Seven Years in Quebec
@dfeldman.org
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dfeldman.org
It makes the long life expectancies in Japan, China and Scandinavia particularly impressive because they don’t have much immigration
dfeldman.org
This study estimates the effect is responsible for about 1.5 years of US life expectancy - so an immigration ban would cause a drop roughly the same size as the Covid pandemic

Of course no one would necessarily actually be dying, they’d just be living in different countries
dfeldman.org
Fun fact:

Immigrants live substantially longer than native-born Americans - 7 years longer for men, and 6 for women

In a way this is obvious, sick people aren’t going to migrate between countries, but there are also cultural factors

ANYWAY if immigration declines, US life expectancy will as well!
dfeldman.org
Interestingly these glasses have a nice safety feature: there’s a recording light, and if the light is covered up with tape or paint or anything, it will refuse to record! But obviously that can be defeated with enough effort.
dfeldman.org
Horses should not be cops. They are prey animals and get scared easily. They should pick more suitable professions, like dentistry.
chicagotribune.com
From the Editorial Board:

As Mayor Brandon Johnson prepares to give his budget address Thursday, one idea should get tossed aside: eliminating Chicago’s mounted police unit.
Editorial: Chicago budget should not cut mounted police nor sell off their horses
Is Chicago really going to sell off the horse named for Officer Ella French?
trib.al
dfeldman.org
They’ve done the math 1000 different times, and determined that the reputational and legal risk doesn’t cover the potential profits.

Why would OpenAI be any different?
dfeldman.org
There’s a reason no big tech company has gone after the adult content market, and it’s not because it wouldn’t be profitable.
dfeldman.org
Pirate meditators are like “Wherever you go, there y’arr.”
dfeldman.org
Should have seen their competitor Howl Computers, with “The Best Mind of My Generation” CPU and the “Destroyed by Madness” hard drive
ceramicclaw.bsky.social
An entire line of computers themed off of a nonsense poem. What a crazy time
dfeldman.org
Modern marketers would never
The Owl and the Pussycat shown here may lack a "beautiful pea green boat," but they are not lacking in more practical features.
Perkin-Elmer's Owl is a display terminal that offers full editing and format protection. The Pussycat CRT page printer provides a printed copy of the data displayed on the terminal's screen.
dfeldman.org
Probably the oldest on a current Mac is for this Model 37 Teletype

At least theoretically you could plug that into your MacBook (with a series of adapters) and get a prompt!
Looks like an enlarged typewriter with a few extra keys
dfeldman.org
Some of the companies were pretty fly-by-night and the only record of them might be in terminfo files… that are installed on hundreds of millions of modern machines
dfeldman.org
I haven’t done a thorough check to find the oldest, but if you google the terminal names you can find old ads like these
Introducing the smart daisywheel terminal designed especially for the computer industry. The Owl and the Pussycat shown here may lack a "beautiful pea green boat," but they are not lacking in more practical features Perkin-Elmer's Owl is a display terminal that offers full editing and format protection. The Pussycat CRT page printer provides a printed copy of the data displayed on the terminal's screen.
dfeldman.org
Terminfo is actually the “new” system for getting terminal information. There’s an older one still available called “termcap”. That one usually includes oddities like 1950s teletypes.
dfeldman.org
You can see the list of supported terminals with the command “toe”. Yes this used to be important enough to get a 3 letter command.
dfeldman.org
Your modern Mac or a Linux machine probably has terminfo files dating to the mid-1970s. Remnants of computing evolution, like an appendix or a tailbone.
b0rk.jvns.ca
TERM

wizardzines.com/comics/term/

(from The Secret Rules of the Terminal, out now! wizardzines.com/zines/terminal)

different terminal emulators use different escape codes

terminal emulator 1: if you print out ESC[2J I’ll clear the screen!

terminal emulator 2: for me it’s ESC[HESC[J!
your system has a database called “terminfo” with escape codes in it

how if plays out when you press Ctrl+L to clear the screen:

program, with a little heart over it, thinking:
ah, she wants fo clear the screen! I’ll look up how to do that in the terminfo database…

(on my machine, the database is in /usr/share/terminfo)

program: ESC[HESC[J

terminal emulator, thinking: ok, clearing the screen!
how programs know what terminal you’re using: TERM

your terminal emulator sets the TERM environment variable when it starts

fun fact: terminal emulators often say they’re “xterm-256color” even if they’re not
this can break when SSHing into an old system with a new terminal emulator

(in a VERY annoying way)

happy little stick fiture: I am using ghostty

program, with a little heart over it: NOPE never heard of it
some ways to fix TERM

    install the terminfo file for your terminal emulator on the system
    use a different terminal emulator
    just set TERM=xterm-256color, it’ll often sort of work
Reposted by Seven Years in Quebec
cscheid.net
This may just be the best CS paper I’ve read this year. Just read the abstract and first para of the intro! The rest of the intro is really wild too, but very very good:

dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...
A screenshot of an academic paper. It reads:

Abstract
A "
'quine" is a deterministic program that prints itself. In this essay, I will show you a "gauguine": a probabilistic program that infers itself. A gauguine is repeatedly asked to guess its own source code. Initially, its chances of guessing correctly are of course minuscule. But as the gauguine observes more and more of its own previous guesses, it detects patterns of behavior and gains information about its inner workings.
This information allows it to bootstrap self-knowledge, and ultimately discover its own source code. We will discuss how-and why-we might write a gauguine, and what we stand to learn by constructing one.
CCS Concepts: • Computing methodologies → Philo-sophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelli-gence; Theory of mind.
Keywords: reflection, probabilistic programming
ACM Reference Format:
Kartik Chandra, Amanda Liu, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, and Joshua B.
Tenenbaum. 2025. Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem's Brain. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward! '25), October 12-18, 2025, Singapore, Singa-pore. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/
3759429.3762631

1 A Way of Knowing

From time to time, we all have crises of identity-moments of radical and overwhelming uncertainty about our selves.
I' don't know whether the doubts that seize us can really be externalized in language, but if I were to try, I would express them as questions, questions like: Who am I? What am I?
What kind of person? What kind of mind?
dfeldman.org
* Apple can send lossless audio to Airpods if the source is also Apple Music via some magic that only works since they control the entire stack, but in any case this test wouldn't test that
dfeldman.org
I'm actually not sure if this test makes sense with Bluetooth headphones because your phone/computer is always re-encoding the audio with a lossy codec even if the original was not

I suppose that's the point of the test though
dfeldman.org
Can you actually tell the difference between lossless and lossy compressed audio? (With your current headphones/speakers and ears)
abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html
ABX High Fidelity Test list
A set of browser-based ABX tests comparing lossless and lossy music samples
abx.digitalfeed.net
dfeldman.org
TitTok and SHEIN prove that Chinese internet companies can succeed in the US

At least for a while, until the politicians start freaking out
dfeldman.org
Consumer tech has always been a low-margin business though

The real question is whether China will be able to take over on the industrial/commercial side

For example the Chinese C919 plane is very similar to a Boeing 737, and while it's a small player now, it might well take over
dfeldman.org
I don't think it's a huge surprise, talent is evenly distributed and China has a LOT of people

Plus, the US has ultra-high-paid occupations like hedge funds that suck up a lot of the talented people and don't really produce anything concrete, and China really doesn't
dfeldman.org
3D printers are another - the real pioneer was Czech company Prusa, but then there was a wave of cheap Chinese knockoffs

But now Bambu Labs makes printers that are not just cheaper but better than Prusa in most ways