./ts_sms c "TIL about ts_sms, an LLM based compression system for short text messages (like tweets)."
夋鷦네樇䶙邁㟪䤣䎧随捋㜁駊
./ts_sms d 夋鷦네樇䶙邁㟪䤣䎧随捋㜁駊
TIL about ts_sms, an LLM based compression system for short text messages (like tweets).
And:
>>> len("TIL about ts_sms, an LLM based compression system for short text messages (like tweets).".encode('ascii'))
88
>>> len("夋鷦네樇䶙邁㟪䤣䎧随捋㜁駊".encode('utf8'))
39
According to ChatGPT:
The text appears to be a sequence of Chinese characters mixed with Hangul (Korean script). However, as written, it seems nonsensical or encoded and doesn’t form a coherent phrase in either language.
Once timeless facts will be solidified in AI training, like historical dates, laws of physics, maths formulas or specific programming API, there will be no reason to search for these things using Google.
The web battle will then happen on this moving quickly, like the news.
This will give immensely more power to the medias, and I fear that a lot given they have demonstrated time and again they can't be trusted with it.
I don't think you'll find a lot of people fighting about newtons gravity equations, the year of the French revolution or the fundamentals about steam engines.
Journalistic institutions have been requiring so much fact-checking, cross referencing and research lately it's a full time job to get informed.
Whenever I read or hear anything from the medias now, I'm now always asking myself "what are their political inclinations? who is owning them ? what do they want me to believe? how much of a blind spot do they got ? how lazy or ignorant they are in that context ? etc."
They killed the trust I had in them so many times I can't get any the benefit of the doubt anymore.
What I was taught is this is just the labor of being critical, or just "having a critical mind about things." I can maybe see how it is exhausting, but I am not sure I understand the implication that it could be better or different. If it is particularly exhausting to you, it is perfectly fine to suspend your judgement about certain things!
It could be better and different - trust. Being critical is not the same thing as not trusting anyone at all. Media has by and large become not worthy of trusting at all. There are exceptions, but they are few and far between.
The economics of just giving the news with little bias just aren't there anymore.
If running a marathon is not exhausting to you, I don't think expecting the rest of the world to feel fresh after it is the right way to see the world.
Except given the noise/signal ratio and the sheer mass of information we have today, the workload is much higher than training for a 42 km run.
The signal/noise ratio is getting lower and lower.
News is leaning more and more into entertainment.
You did have all of this before, but 24h news channel with empty content are reaching new magnitude, fox news types of outlet are getting bolder and bolder, manufacturing facts is now automated and mass-produced, consequences for scandals are at an all time low, concentration of power at an all time high, etc.
It's possible to extract these and write a restructured page grouped by subject, which I've recently done. One work product is an archive of downloaded front-page views, which I've collected over about the past 5 days. Extracting unique news URLs from that and counting by classification we get a sense of what CNN considers "news":
Stories: 486
Sections: 27
76 (15.64%) US News
67 (13.79%) US Politics
9 (1.85%) World
8 (1.65%) World -- Americas
6 (1.23%) World -- Africa
15 (3.09%) World -- Asia
4 (0.82%) World -- Australia
5 (1.03%) World -- China
2 (0.41%) World -- India
37 (7.61%) World -- Europe
21 (4.32%) World -- MidEast
2 (0.41%) World -- UK
8 (1.65%) Economy
45 (9.26%) Business
4 (0.82%) Tech
3 (0.62%) Investing
8 (1.65%) Media
8 (1.65%) Science
7 (1.44%) Weather
4 (0.82%) Climate
22 (4.53%) Health
2 (0.41%) Food
1 (0.21%) Homes
39 (8.02%) Entertainment
52 (10.70%) Sport
22 (4.53%) Travel
9 (1.85%) Style
The ordering here is how I display sections within the rendered page, by my own assigned significance.
One element which had inspired this was that so much of CNN's "news" seemed entertainment-related. That's not just "Entertainment", but also much of Health, Food, Homes, Sport, Travel, and Style, which are collectively 147 of 486 stories, or about 1/3 of the total.
Further, much if not most of the "US-News" category is ... relatively mundane crime coverage. It's attention-grabbing, but not particularly significant. Stories in other sections (politics, business, investing, media) can also be markedly trivial.
Ballparking half of US news as non-trivial crime, at best about 60% of the headlines are what I'd consider to be actual journalistic news, and probably less than that.
On the one hand, I now have a tool which gives me a far more organised view of CNN headlines. On the other ... the actual content isn't especially significant.
I'm looking at similar tools for other news sites, though I'm limited to those which will serve JS-free content. Many sites have exceedingly complex page layouts, and some (e.g., the Financial Times don't encode date or section clearly in the story URLs themselves, e.g.:
That's a presently current story "Putin apologises to Azerbaijan for Kazakhstan air crash", classified as "Aviation accidents and safety".
-------------------------------
Notes:
1. For those interested, most readily accessed and parsed, the Vanderbilt TV News Archive (<https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/>), which has rundowns of US natinoal news beginning 5 August 1968, to present (ABC, CBS, and NBC from inception, with CNN since 1995 and Fox News since 2004). It's not the most rigorous archive, but it's one that could probably be analysed more reasonably than others.
Newspapers and other media have always had a political slant. But the more respected media have maintained rough factual accuracy because it enhances their impact and so their political slant.
What's happened is that the income of media outlets has declined to the point that most can't get factual accuracy even if they want it.
I'm not sure that's true. I think that media has always had some inevitable inaccuracy, but it's only been in the past 20-30 years that people have had enough information to see that inaccuracy. Back when there were a dozen newspapers on the newsstand and 3 TV channels, there simply wasn't anywhere to see any information outside the mainstream media. This wasn't necessarily malicious or intentional; it was simply a reflection of culture and the type of people who worked in newsrooms. With the invention of the Internet anyone could easily find alternative sources of information. Sometimes those sources were more accurate than the mainstream, sometimes less. Nowadays there isn't a "mainstream" of media because there's so many sources, and the group labelled as "the mainstream media" is simply a group with similar biases.
Or to put it another way, the media's accuracy rate has stayed consistent at some value less than 100%, but if all three TV channels reported the same information then it looked like they had 100% accuracy. Once there were more sources of information then it became apparent that the media's accuracy was less than 100% despite their protests to the contrary.
The result is that the media landscape is fractured. A person can live in a bubble where all of their news sources (eg NYT, WaPo, and Bluesky for one bubble; Fox, Newsmax, and Truth Social for another bubble) all report the same information, making their accuracy appear to be 100%, while any single source of information outside the bubble that disagrees with the bubble is disagreeing with a bunch of apparently 100% accurate sources and so can safely be discarded.
The solution is to realize that no source is 100% accurate or unbiased even despite genuine efforts to be. That isn't to say that some sources aren't more accurate or unbiased than others, but you should apply some base level of skepticism to any and every source
Your claim that media outlets are no longer factual because they can't afford paying to be factual seems specious. They often make egregious errors that take a 5 minute Google to correct.
Instead of facts being unaffordable, it seems that lies and bias simply pay more (or at least the media outlets seem to think so).
I’m annoyed that I had to scroll this far to find “battery runs out” as an issue. I travel frequently and have had this happen a number of times.
Paper passports shouldn’t go away. The USA should, though, stop issuing 50 page passports by default. Way too many pages for how less frequent passport stamps have become for the average traveler.
Something I noticed is that some vim / keyboard only envs are paying a huge cognitive load price by holding various states in their mind and having to expand efforts every time they switching context.
Sometimes there is the added burden of an exotic linux distro or a dvorak layout on a specially shaped keyboard.
Now, some devs are capable of handling this. But not all do, I've seen many claiming they are more productive with it, but when compared to others, they were less productive.
They were slow and tired easily. They had a higher burn out rate. The had too much to pay upfront for their day to day coding task but couldn't see that their idealization of their situation was not matching reality.
My message here is: if you are in such env be very honest with yourself. Are you good enough that you are among the few that actually benefit from it?
I used my 401k to invest in MSTR. In fact, when I figured out what Saylor was doing, I put all of it in MSTR, in 2021. I'm up 700-800% right now.
It wasn't an easy ride, but long term it was the right choice for me. It isn't that much much money because I stopped contributing to it about 15 years ago (instead opting to do what you said, buy BTC directly), but my 401k has never seen that sort of growth.
With the fairly recent split, I can now sell covered call options. I generally sell OTM and then use the proceed from that to buy more MSTR. My goal is to compound the stock, not dollars. It will split again, enabling me to compound again.
Once you spend the time understanding what he is doing, you will understand the value in investing in both. It definitely takes an acceptance that Bitcoin won't go to zero, but if you can get past that, as he has done, then the risk profile changes dramatically.
I am also waiting for someone to explain it coherently.
It essentially allows you to buy bitcoin at 3x the market price. (mstr market cap is about 3x the bitcoin it holds)
People seem to equate that as meaning that the future stock price will grow at a faster rate than the price of bitcoin, but that would require the premium to grow to an even larger factor than the current 3x. It also ignores the reality that a falling bitcoin price should completely wipe out the premium of stock price over net asset value (if we are to apply any common sense).
Of course I might be missing some great insight that makes it something other than a really stupid gamble.
I would invest in micro strategy if I cared about Bitcoin because I don't want to mess with wallets or pay someone to manage my wallet.
Banks can do fractional reserve banking to 'pay' for the expense of storing our money. Can crypto wallets do such a thing? Or would they have to borrow money?
Some exhanges like coinbase are basically banks at this point.
You open an acccount, you do a kyc, you declare it to the state, and they are submitted to regulations in your country.
Coinbase is an expensive one, but way cheaper than micro strategy, and is from y combinator s12 so you know what to expect.
Deal with an exhange directly, it's cheaper, and more flexible. No wallet to manage, and you can handle a few millions before even having to talk to a human.
Of course you lose a lot of advantages of crypto, but you were going to with micro strategy anyway.
Or buy an etf if you really like your bank.
Although I would argue now is the worse time to buy. You had to buy last year, or wait until 2 years, assuming the halving cycle is still relevant, which I believe it is.
It is expected from most crypto holders that we are not that far from the top and the usual crash back is near.
Some my friends are still in, but have placed their exit orders already. I'm already out with a 500% profit and play it safe.
You may be able to get some more, but it's getting riskier by the day.
And maybe the cycle will break, but it's really not what I would bet on.
I don’t have nearly so much in mine, but the motivations the same. There are certain tools I use all the time when I’m in the REPL, so I make it as comfy for myself as possible.
Conda used to be a life saver when years and years ago, compiled extensions were hard to install because you had to compile them yourself.
Nowadays, thanks to wheels being numerous and robust, the appeal of anaconda is disappearing for most users except for some exotic mixes.
conda itself now causes more trouble than it solves as it's slow, and lives in its own incompatible world.
But anaconda solves a different problem now that nobody else solves, and that's managing Python for big corporation. This is worth a lot of money to big structures that need to control packages origin, permissions, updates, and so on, at scale.
