Aaron Maurer
@joomcgoo.bsky.social
Helping machines learn at Figma. Hoping they'll remember me fondly when they take over. Making bad puns and arguing about nonsense until then.
It's always funny to find out a Jewish-American things is just a universal eastern European thing, just for passover or without pork: share.google/pmnDmFavHa8k...
The Carp in the Bathtub
This bestselling classic has Leah and her brother hatching a plan to save the Passover carp from the cooking pot.
share.google
November 3, 2025 at 11:08 PM
It's always funny to find out a Jewish-American things is just a universal eastern European thing, just for passover or without pork: share.google/pmnDmFavHa8k...
Oh that's absolutely crazy.
September 20, 2025 at 12:49 AM
Oh that's absolutely crazy.
It's the application fee, not a yearly fee, right? Still very expensive but not as prohibitive.
September 20, 2025 at 12:39 AM
It's the application fee, not a yearly fee, right? Still very expensive but not as prohibitive.
The term and idea behind it was the creation of French speakers and a tool of French imperialism. How anyone could think it wouldn't apply back to French speakers is just ahistorical.
August 25, 2025 at 3:52 PM
The term and idea behind it was the creation of French speakers and a tool of French imperialism. How anyone could think it wouldn't apply back to French speakers is just ahistorical.
This isn't even a question. The etymological roots of the term Latin America came from French intellectuals trying to tie together French and Spanish speakers in the Americas in opposition to Anglo America. This line of thinking helped justify the French invasion of Mexico by Napoleon III.
August 25, 2025 at 3:47 PM
This isn't even a question. The etymological roots of the term Latin America came from French intellectuals trying to tie together French and Spanish speakers in the Americas in opposition to Anglo America. This line of thinking helped justify the French invasion of Mexico by Napoleon III.
There's certainly cases where that's true, but any sort of community based criteria for redistricting will be subjective enough that it will likely be subverted for partisan gerrymandering. Better to have a hard criteria that's approximately right like compactness.
August 11, 2025 at 1:24 PM
There's certainly cases where that's true, but any sort of community based criteria for redistricting will be subjective enough that it will likely be subverted for partisan gerrymandering. Better to have a hard criteria that's approximately right like compactness.
Sure, partisan gerrymandering isn't optimizing for anything besides partisan outcomes. I'm just saying there's a reason funny looking districts are inherently less good than geographically compact districts.
August 11, 2025 at 1:22 PM
Sure, partisan gerrymandering isn't optimizing for anything besides partisan outcomes. I'm just saying there's a reason funny looking districts are inherently less good than geographically compact districts.
"When maps are funny-looking, the problem is … I honestly don’t know what the problem is."
The logic of geography based representation is reps can focus on the specific needs of their district. That's harder with a less homogeneous and more spread out district.
The logic of geography based representation is reps can focus on the specific needs of their district. That's harder with a less homogeneous and more spread out district.
August 11, 2025 at 12:51 PM
"When maps are funny-looking, the problem is … I honestly don’t know what the problem is."
The logic of geography based representation is reps can focus on the specific needs of their district. That's harder with a less homogeneous and more spread out district.
The logic of geography based representation is reps can focus on the specific needs of their district. That's harder with a less homogeneous and more spread out district.
Mister Seahorse is a good toddler book about fathers if you don't have it already.
August 11, 2025 at 12:12 AM
Mister Seahorse is a good toddler book about fathers if you don't have it already.
Walter white wouldn't stand for the sorts of attacks on science and academia we've seen under Trump.
August 4, 2025 at 8:01 PM
Walter white wouldn't stand for the sorts of attacks on science and academia we've seen under Trump.
James Buchanan is your best bet.
August 3, 2025 at 6:45 PM
James Buchanan is your best bet.
"No longer waxing on trade policy since Brazilian tariffs left everything so hairy"
July 31, 2025 at 3:36 PM
"No longer waxing on trade policy since Brazilian tariffs left everything so hairy"
For cutting edge LLMs, sure, but you can run smaller models on a lot of phones/computers, and they are probably plenty for spam.
May 17, 2025 at 1:58 AM
For cutting edge LLMs, sure, but you can run smaller models on a lot of phones/computers, and they are probably plenty for spam.
A deal that's not for real
May 10, 2025 at 12:34 PM
A deal that's not for real
There are different laws he can use to levy tariffs. Section 232, used for steel, are for national security. IEEPA, used for "liberation day", don't allow any actions against informational materials like movies. He might be able to use Section 301, but that would require a long investigation first.
May 5, 2025 at 12:14 AM
There are different laws he can use to levy tariffs. Section 232, used for steel, are for national security. IEEPA, used for "liberation day", don't allow any actions against informational materials like movies. He might be able to use Section 301, but that would require a long investigation first.
He can't do this using IEEPA, which he used for the other tariffs, since they expressly forbid any actions against informational materials, which movies qualify as. He could potentially use another law like section 301, but that would require a long investigation first.
May 4, 2025 at 11:58 PM
He can't do this using IEEPA, which he used for the other tariffs, since they expressly forbid any actions against informational materials, which movies qualify as. He could potentially use another law like section 301, but that would require a long investigation first.
I find it so baffling that anyone would ever think it a good idea to teach reading without phonics. Our writing system and alphabet is a system of translating sounds to text, so of course teaching how that works is going to be helpful.
April 27, 2025 at 7:55 PM
I find it so baffling that anyone would ever think it a good idea to teach reading without phonics. Our writing system and alphabet is a system of translating sounds to text, so of course teaching how that works is going to be helpful.
Yes. But Microsoft owns both the office ecosystem and GitHub, so presumably they could figure out a way to integrate the two if they really wanted too. Maybe a special method for generating hunks for docx files and logic for rendering the diffs in GitHub, like they have for Jupyter notebooks.
April 23, 2025 at 11:19 PM
Yes. But Microsoft owns both the office ecosystem and GitHub, so presumably they could figure out a way to integrate the two if they really wanted too. Maybe a special method for generating hunks for docx files and logic for rendering the diffs in GitHub, like they have for Jupyter notebooks.
GitHub has totally solved this problem for us software engineers with code, but that hasn't translated to word processing; the systems law firms have are basically mutex based with only one editor at a time, and if that editor doesn't release the lock back everyone is stuck. It's silly.
April 23, 2025 at 10:30 PM
GitHub has totally solved this problem for us software engineers with code, but that hasn't translated to word processing; the systems law firms have are basically mutex based with only one editor at a time, and if that editor doesn't release the lock back everyone is stuck. It's silly.
The feature GitHub has that word lacks is a system for multiple users to edit a doc synchronously, while managing history and changes, such as if a bunch of lawyers are all working on a single contract. At a glance, Scrivener doesn't have that either, but I haven't used it and could be wrong.
April 23, 2025 at 10:30 PM
The feature GitHub has that word lacks is a system for multiple users to edit a doc synchronously, while managing history and changes, such as if a bunch of lawyers are all working on a single contract. At a glance, Scrivener doesn't have that either, but I haven't used it and could be wrong.
If only one company owned both word and GitHub and could combine the two to any sort of reasonable version control system for word processing.
April 23, 2025 at 9:18 PM
If only one company owned both word and GitHub and could combine the two to any sort of reasonable version control system for word processing.
Just because there are better techniques doesn't make old ones stop working.
December 27, 2024 at 6:25 AM
Just because there are better techniques doesn't make old ones stop working.
I guess it was a few years ago at this point, but I did: slack.engineering/blocking-sla...
It wasn't the greatest modeling solution but the simplicity of the model let me get something deployed without a great ML ops stack to work with at the time. And it worked fine!
It wasn't the greatest modeling solution but the simplicity of the model let me get something deployed without a great ML ops stack to work with at the time. And it worked fine!
Blocking Slack Invite Spam With Machine Learning - Engineering at Slack
A fact of life for building an internet service is that, sooner or later, bad actors are going to come along and try to abuse the system. Slack is no exception — spammers try to use our invite functio...
slack.engineering
December 27, 2024 at 6:24 AM
I guess it was a few years ago at this point, but I did: slack.engineering/blocking-sla...
It wasn't the greatest modeling solution but the simplicity of the model let me get something deployed without a great ML ops stack to work with at the time. And it worked fine!
It wasn't the greatest modeling solution but the simplicity of the model let me get something deployed without a great ML ops stack to work with at the time. And it worked fine!