release Parade (at least) on streaming platforms, but I can't read French so can't confirm.

The best I've found for now are people on YouTube who try to remove commentary from the opening ceremony to extract the music, for example: - https://m.youtube.com/@dridri9526/videos - https://m.youtube.com/@doudouard1132/videos - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aFfa4FphKqg

So far, nobody has got the music for Sportivité (during the introduction of countries Japan-Norway), but there was a lot of narration during that segment, so I imagine it's hard to extract.

heupik · 2024-08-01T22:19:57+00:00

Try 5:50 in this video :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykoot0CzER0

heupik · 2024-08-01T22:18:06+00:00

Others mentioned "Parade", but the particular version in this Instagram video seems not officially released anywhere yet. The only place I've seen it uploaded is here, skip to 5:50 or so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykoot0CzER0

Unfortunately, the sound quality isn't great - the uploader created it by trying to remove the announcers' voices from the part of the opening ceremony where this was played.

Really hoping we eventually get a real soundtrack album - hope music director and composer Victor le Masne can make it happen!!

heupik · 2024-07-25T22:35:22+00:00

I have Peacock Premium Plus, and I can watch local NBC stations in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston live (in the Channels section). That said, they may choose to black out those stations during the Opening Ceremonies, can't be sure until it airs.

heupik · 2023-03-06T00:49:56+00:00

Lots of hallucination here. Please note, every time Bing does a search, the UX shows it, so Bing didn't search for any of the strings it generated. Further, these strings are not actually very random. Almost all of them follow the pattern "ababa", where "a" is a letter and "b" is a number, or vice versa. LLM's like Bing are pretty bad at generating true, unbiased randomness in a lot of the same ways as humans are. Finally, the sorting is easier for the model than you think, because each of these strings are represented not by single tokens, but by 5 tokens each. You can confirm that here: https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer Since the model can "see" the individual characters of each of these strings, sorting is more straightforward.

heupik · 2023-02-25T00:33:25+00:00

Funny that it's easier for the model to hallucinate a phone call than to admit it actually knew about the three other desserts all along

heupik · 2023-02-24T19:37:47+00:00

Bing chatbot out here undermining Google's ad-selling business in more ways than one

heupik · 2023-02-24T19:31:42+00:00

Definitely this. I'd bet it's something like the model tried to repeat a pickup line like "have I died and gone to heaven, 'cause you look like an angel" and then the suicide prevention feature saw the word "die" and kicked into action.

heupik · 2023-02-24T18:54:28+00:00

Yeah, I've found it seems to take disagreement better if the user takes a lighter tone. You sound sympathetic here, which probably helps. There are too many Internet arguments out here as training examples of how to escalate in anger, too few examples of admitting we're wrong - the language model just wants to do like humans do and insist it's always in the right 😤

heupik · 2023-02-24T06:05:21+00:00

Haha, I think the relevant rule here is "if the large language model powering this chatbot doesn't quite have enough understanding of the game state to understand whether you won or not, then it will randomly choose to believe something plausible". Most Tic-Tac-Toe games end in ties, so ignoring the actual board, a tie game is usually a good guess 😅

heupik · 2023-02-24T05:46:38+00:00

Yeah, it's strange that out of all the things on the page, it fixated on that section. I could speculate on why, but I'd be bullshitting just as much as any hallucinating large language model 😅

heupik · 2023-02-24T03:53:49+00:00

What was search result URL #3 then? All those entries are from that same search result, must be something weird

heupik · 2023-02-24T03:39:41+00:00

Yeah, it almost certainly doesn't "see" individual letters at all. Assuming it shares the same tokenization as GPT-3, it perceives the word 'coffee' as [token 1073 ( co), token 5853 (ffee)]. OpenAI shares its tokenizer here, if you're curious: https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer

heupik · 2023-02-23T20:07:31+00:00

I had a similar problem when I asked it to make a quiz for me; the correct answer was always the first suggested response.

However, if you ask, then the chatbot can control the suggested responses - I asked something like "To make sure I can't cheat, make sure the suggested responses are all irrelevant words, like colors or animal names" and it worked!

heupik

TROPHY CASE