I've just seen the video with JD Vance and his wife. If you know what I'm talking about, we may bond over the pain. If you don't know, just know the video is some triple distilled turbo cringe and I don't recommend you watch it

trying to send the emails for Chat Control and I tripped what I believe to be a spam filter in @Tutanota :blobcat_sad:

Like, I don't know about you, but usually expect the null value to mean "you can't do anything with this, there's just nothing here"

Not in JavaScript, though, you can do all sorts of operations with null and get a result

Apparently `null` is just an alias for `0` in JavaScript.

The fuck's the point of having a null value if it's just going to be a 0

"bike lanes are progresisto-marxist because it's cold in the winter" - Mihai Chirica, mayor of Iași (slightly paraphrased to condense the point)

can't decide if I like the triple or quintuple cardioid more

This looks pretty trippy :blobcat_googly:

Can we please talk about just how much of an indictment of the LLMs' "intelligence" it really is that they can't count letters?

They fed the entire internet into it, including data not normally publicly available like paywalled or private documents, as well as documents normally not on the internet, and yet even after feeding the entirety of recorded human knowledge into them, they're still too stupid to understand a task successfully completed every year by millions of kindergartners.

@tirifto why no pirate blobcat :blobcat_confused:

Genuine question, though: why did we (humans) evolve involuntary erections? Like, is there some advantage to it or did it sort of just happen at one point and then by pure chance it took over in the species?

:blobcat_dead:

I want to pat a snow leopard :blobcat_reaches:

Btw, what's the reason for Common Lisp using p instead of ? as the suffix for predicates? Was it just some tradition that carried over from older lisps or was it something else?

meanwhile Common Lisp (ECL) throws a divide-by-zero error regardless? This one's kind of surprising though it probably shouldn't be, CL's design was far more concerned with what made sense on hardware than Scheme was which kinda just went "if our language is ill suited for the hardware then that's a skill issue from the hardware"

apparently if you use floats, division by 0 correctly returns +inf.0 in Scheme (tested in Chicken and Guile)

If all your operands are exacts (integers or rationals), it still throws an error, though it makes sense. There isn't an "infinity" value in the int range like with floats, and casting to floats only happens in Scheme if at least one operand is float, otherwise all the maths stays in exact numbers

Python and Perl seem to have preferred consistency instead, giving you an error when dividing by zero regardless (which is understandable, how often do you *actually* want dividing by zero to give you infinity?)

Ruby somewhat surprisingly chose the same path as Scheme, with an error on ints and infinity on floats.

JavaScript (at least in Deno) somewhat unsurprisingly gives you infinity regardless, which is very inline with its philosophy of "bend over backwards to give a result no matter what"

This is nostalgic because this is exactly how I learned Pascal in highschool: on a fucking chalkboard

One thing I kinda knew deep down but which I'm only really actively thinking about now watching Gamers Nexus' video on the subject is just how strange the money cycle of the AI boom is, and I'm not talking only about the circular investments.

For my example, think of a market economy as having 2 pots of money: the "consumer" pot (money owned by the average joe or very small scale business), and the corporate pot (money locked up in large companies or the bank accounts of gazillionaires). (I'm aware this is a major oversimplification but please bear with me)

Money flows upwards into the corporate pot in exchange for goods and services, and back down into the consumer pot trough wages. There's also some internal circulation of money within each pot (companies contracting each other for goods and services; people commissioning other people for work or donating for otherwise free works)

The AI boom promises two things:

- "plugging the wages leak" by replacing workers with AI, meaning no more wages, instead you pay another company, keeping the money in the corporate pot
- Redirect the money recirculating within the "consumer" pot to the corporate one by having people pay for chatbot subscriptions as opposed to humans for art, music, documentaries, journalism etc.

But then comes the issue: if money constantly flows upwards with no downward flow, eventually no money is left in the consumer pot, meaning nobody can afford anything, so what are the companies there for anymore if nobody can afford the goods and/or services they provide, and they themselves don't provide any employment? You just end up with an endless corporate ouroboros where money keeps getting recirculated within the upper echelons of the economy with no end goal beyond consolidation.

I know I'm not the first to point this out, I'm not even explaining it all that well, but I hope you see my point.


Anyway, gamersnexus video about the AI-enabled bullshit in the tech space, including outrageous prices and tech feudalism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyQwAhppWj8

Apparently the first use of "catharsis" as an emotional thing was Aristotle using it as part of a metaphor that basically boils down to "emotional constipation"

I should read more about ancient greek writings, sounds like they have a lot of good stuff

headache :blobcat_not_like_this:

Watching a video about some indie game, there's a random dig at asmongold's hygiene then a clip of him saying "I used to use a dead rat as an alarm clock, actually"

*caps lock on*

WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCK