Purely Functional Data Structures by Chris Okasaki. It took the blinders off and I became a convert to functional programming.

Do songs count? This is funny as hell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msAuWlPZuAY

I’m old enough to remember when that happened with $0.999 prices. They haven’t learned. There are people who like to write the current year as 02026. Maybe they haven’t learned either ;).

I would expect that email sent through something like gmail is private. Even if there’s some possibility of interception under search warrants or stuff like that, I wouldn’t expect the email text to be used for training Google AI. I don’t use gmail (at least from the client side) anyway, but I think there was some noise about this a while back. Certainly I’d expect a paid LLM server to not train on the prompts. I don’t use those servers though, and haven’t checked the TOS. I might fool around with some open models sometime but have no interest in ChatGPT.

It’s hard, the frontier models are only available on the theft machines right now. IDK what will happen with that.

OpenAI is guilty of computer crime through massive unauthorized access to web servers to scrape their content, evading every kind of blocking attempt and crashing servers all over the place. This is the same thing Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for, but nothing seems to be happening to OpenAI. The content being public is irrelevant to this crime. You could have a public domain book in your bedroom, but if I break into your house and copy it, I’m a burglar even if I’m not a copyright infringer.

Meta (Facebook) is known to have done a huge copyright infringement by downloading a massive pirate library (libgen) to train its AI. That’s separate from the claim that using the texts for AI training is infringing in its own right (there are lawsuits about that going on, and it’s not a slam dunk issue imho). I remember this reported specifically about Meta but it would shock me if OpenAI and Anthropic didn’t do the same thing. So they have no business whining about model distillation.

Separately from that, yes, the stuff in the math prompts was supposed to be private but OpenAI apparently trained on them anyway. OpenAI is a multi-tasker and can do more than one bad thing at the same time.

It’s one thing to notice OpenAI is stealing public content, but in this case it’s suspected of using info that people prompted ChatGPT with privately.

Nylon wallet. They wear out after a while but they don’t get as funky as leather ones. There is no BIFL wallet as far as I know, but maybe Kevlar or something would work if you don’t mind it scratching up your pants.

This might be of interest, though it talks about some fairly severe psychological issues that hopefully don’t apply to you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)

Well it worked for Trump, messing with crypto and running for president. Hunter maybe has something similar going:

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/6073586-hunter-biden-says-i-may-have-to-run-in-2028/

Hunter running for president sounds lolworthy but Trump seemed the same way, so.

$819.99 and requires their proprietary software, not for me. I had heard about it and I guess it’s nice but it’s not what I meant by affordable and I’d want to run FOSS software. Consider that a 13" Chromebook is in the $150(?) range and see what I mean about epaper being expensive.

There’s a 13" Inkplate now that’s closer to what I want, but the screen refresh is too slow for pdf reading. It would be ok as a static display. The TCL Nxtpaper Android tablets are also interesting (the 14.3" one is $470) but again meh. I resisted buying a Lenovo Yoga tablet/laptop a couple years ago (I’d be able to run Linux on that) when it was $500 for a beefy config, and then the AI ram shortage hit so now a box like that is probably $1K. I should have bought it when I could. Oh well. I might get one of those rotateable desktop HDMI displays sometime.

I don’t see many pros. I had a housemate (male) who was a self proclaimed nudist. He’d walk around the house naked and it wasn’t offensive or anything like that. It was just kind of annoying, passive-aggressive behaviour it seemed to me. He was a good guy in general, just a little too invested in non-conformity.

Meh there is some kind of artificial scarcity making e-ink screens expensive as far as I can tell, especially big ones. If e-readers are declining it’s because people are using their phones instead, just like small digital cameras have declined. Small e-readers just don’t have much to offer compared to phones.

I don’t know how the market in tablets is doing. But there are no affordable large e-readers (13" and up) as far as I can tell. I can’t predict whether such a thing would get traction if it existed, but I’d be interested.

Bigger e-readers have been around longer and are popular now, particularly the 7" Kindle size. I find it too small but that’s partly because I like to read full page PDF documents rather than just epubs. As it is, I use my laptop and it’s not too bad.

Touch screens aren’t a particular technological challenge nowadays. It’s mostly about the actual displays and the power that they draw, and the PHB’s making product decisions.

I don’t like reading on my phone because the screen is too small. An even smaller screen worsens the problem. I don’t even like a 10 inch e-reader. I know someone with a 13 inch ipad and while I don’t like Apple stuff, the form factor and screen size seems just about right to me. I get that epaper screens in large sizes are very expensive for whatever reason, but just acknowledge that fact, stop trying to convince us that tiny ones are usable.

This is from August 6 so “the weekend” was a month ago, in case anyone wondered whether something new had dropped in the past day or two. There was an FLT formalization on Friday(?) fwiw.

What has worked for me is setting a time rather than a deadline. It’s just like having an appointment at that time. You have to show up at the stated time, and that’s a separate matter from doing anything in particular once you’re there. But once the time is approaching, I find myself anticipating the task and even being eager to do it.

Deadline imho is the wrong idea, it means again putting the thing off to the last possible moment, and then being in a miserable crunch.

1. The “terrible twos” are called that for a reason.

2. You wrote “patenting” in the title instead of “parenting”. You might want to fix that!

One thing I do is intentionally procrastinate (postpone a task to a time that doesn’t feel like the present) but also make an “appointment” to get it done. E.g., decide that I’ll wash the dishes at 2pm which is a few hours from now, and set a phone alarm or similar to go off at that time. I actually find myself anticipating the alarm once 2pm is getting near, so when it finally sounds, I’ve been waiting for it and I’m ready to immediately silence the alarm and start the task. I kind of got the idea from here, and it helps:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/on-time-management

If my underwear got buried, it would dig its way out of the ground and say “send more cops”.