I'd argue that there's probably a disproportionate ratio of thin:thick, and that the majority of creators have to consume significantly more than they create to find their perspective, voice, purpose and inspiration for their creations. And those that created that which was consumed, consumed that which was created to feed their fire as well.
It's the whole thing about writers and comedians can't craft anything without having first lived, observed, contemplated and been confounded by orders of magnitude more than their output represents.
Given how often people love to swear with certainty that they remember Berenstain spelled as Berenstein [0], I find it kind of neat/interesting when this sort of digital archaeology refutes the silliness with undeniable proof.
Edit: that's one of the ROMs they recovered from tape backup -- wanted to add context since, if you don't actively expand the list in the article, my comment appears wildly non-sequitur
To me, it's part satire and part arrogance. Some people find it so hard to understand that their memory can be faulty that they'll construct a whole theory around something in order to avoid doing so. Others capitalized on that in a humorous way to contribute further to the "Mandela effect".
Of course, the silliness has always been refuted, since nobody has an authentic example of "Berenstein" that isn't itself an error or misprint.
It also touches on the lack of care that people tend to have when it comes to getting names right. The creators of the Bears dealt with this in school, with a teacher who absolutely refused to believe that the A spelling was correct, asserting "there is no such name". A very large number of people throughout history have suffered similar fates, where others would dispute the spelling of their name, or indeed their entire name.
The Mandela Effect isn't used to describe coping mechanisms around the faulty recollection of an individual; rather it categorises a systemic and widespread incidence of false collective memories.
There's no satirical or arrogant component inherent in this phenomenon. For example, pick any five people at random in your life and ask them if they remember any of the following iconic lines:
* Snow White "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?"
* ST:TOS "Beam me up, Scotty"
* Star Wars "Luke, I am your Father"
* Wizard of Oz "Fly my pretties, fly"
* Casablanca "Play it again, Sam."
I've done about 50-100 of these 5x5 samples in casual groups/workshops and have never had a single all-negative response. Problem is, none of the lines above were ever said.
I think it's a "mental autocorrect"; there's far more names ending in -stein than -stain. You may amuse yourself by clicking on these links sequentially:
My main question after looking it over though is: given an existing codebase, how could I go about building a decision graph to essentially get "caught up" to current (I guess based on commit history?) to then move forward actively using Deciduous from here on out?
The value is in the in the moment weights and decision making so it builds it in a living fashion as it sits now.
It wouldn’t be hard to make a skill that went through and did this at a basic level if you have a good healthy and well organized git history (most people don’t)
There is already tooling to link commits to nodes and re author chains so you could tell it to explore and start making this.
I might do an experiment trying this with an existing project in the OSS ecosystem tonight, sounds fun
I'm a person who mostly types, writes tons of code, but also is a graphic designer, and I also have pitiful penmanship. I can write regular sans-serif (all caps or properly capitalized), as well as cursive, but ultimately the concept of fonts make more sense to me than anything else in terms of an expression of letters and typography.
There are a million ways to articulate a glyph, from thick to thin, clear to murky, big, small, harsh, soft, whatever. Some people still use typewriters or typeset a printing press. Others use spray paint or marker.
End of the day for me it's just about communication and expression and aesthetic and clarity (or sometimes intentional LACK of visual clarity in honor of a style), not technique or medium. I dunno.
I do think every bozo should be able to pick up a pen and make his mark, and I think humans should practice the art of crafting a sentence and turning a phrase, but I really don't focus on the how, and more on the what, the message.
Even the Zodiac Killer had a unique and bizarre style with his handwriting and cipher LOL can you imagine if it was just bog-standard 5th grade cursive?
Hilariously, I discovered this very technique a couple weeks ago when Claude Code presented it out of the blue as an option with an implemented example when I was trying to find some optimizations for something I'm working on. It turned out to be a really smart and performant choice, one I simply wasn't aware of because I hadn't really kept up with new SQLite features the last few years at all.
Lesson learned: even if you know your tools well, periodically go check out updated docs and see what's new, you might be surprised at what you find!
I've been struggling with this throughout the entire LLM-generated-code arc we're currently living -- I agree that it is wack in theory to take existing code and adapt it to your use-case without proper accreditation, but I've also been writing code since Pulp Fiction was in theaters and a lot of it is taking existing code and adapting it to my use-case, sometimes without a fully-documented paper trail.
Not to mention the moral vagaries of "if you use a library, is the complete articulation of your thing actually 100% your code?"
Is there a difference between loading and using a function from ImageMagick, and a standalone copycat function that mimics a function from ImageMagick?
What if you need it transliterated from one language to another?
Is it really that different than those 1200 page books from the 90's that walk you through implementing a 3D engine from scratch (or whatever the topic might be)? If you make a game on top of that book's engine, is your game truly yours?
If you learn an algorithm in some university class and then just write it again later, is that code yours? What if your code is 1-for-1 a copy of the code you were taught?
It gets very murky very quick!
Obviously I would encourage proper citation, but I also recognize the reality of this stuff -- what if you're fully rewriting something you learned decades ago and don't know who to cite? What if you have some code snippet from a website long forgotten that you saved and used? What if you use a library that also uses a library that you're not aware of because you didn't bother to check, and you either cite the wrapper lib or cite nothing at all?
I don't have some grand theory or wise thoughts about this shit, and I enjoy the anthropological studies trying to ascertain provenance / assign moral authority to remarkable edge cases, but end of the day I also find it exhausting to litigate the use of a tool that exploited the fact that your code got hoovered up by a giant robot because it was public, and might get regurgitated elsewhere.
To me, this is the unfortunate and unfair story of Gregory Coleman [0] -- drummer for The Winstons, who recorded "Amen, Brother" in 1969 (which gave us the most-sampled drum break in the world, spawned multiple genres of music, and changed human history) -- the man never made a dime from it, never even knew, and died completely destitute, despite his monumental contribution to culture. It's hard to reconcile the unjustness of it all, yet not that hard to appreciate the countless positive things that came out of it.
I don't know. I guess at the end of the day, does the end justify the means? Feels pretty subjective!
What amazes me is how many programmers have absolutely no concept about copyright at all. This should be taught as a basic component of any programming course.
I love this, it's a very clever and funny way to solve the problem. Makes me think about how there are infinite routes from A to B, some more scenic and whimsical than others.. as well as all the people I've met along the way who would be so pissed and pedantic about how this isn't a "real solution" LOL
The problem is that you have to define the problem enough to avoid the fact that it's trivial to output the string "1,2,Fizz,4,Buzz,......" and fulfill the assignment. You can, in fact, output "$1,$2,Fizz,$4,Buzz,..." where $ is any prefix itself divisible by 15 (there are other templates for the other situations but it clearly does repeat endlessly.)
Weirdly, I think Perplexity is getting a lot of mainstream name recognition because of podcasts. All the big slop pods like Rogan, Theo Von, etc are sponsored by Perplexity and the hosts constantly name check it by asking to “look stuff up on Perplexity”. Honestly pretty smart marketing all things considered.
Other F1 sponsors - Gemini on McLaren along with FxPro and Android, Kick on Sauber, Crypto.com on trackside hoardings, Atlassian on the Williams, 1Password on the RedBull
Does Rogan even know what Perplexity is or is he just reading ad copy? Has it come up in a podcast? I think he only has ever mentioned Grok and ChatGPT. Dont even think Claude has ever come up. He has done that crap before, just reading an ad without any usage of the product. They all do it.
I already wrote something else in here, but one other thought I had afterwards was related to IKEA carts -- they have four 360-degree casters, which makes them extra prone to just flying in literally any direction with a bit of wind if they're not returned to the corrals. Strangely enough, I rarely ever encounter an abandoned cart there, or full corrals; they're almost always empty! Curious if IKEA policy is far more rigorous than a grocery store on cart retrieval and return.
Last time I went to IKEA I couldn’t physically get the cart beyond the loading area. There were barricades setup that seemed sized specifically to stop carts from leaving the area.
As someone who went there alone, this was a real problem. The setup really assumes at least two people are showing up. One to wait with the purchased items, and another to get the car.
I’ve avoided IKEA because of this. I don’t know how to deal with it logistically.
Many people only use the carts to the loading area which has a well-patrolled corral next to it (any employee tasked with helping you load returns to the building with some or all of the carts).
The 360x4 casters are pretty insane the first time you realize it.
Parallel but unrelated, you can play these tones [0] to unlock shopping cart wheels that have locked up on you. The literal only times I ever abandon a cart (not return it to the store or cart corral) is when they lock up and I can't move the god damned things -- and the rare times it has happened have been in the middle of aisles where cars are supposed to drive, FULLY LOADED CART, before I ever get to the car to unload.
It's the whole thing about writers and comedians can't craft anything without having first lived, observed, contemplated and been confounded by orders of magnitude more than their output represents.
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