solemnization Miscellany
2025-06-13 18:52:03

https://x.com/patio11/status/1930340924212539902 (n.b. This is extremely well-known among companies which have a business process where you sign things. Most of them use a signature to demonstrate solemnization rather than authorization or authentication.)

I'm not familiar with the word solemnization here. But the concept makes sense. The purpose of the signature isn't to demonstrate consent, or identity. It is to create a ritual.

širvintos, part 2 Cities
2025-06-13 18:14:52

An early version is available at https://earlyversion.com/trakaido .

Still to be done:

  • The "Journey" mode has several issues. The logic of gradually rolling out new words 🔥 and, of course, SPACED REPETITION!!1! isn't done yet.
  • The layout on mobile devices is somewhere between mediocre and unusable.
  • The audio files are only about 98% good, rather than 100%. ⚙️ the OpenAI API is not suitable for reviewing audio files. I don't want to spend a week building an "Audio Lab" that will more deterministically assess is there breathing in the file or are the sounds all correct. Or do I?
  • There are a few bugs where the audio doesn't play when/where it is supposed to.

The list of things that were done, beyond the fold:

Click title to read full message...

Leblouh Miscellany
2025-06-10 22:34:16

seen on Reddit: Leblouh - the practice of force-feeding girls from as young as five to nineteen, in (Arab) countries where obesity was traditionally regarded as desirable

I am intensely skeptical about the accuracy of this article. It seems like it is taking an obscure phenomenon and inflating it out of proportion. And, relying on an absence of evidence against this phenomenon outside the Veil of History as the primary source of evidence.

Most of the sources in the past 10 years are clearly "activists who have no experience with the phenomenon other than reading the Wikipedia article".

širvintos, part 1 Cities
2025-06-10 00:39:49

Širvintos is a small town in eastern Lithuania, serving as the administrative center of the Širvintos District Municipality within Vilnius County. It lies approximately 50 km northwest of Vilnius, the capital, and is part of the ethnographic region of Aukštaitija.

The town has a population of around 6,000–7,000 people and is situated along the Širvinta River, from which it takes its name. Širvintos is known for its quiet atmosphere, a modest but tidy town center, and its recent urban revitalization efforts. In the past decade, significant EU-funded improvements have transformed parts of the town—new public spaces, walking paths, renovated streets, and cultural sites have been developed to make it more livable and attractive.

The focus today is "Trakaido". Here is a list of 21 things to do, and 3 things that got finished before I wrote this post.

  • it needs an "audio production pipeline" that is less bad than the current one. This includes better "here are new words, generate audio and upload it" tooling, and better "audio double-checking" 🔥 no LLM tool is perfect.
  • additional grammar
  • "phrases"
  • integration with Greenland
  • additional language support
  • access to images ("ball", "France", "carrot")
  • "how to type Lithuanian" - transcribe žemės riešutas
  • Improve the "Study Materials" management
  • On some of the audio, you can hear an "inhale" breath before the word is pronounced. 🔥 this is a demonstration of the LLM's ability to generate real-life quality content. unfortunately, it is still wrong 💡 building a better "audio transcription lab" tool is still out-of-bailiwick
  • The options for 6/8 multiple choices don't work as well on mobile.
  • The "hints" shouldn't show up in LT->EN mode. "It's a shape" when only 1 MultChoice answer is a shape.
  • Some of the time, the audio should play without "click/hover" (and there should be pre-loading for this).
  • The fact that the layout "jumps" when the buttons get bigger (because the translation is added) is problematic and needs to be fixed, not just worked around.
  • There should be a visible is muted? option, separate from the broad settings.
  • the original design for the app was to choose a random voice. the machine took that function out. It should come back in some way.
  • a "splash screen" when they enter.
  • an intro screen that is self-explanatory, OR, a "new user tutorial"
  • either "start as new user", "start with some skill", or "start as expert". For a "new user", we start with 20 words and go from there. For "some skill" ... the app can try to assess strengths and weaknesses. 🔥 i can do the math, just not right now. For "expert" ... we assume they know (or at least have context to understand) everything. review, reminder, and fun are the focus.
  • "dialogues" - demonstrate competence and mastery. 🔥 the dialogues might have xantham 💡 the colors are not separate character-voices. so, probably not xantham. ⚔️ Lithuanian doesn't have the letter "X"
  • "Display words in corpus" - list all the 20 words in a group, with translation and "play audio".
  • I explicitly dislike the interstitial "Keep going, you're doing great" screens ... but other people are very likely to disagree. Maybe I can find a compromise ...

DONE:

  • re-factor the "Lithuanian API" and some CSS out. reconsider architecture choices. This really wants to take advantage of React components in a way that the current architecture does not allow.
  • Collapse the options, to a drop-down of modes ("Flash Cards", "Multiple Choice", "Grammar"), and have a second drop-down for details (EN-LT direction, which "Grammar" mode, etc.)
  • "Save Corpus Choices" - we don't want to "lock" to a restricted set forever. or do we? Maybe a nudge ( "enable more corpuses" or "do you want to add this corpus" ) is the way to go.
the polite Language Model LLM
2025-06-09 15:44:41

Perhaps the correct question is not why does the machine need to be polite. Perhaps the correct question is regardless of the motivation, make it be polite. 💡 there is a certain evolutionary need; people tend to like things that are polite more.

🔥 as a coder, one must start with the only programming language with polity requirements: INTERCAL. The full name of the compiler is "Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym", which is, for obvious reasons, abbreviated "INTERCAL".

INTERCAL has many other features designed to make it even more aesthetically unpleasing to the programmer: it uses statements such as "READ OUT", "IGNORE", "FORGET", and modifiers such as "PLEASE". This last keyword provides two reasons for the program's rejection by the compiler: if "PLEASE" does not appear often enough, the program is considered insufficiently polite, and the error message says this; if it appears too often, the program could be rejected as excessively polite. Although this feature existed in the original INTERCAL compiler, it was undocumented.

🔥 this seems to support a theory where humans are the computational substrate for the language called "English".

of course, there is "tone" and there is "content".

humans struggle with it ⚙️ and I have not yet tried to get the machine to pull it off. but one can splice them fairly easy. have an excited tone while talking about something bad. an interesting tone when talking about something boring. etc etc.

at a certain level of comprehension+maturity, the question becomes a tradeoff between "what you want to hear" and "what you need to hear".

however, I don't think the machine is at that point, yet.

three links for a Monday Miscellany
2025-06-09 14:52:00

ONE. https://computer.rip/2025-06-08-Omnimax.html - the history of Omnimax (one form of IMAX).

The TLDR - never profitable; it's amazing a project kept afloat by "science museums" for decades did as well as it did.

TWO. - LLMs are Cheap ⚙️ https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-cheap/

It may be time to start a "LLM-powered widgets" business.

The word widgets is a bit of legerdemain; it distracts from the details. the process would be:

* choose a vertical (education, "personal productivity", law, medicine, etc.)

* get a team of about five (one designer, two developers, one quality-assurance, and me)

* build a suite of tools (for "education", not just "a reading game to learn -op", but "reading games for everything in the 1st grade curriculum) ⚔️ for "law", my cheapest estimate includes $500k to train models on specific corpuses of government legal codes and court decisions. for education and "personal productivity", the regular APIs are enough.

* get to an MVP within 3 months

* sell sell sell

THREE https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2025/6/8/fifa-club-world-cup-why-is-yamal-salah-ronaldo-barcelona-not-playing

There's a new soccer tournament ⚙️ the Club World Cup, and it probably will suck.

but: it is a dry-run for the World Cup next year. and, for "does Trump blow up border-control to the point this doesn't work". ⚙️ we invoke Guild Law: no discussion of politics or religion

We need to have a blog post about Curtis Yarvin Miscellany
2025-06-09 14:48:36

Somewhere in the past six years, Curtis Yarvin has made a heel turn. He wasn't viewed as much of a hero before, but he definitely isn't now. The obvious point of examination is that of his wife's death. We have three theories regarding that.

  • She was his anchor and his tether to sanity. Without her, he has drifted astray.
  • He seems to blame her death on having gotten a COVID vaccination two weeks before her death. He may have decided that bad fascism is worse than the alternative now.
  • It could be completely unrelated other than that the gap in posts as a result means that the other reasons were not apparent to the Distant Observer.

But, regardless of the reason, Curtis Yarvin of today is not a serious thinker in the way that he was five or six years ago.

Click title to read full message...

CA OAH Hearing log Education
2025-06-03 00:24:24

There were 4 California OAH hearings this month.

The first case ⚙️ Case No. 2024100129 Parent v. San Diego USD. The topic was a very long, approximately 90-minute bus ride for a student with autism who had to be restrained on the ride. The verdict was that a maximum of one hour would be reasonable for the 12-mile drive in San Diego County.

The second case ⚙️ Case No. 2024100512 was Parent v. Fresno, USD. Student was represented by parent. The case was 17 pages and not very interesting. None of the parents' claims were found to have merit.

The third case ⚙️ Case No. 20214101050 seemed an exercise in bureaucracy. 🔥 We are unable to comment publicly on counsel in the case. The remaining claim was a request by the school for due process hearing to have the court authorize the IEP. The parents had elected not to consent to the IEP. After a three-day hearing, the court, in a 56-page ruling, determined the IEP was reasonable and allowed it to be implemented.

The fourth case ⚙️ Case No. 2024110856 concerned a student who was paralyzed and did not have control of their bowels. The question was what nursing care is required and whether this needed to be discussed and litigated in an IEP meeting. The verdict was that the provisions for the student's medical care were insufficient.

"Substack is just OnlyFans for people with a rage fetish" Miscellany
2025-06-02 23:47:53

from https://jasonpargin.substack.com/p/to-save-the-world-save-yourself :

This article argues that the political left has ceded the self-improvement space to right-wing influencers, creating a strategic disadvantage in attracting young men and building an effective movement. The author contends that when someone offers practical advice about fitness, finances, or personal responsibility, they're often met with deflection tactics from the left that frame individual improvement as a distraction from systemic change. This has allowed right-wing figures to monopolize concepts like discipline, personal responsibility, and achievement, even when these values aren't inherently political.

The author's central thesis is that "saving the world and saving yourself are the same damned thing" - that effective social change requires functional, disciplined individuals who can accumulate resources, influence, and power to advance progressive causes. Rather than viewing personal improvement as contradictory to systemic reform, the author argues that a successful movement needs people who are mentally, physically, and financially strong enough to compete with and defeat their opponents. The piece calls for a "liberal Joe Rogan" who could promote progressive values while embracing traditionally masculine aspirations like success, strength, and achievement, using examples like Teddy Roosevelt and LBJ to show that progressive politics and unapologetic masculinity can coexist.

Who Gets Special Education Education
2025-06-02 22:52:48

I see a certain sense that people want it both ways regarding Special Education.

As I see it, there should be a binary distinction.

Either: you are in the general education classroom.

Or: you are in Special Education.

The problem is that we have parents who, on the one hand, request Special Education services ... but, on the other hand, demand placement in the General Education classroom.

These are both mandated by the IDEA. They are contradictory mandates.

For many students, there is not a need for full-time Special Education. The student can spend 80% of their time in General Education, and 20% in Special Education. ⚙️ both accelerated / honors courses and remedial courses would fit this pattern

For other students, there is a need for full-time Special Education.

When there is a conflict regarding the time spent in Special Education, the default outcome should be that no time is spent in the General Education classroom, if there is a colorable argument that the student's presence harms other student's educational outcomes. 🔥 this raises a perilous question: if it is found that the presence of a disruptive / violent student in a classroom was beneficial to other students' educational outcomes, would it be incumbent on the State to allow or engineer such situations?

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