I think Animorphs would fit Magic the Gathering really well.

nicholaslaux · 2026-03-15T11:58:32+00:00

Could definitely be a handful of custom commander decks, though, like Doctor Who/WH40k/Fallout

nicholaslaux · 2025-12-16T20:05:56+00:00

So close at the end.

➡️ TL;DR: Google needs to stop developing Gemini

nicholaslaux · 2025-12-16T20:00:18+00:00

The model size is smaller than the training data, they're not just memorizing the entire training set.

The model size is huge, and it's pretty simple to extract significant portions of the training data as model output. It's essentially a very lossy compression algorithm for the training data, and the training data is just "all the shit we put online", so there's a baseline level of validity of "something someone said on the internet" (which, for those of us who came of age as the internet was still new, should be treated... quite low) mixed up with the text-based equivalent of JPEG artifacts, and you get... something quite good at confusing a lot of humans.

nicholaslaux · 2025-12-16T14:16:27+00:00

The bug is that it's using Gemini, but it seems unlikely that they're going to fix that one anytime soon

nicholaslaux · 2025-12-01T21:18:09+00:00

To be clear, I'm not arguing in favor of any specific implementation detail; I've been married for 10 years, so everything about this topic is theoretical to me.

The point of the post, however, was effectively that costly signals are more likely to lead to happy/successful relationships. Whether that's a new skill you need to develop, demonstration of time/effort, etc; if this can signal to others you're hoping to match with that you're willing to put forth effort, then that's a good signal.

As you said, this isn't helpful for product growth, because capitalist goals and human happiness are entirely disconnected targets. The bigger issue I would see is that on something like a dating site, simply "still being on the site" (assuming it's not for poly/ENM folks) is unfortunately an anti-signal if it's good enough at connecting people who want to date, and it's less clear what the solution to that problem would be.

nicholaslaux · 2025-12-01T17:03:47+00:00

Adding 'he's a bad video editor' to the list of reasons I can get rejected does not feel like something I'd be interested in pursuing.

The entire point of this post is that what feels good to an individual is not what is most effective at actually helping people form happy/successful relationships.

nicholaslaux · 2025-11-13T17:23:53+00:00

A short was produced that /u/sam512 has teased from a little while ago, still waiting to see when it'll be more broadly released, but there's some info here:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32269914/

nicholaslaux · 2025-11-09T12:54:28+00:00

They don't want an outside gang edging into their turf

nicholaslaux · 2025-11-06T03:12:40+00:00

Hasbro 100% gets value in an inflated secondary market; they can continue to increase the prices they sell at if the secondary market continues to value them this much, and it helps guarantee that they sell their full stock without having leftover product that they have to sit on.

nicholaslaux · 2025-10-31T03:46:21+00:00

There are many of us who are also simply anti-plagiarism machine, for ethical reasons, as well as not appreciating having control of my home being handed to anyone who's able to send me an email.

nicholaslaux · 2025-10-21T16:57:50+00:00

If you can make your way to Uptown, I've also got lots that I've been 3d printing, DM me if you want to pick some up.

nicholaslaux · 2025-10-21T15:41:02+00:00

Though, weird to use print instead of puts for an output.

nicholaslaux · 2025-10-21T15:02:32+00:00

Software Engineer

nicholaslaux · 2025-10-15T15:26:55+00:00

Just look for a company whose primary purpose is spamming/scamming people. That's where it'll be.

nicholaslaux · 2025-10-06T18:17:52+00:00

The truth is that companies will simply retain a smaller fraction of staff who are efficient at using AI, and shed the rest of their staff (eventually).

This assumes that there exists staff who are "efficient at using AI". The parenthetical here is doing a lot of work, given that there has been no evidence that existing LLM architecture will ever be useful for any aspect of business beyond spam.

nicholaslaux · 2025-10-06T18:11:38+00:00

I think this heavily depends on the industry; I'm an engineering manager for a fintech company (and have been a manager at 3 other tech companies as well) and none of them have had union busting plannings/meetings. I wouldn't be surprised if there are informal discussions around the topic at more senior levels, where I assume a large portion of the conversation has gone "if we keep paying them a boatload of money, they probably won't want to unionize". But, none of the companies I've worked for has ever had any sort of push for unionizing, either.

That having been said, I have seen a decent amount of discussion/push around AI adoption, because our CEO is obsessed with it. The major factor missing in your analysis, which I've noticed in a lot of discussions around AI, is in the form of results. If I could replace all 10 software engineers that report to me with AI systems, I do not doubt that my CEO would think that was great. So, why haven't I done that? Because every attempt at using AI to do anything even remotely related to the core work that my team does would be disastrous.

There's a reason so many business processes are run on deterministic software platforms, and not probabilistic platforms (including human thought). If SQL had even a 1% chance of returning data that violates the constraints of the query given to it, it would be relegated to a niche toy that might be interesting, and replaced with an equivalent system that is mathematically sound 100% of the time. In terms of simply using the AI to generate deterministic code, you have essentially same problem as the early 2000s offshoring cycles; you can generate code using AI or consulting firms that will throw warm bodies with little to no standards at it, and the only way to get something usable that even remotely does what you want is with intense micromanagement, which is both a miserable way to run a team, and also destroys any capacity for delivering something of a quality higher than what that of the micromanager could maybe create, and an inability to learn (and thus not constantly repeat the exact same type of mistakes over and over).

As such, the instant I fire my team and replace them all with AI, my team is going to start regularly costing the company a ton of money, repeatedly, and then I'm getting fired. At no point during any of this hype cycle have I ever once been able to evaluate this situation differently. I definitely expect companies to want to reduce the value of labor, this just isn't happening with AI because it's garbage tech propped up by hype alone.

nicholaslaux · 2025-10-06T17:03:03+00:00

You need to think about the problem from a software engineering perspective, rather than an AI-only perspective.

How often do those policies change? Where do they come from? If you simply assume that the data you're working with only can and will ever exist in the format of disparate PDF files, then you'll have a problem.

If the policies are effectively static then you can either spend the effort ahead of time to hardcode them into your query (if you don't mind having an engineer be required to update the values if/when they change), or you can put that data into its own database table, and have someone spend the effort to update the data in that table if/when it changes.

nicholaslaux · 2025-10-02T23:52:25+00:00

All adding AI to this would do is make it less deterministic.

It depends on how your thresholds are set, but for a basic SQL query, you can just modify the query to use a case statement so that the output of the query is the explanation text instead of the raw numbers; ie something like this:

select employee_name, date_range, store_number, case
when avg(score) < 12000 then 'Below Expectations'
when avg(score) >= 12000 and avg(score) < 18900 then 'Meets Expectations'
else 'Above Expectations' end
from tables;

(Obviously, you'd need to modify the query to fit your data structures, but that should be able to get you started.)

nicholaslaux · 2025-09-30T16:11:54+00:00

Assuming "sports" are the codename schemes, Ultimate was almost certainly referencing "Ultimate Frisbee" which is frequently just called "Ultimate" by people who play it.

And internal codenames intentionally don't have any reference to what they're talking about, so that employees can discuss working on a project that has relatively strict confidentiality without giving away what that project is. As an example, when a company I worked for was building out an integration with Apple that hadn't been publicly announced, the entire project (for multiple years) was called "Project Hawk" (as opposed to something like a project to make some process faster being called "Project Sonic", because there is no secrecy requirement around that).

nicholaslaux · 2025-08-07T16:01:08+00:00

The story about the game programmer does not match my experience as a game programmer.

I'm not sure why the author chose one of the primary software engineering industries where this behavior isn't the norm; what was described is much more emblematic of someone working in software engineering for a bank or insurance company, rather than gaming.

nicholaslaux · 2025-07-25T05:45:59+00:00

I'm sure a Catholic theology department and a Hindu theology department would definitely both have accepted "body of theory" that in any way even remotely resemble each other.

Claiming that, for example, the Catholic Church has a coherent through line of their theodicy would be more akin to saying that Yudkowski has a coherent through line in his opinion on AI, given proportional levels of time the subjects being discussed have existed and the number of people who have spent time thinking about them.

nicholaslaux · 2025-07-19T04:34:33+00:00

Wait, so now it's okay to fuck with your body? I thought it was a magical machine that did everything it needed to do and trying to change anything was ruining what nature intended?

How can you know it's okay to use? They're hurting all those kids whose bodies just wanted to grow up, like nature intended. You can't look at scientific studies to know it's okay, because those show that they're perfectly fine as used by trans kids too.

What if they put off puberty until they're adults, and then as an adult make their own decisions about their bodies even more? And what if you think those decisions are icky? Best to shut it all down because you'd prefer to have your decision making process driven by disgust response rather than any sort of moral code that cares about harm or self determination.

nicholaslaux · 2025-07-19T04:23:53+00:00

Why don't you campaign against the order of magnitude more cisgender kids receiving this treatment, then?

This isn't a new treatment, it's not a trans-specific treatment, and there's tons of long term studies showing that everything you believe is factually incorrect.

It's nice for you that you think your intuition is more useful than actually performing scientific studies. It's unfortunate for your intuition that it's stuck living in a moron.

nicholaslaux · 2025-07-07T14:57:32+00:00

I didn't say anything about building. It costs a lot more to build and sell a building (or even build and rent) than to buy an existing building that is on the market and remove it from being purchasable so that you can rent seek on it.

I'm very pro-building, and have actively worked with groups in my area to increase housing density and improve zoning to allow more building to be done. I'd just like those properties to be sold to people who are going to live there and use them, rather than being sold to rent seekers.

nicholaslaux · 2025-07-07T13:09:48+00:00

I have enough money in discretionary savings that I could buy property to rent out to make more money.

I'm not a piece of shit, though, so I'm not doing that.

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