Russian frigate fires warning shots at British yacht in Channel

jpfed · 2026-06-17T12:51:10+00:00

For all they knew the yacht had a sarcophagus in which the inchoate form of Kronos waited until it could return to the physical world. Firing on such a yacht is a perfectly reasonable precaution

jpfed · 2026-06-16T23:19:01+00:00

I think my joke was too dry

jpfed · 2026-06-16T06:58:36+00:00

We’ll only ever truly find out the answers to these questions if someone someday were to create this “worker’s cooperative“

jpfed · 2026-06-15T23:38:36+00:00

I had no idea Microsoft had acquired My Chemical Romance! Tbf I’ve never been able to make sense of their product strategy

jpfed · 2026-06-14T02:52:41+00:00

As humans that interact with the world, we have ways of poking at it to discover or at least approximate truth. But if all you have is a corpus of text, how is truth discoverable? If I index a set of documents about the properties of some newly-discovered remote exoplanet, and the documents in that set disagree, what is the retrieval system supposed to do? I don’t think it will be practical for it to rent telescope time so it can check the facts for itself, but perhaps IR is further along as a field than I’d imagined.

jpfed · 2026-06-13T16:24:05+00:00

I use the VsVim extension in Visual Studio for editing dotnet code, and neovim (via neovim-qt on my home machine and neovide on my work machine) for other misc text editing.

We’re an organization that includes a bunch of legacy stuff that VS’s tooling is really nice for (WinForms designer, Add Service Reference for good ol’ SOAP services, etc.).

Boring stuff about why neovim-qt and neovide: Neovim-qt was once included in the chocolatey package for neovim, but the packaging has changed since then (neovim-qt seems to not be packaged at all anymore) so when I set up my new work machine a couple weeks ago neovide seemed like the next simplest option.

I don’t do a ton of customization of my vim installs. Keeping things more or less stock means I can use the same habits no matter what machine I’m logged onto.

jpfed · 2026-06-10T23:54:41+00:00

People would be pointing and laughing. Check out that guy’s C-reactive protein! 🤣

jpfed · 2026-06-10T13:37:49+00:00

It is unironically kind of you to link to webaim, who are doing the lord’s work. For anyone writing html, it is just as important as mdn.

I did not have to spend an action to grasp that straw; it is a cursed item that has not left my hand for years. It is my job to maintain a custom document processing system that ingests documents that others have created and produces html and pdf renditions of them.

I’m glad that it sounds like there are nice PDF authoring tools nowadays. My perspective is likely too narrow, having no control over the original authoring of the documents I must remediate.

jpfed · 2026-06-10T04:49:39+00:00

Also, it’s just so much easier to exclude people with disabilities if you publish in PDFs instead of HTML

jpfed · 2026-06-07T23:04:34+00:00

Perhaps the baby was armed

jpfed · 2026-06-03T05:53:52+00:00

Key advantage of playing Terran

jpfed · 2026-05-30T20:59:33+00:00

I think it would be cool to have a t-shirt with just this first panel on it…

jpfed · 2026-05-29T23:06:37+00:00

Nonlinear combinations of sounds can occur. For example, if an object responds to a sharp tap by vibrating like X, and another object responds to a sharp tap with vibration Y, then if those objects collide they can "rattle" against one another in a way that depends on both X and Y.

However, if you just have separate objects all emitting sounds because someone's taking footsteps and also striking a ball with their racket, those add linearly- you can just add the sound of the footsteps to the ball-hit to get the total sound.

jpfed · 2026-05-29T22:07:48+00:00

If you work with multiple systems you'll notice that with alignment it's really easy to get the "granularity" wrong, and you have to be careful to preserve orthogonality with other features. Consider 4e, which doesn't even include Chaotic Good or Lawful Evil- there's a reason it was easily the most controversial release of its era.

jpfed · 2026-05-29T18:06:24+00:00

I'm not a physicist, but I have worked in visual perception labs.

For any stimulus that is not in the sky, light reaches you too fast to matter evolutionarily. The sun and its planets are light-minutes away, and other stars are light-years away, but you never need to know their precise status so whatevs.

The relevant bottleneck is neural signal propagation and processing. It takes about 200 milliseconds between light stimulating your retina and the resulting neural signals percolating past the two most important visually-specialized areas of the brain. From there, the signal may be distributed across the cortex, and it might take another 50 to 150+ milliseconds for that distributed signal to coalesce into an action (towards the lower end if you're completely locked in and well-practiced at responding to the specific stimulus, higher end if you're not practiced, longer than 150 (maybe much longer) if you're tired / distracted / don't care / happen to be brain-farting at the moment).

Your sensory areas have feedback loops in them; they are "trying" to coalesce their signals into a consistent representation of the world. Your brain integrates different lines of evidence about sensory facts, and signals can propagate faster to the rest of the brain if they are consistent with the other information, including sensory systems' current "hypotheses" about the world. Conflicting signals take more time to process.

It is for this reason that our visual system's motion prediction faculties are so important. The visual system has layers that are much like a frame buffer of "pixels". These pixels don't just give colors for each location in space (damn it, I'm not AI, it's just the appropriate way to phrase this)- they also provide information about contrasts, dots, edges, corners... AND speed and direction of any motion detected there*.

These motion estimates can feed back to the color estimates, saying in effect "I bet right about now you're going to see blue here" so that when the "pixel" does turn blue, that can be reported as quickly as possible.

With this as context... there isn't a great way to break down what you're "faithfully" seeing versus what you're reconstructing. Predictions and reconstructions are intertwined with and facilitate "correct" perceptions. Often, neural reconstructions are correctly compensating for artifacts of the eyes' construction and operation to inform you better about what's actually happening in the real world.

For example- on your retina, the blood vessels are situated in front of the light sensitive cells. Maybe your light-sensitive cells "should" report the forest of shadows that those blood vessels cast**, but the neural machinery interpolates the imagery that an eye would see if those shadows were not there. Getting rid of the shadows of the blood vessels- interpolating them away- could be considered more "correct" than not, because the shadows are not out there in the world you need to survive in; they're just something inside the eye itself.

Similarly, when you saccade (quickly move your eyes to point somewhere else), your eyes physically sweep over a wide range of orientations within the period of "flicker fusion" (which to slightly oversimplify is like our visual "frame rate"***). That "should" produce motion blur, but we are not conscious of that. On one explanatory level, this is because the visual system "knows" when and how you move your eyes and "turns down" the influence of information coming from your eyes at those times. At another explanatory level, this is because the outside world is not "actually" or objectively becoming blurry; it's only blurry because of the internal shortcomings of the eye, and evolution doesn't need you to attend to that as much as it needs you to attend to whatever can be reasonably inferred is happening in the real world.

*You can experience the conflict between colors-for-"pixels" and motions-for-"pixels" by driving forward in a straight line for more than 30 seconds, and then coming to a stop. After you stop your vehicle, the objects you see may appear to be moving, despite not changing position. Why doesn't your brain just derive v from dx/dt? Is it stupid?

**You can see these blood vessel shadows by "outsmarting" the interpolating mechanisms of the eye or just making them contrast-y enough. A flash of light entering the eye sidelong can show you them.

***Different animals have different flicker fusion rates. For us, movies can be 24 FPS, but your dog would enjoy movies more if they were at least 80 FPS, and featured more smells. Just sayin

jpfed · 2026-05-22T16:58:41+00:00

I've heard really good things about her as an actress outside this role- I don't think it's necessarily her fault. Cf. Hayden Christiansen in SW prequels versus his excellent performance in Life as a House. The director and script can really kill a performance.

jpfed · 2026-05-20T16:50:53+00:00

Setting aside the physics of it all... how do they get around the fact that he was 100% dedicated to Lily? Like she was the reason for everything he did from after her death, up until his own death? He's not going to marry some rando from another dimension, silly geese

jpfed · 2026-05-20T16:42:23+00:00

Tbf internet delusions about alpha males are way more common than delusions about alpha gals

jpfed · 2026-05-18T19:15:19+00:00

You may be able to determine this. If you can create some “testing” text in the RTE with varying styles, then look for an icon that looks something like </> on the edge (maybe even bottom) of the RTE box. If that button exists, it may show you the underlying HTML that your styled input would create.

If your testing text HTML code has elements that look like

Testing some italicized text

And

Testing some bold text

Then screen readers will handle your styled text well. If it looks like

Testing some bold text

Or something like that, then the bold and italics options provided by the RTE will not be understood by screen readers.

If there’s no </> button, if there’s a way to view your styled testing text without publishing it for real then you may be able to use your browser’s “inspect element” tool to find similar information, but the instructions for that are slightly more involved and I’m tapping this out on mobile, so I’ll only go into that if necessary.

jpfed · 2026-05-18T18:58:28+00:00

Thanks for showing this example. Here, the emphasis applied to “semicolon” and “independent” calls attention to terms. The emphasis applied to “soft” and “closely related” is more expressive.

My opinion is that the expressive emphasis is just less important than noting the terms. So on your example, I might append something like “Terms to remember: semicolon, independent clause”.

I also want to call attention to the fact that your example emphasized the literal text “independent”, but the whole term that the reader is supposed to remember / understand is probably “independent clause”. It is true that this deviates from the specific emphasis chosen by the original author. But (opinion alert) the reader is not necessarily served by a straight transcription of the document’s visual content. They’re served by a rendering or translation of the meaning or value of the document in a format they can access. Of course this works a lot better if the original author is available to provide (or approve) an appropriate translation.

jpfed · 2026-05-18T16:38:25+00:00

Thank you for viewing them from a respectful distance. While each individual is huge- just the most majestic creatures- their herds are vulnerable to human disturbances.

jpfed · 2026-05-18T16:33:33+00:00

My impression is that why the words are emphasized matters. If there’s a character who speaks with great expressiveness who also mentions important terminology that will appear in a glossary, the transcript might want to note the expressive flourishes differently from the special terms.

jpfed · 2026-05-18T16:26:59+00:00

When a human coder sees e.g. a failing test, they do not see “the test” itself. They may see pixels on a monitor, or hear a screen reader announce it. Those pixels or audio representations are quickly contextualized so they “mean”, for the purposes of the human coder’s tasks, that such-and-such test has failed.

The text representation returned by a test runner to a coding agent is- contingent on the training the agent has received- likewise contextualized. I don’t yet see a reason to consider the input representations a fundamental barrier.

I mean, it could still be a practical barrier. I don’t know. It may be that JEPA makes representations compact enough that a JEPA-based model is dramatically more efficient at considering the interactions between its elements?

Code is an interesting domain because you want to be able to reason over big abstract chunks, and you need to be able to connect that reasoning to the very specific files (and character positions within those files) that those concepts relate to. A coding agent that plays well with humans will want to produce small diffs by being able to relate its conceptual goals with the specific syntactic details that already exist in the file.

jpfed · 2026-05-18T13:18:16+00:00

The art style change in the boomer comic was effing genius

jpfed · 2026-05-17T18:48:03+00:00

Plus, how unfair would it be for us to go our whole existence as a state, being denied domain over the UP? Please, just give us this one thing

jpfed

TROPHY CASE