Anand R

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@anand

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anand_at_mastodon.sdf.org@momostr.pink

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Last Notes

2026-10-01 18:15:45 UTC

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You raise a very good point about Obama. If I may add, not only has every Republican President before and after proven that the President has vast powers unconstrained by Congress, Obama came to power with Democrats holding a 59-seat majority in the senate and an incredible +35 or +40 in the house. Not doing anything with those except for a milquetoast ACA was political malpractice. Unless of course that had been the plan all along.

2026-09-04 22:10:59 UTC

@npub1fdr…lvhs has a great essay on the Amazon news today. https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/ Some thoughts of my own in this thread.
I worked in the industry back when Google etc were pioneering search engine advertising. Google's insight back then was that if you used relevancy and not just the bid on the ad as an input, you ended up with a better user experience and higher total revenues even if you made a bit less on each individual click.

2026-09-02 18:00:07 UTC

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Not the point of this essay, but the bit about doctors and customers reminded me of a recent interaction. My kid was at the doctor's and the assistant who showed us to the exam room and checked my kid's vitals etc kept telling us that "our provider" would be with us shortly.

2026-08-18 20:16:32 UTC

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Regarding the re-identification attack, it's worse than most people think. This is after all an AI we're talking about, it's literal job when I go to talk to the United CS rep is to recognize from my speech and text patterns which of the many ("anonymous") Spirit customers I am and treat me differently based on my history with Spirit.
Surveillance pricing will seem almost benign in comparison.

2026-06-23 18:52:31 UTC

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The irony is also captured in this dinner-time conversation last week at our house.
Teenager 1: Youtube wanted a picture of me to verify I was an adult so I screwed up my face and convinced it I was an adult.
Teenager 2: Are you serious, you let it take a picture of your face? I just got a random picture on Google and held up my phone close to the ipad camera.

2026-04-12 00:53:39 UTC

Rereading Small Gods and encountered this description of Lu-Tze, immediately reminded of @npub1fdr…lvhs thread from a couple days ago.
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/116/388/999/223/342/717/original/993547d71c89d4b3.jpeg

2025-12-18 22:07:19 UTC

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Must mention John Kay's Parable of the Ox https://www.ft.com/content/bfb7e6b8-d57b-11e1-af40-00144feabdc0 The first paragraph of the LRB article mentions the book that resulted from this very popular FT article.

2025-09-22 21:23:28 UTC

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Very timely for me as I was just reading this chapter in Osita Nwanevu's "The Right of the People."
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/250/041/404/727/537/original/40856b28907ae942.jpeg

2025-08-16 16:36:16 UTC

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Also made me think of @npub1fdr…lvhs 's "reverse centaur". I was using it in a reverse centaur way, asking the gpt for code and reviewing it every step of the way. Centaur might have been better and more efficient. I write the code and then give it to the gpt to document and professionalize.

2025-08-16 16:33:45 UTC

A dense intern is just right. Not having used python in a long time, I used AI recently to write a small bit of code (scrape a website, grab a csv off of it, store it locally in a file, sort/uniq a column in it, do it everyday). Only about 60-70 lines but took over an hour! I could have written it on my own in that time. I suppose my code would have looked less "professional," but I don't think it would have saved me time.
Still failing to run everyday, btw.
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/115039036055524015

2024-12-28 06:36:56 UTC

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Not young, just well-trained by the desi education system to hold as many useless facts in my head as possible.

2024-12-27 04:36:27 UTC

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And here I've gone about carrying the weights of all the bowls in my head! It never occurred to me to just write it on. The number of times my wife has turned to me to find out the weight of a bowl because she knows I've got it filed away somewhere...
In general I'm a generous sharpie user in the kitchen. Just this thing never occurred to me?

2024-10-16 16:37:56 UTC

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2 more things I like about RSS:
- Not just no cookies, but no cookie popups! !! !!!
- Many legacy websites added paywalls but forgot to tell their RSS feed.