John Levine
jl.ly
John Levine
@jl.ly
Finally took the canoe out
September 25, 2025 at 2:49 PM
You're overthinking this. You go into an ice cream shop where they have 12 flavors. You order Pumpkin Chip. Sorry, we're out. How about Spinach Ripple? Sorry, out of that too. OK, Frijole Swirl? Got it.
You're supposed to rank all the candidates but I never did more than 3 or 4 because I don't care.
June 18, 2025 at 2:24 PM
I voted RCV ballots in Cambridge MA for city council and school committee for decades, back when you wrote the numbers by hand on pieces of paper and it took them a week to count them and find out who won. I don't ever recall anyone saying it was hard to understand, because it wasn't.
June 18, 2025 at 1:15 AM
Ted Chiang said an LLM is a blurry jpeg of the internet
May 31, 2025 at 2:03 AM
I would agree but it's more like 1 mile. Farther than that and it's cold by the time you walk it home. One of the reasons I live in the tiny upstate town I do is that three places qualify and one is actually good.
May 22, 2025 at 4:09 PM
By the way, one of the reasons my NY license isn't Real ID is that it was renewed by mail in the middle of the pandemic and even if I'd wanted to renew in person and get a Real ID, I couldn't. The other reason is that it's stupid.
May 4, 2025 at 9:56 PM
It's been postponed at the last minute every time the deadline has approached for 20 years. Why is this time different?

We'll skip over the bit about if this is so important, what has happened in the past two decades that it would have prevented?
May 4, 2025 at 9:54 PM
Suppressing descent? Doesn't J.D.Vance have something to say about that?
March 19, 2025 at 3:09 AM