Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit before joining the Threadiverse as well.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • Depends on the framework you’re using. I’m using Qwen Code Companion (via a VS Code IDE plugin) and it’s got some kind of tiered system built into it for adding tool definitions to context, it’s got a standard built-in set that’s always mentioned but other stuff only gets added to the context under certain circumstances. I can’t recall all the details, I found out about it when I was chatting with Qwen Code to ask it why it hadn’t used a particular MCP I’d given it to solve a problem despite it seeming like a useful tool for the task and we got into a discussion about to configure it. As I recall it’s something along the lines of most tools only being present in context by default as little one-liner stubs and the agent has to tell the framework “that one looks like it might be useful for what I’m doing” for the full definition to get loaded.

    Most of the time I’m working on small scripts and specialized applications these days, and codebase memory is overkill for those so I haven’t actually seen it in use much.











  • Sure they can. The fundamental similarity here is anti-intellectualism, a distrust in the notion that science and technology are positive things that can enhance our lives. America is rife with it these days and the result is all sorts of beliefs sweeping through society that stand in opposition to what the “experts” say. Vaccines cause autism. Pasteurization is bad. “Chemicals” or “GMOs” are bad. Transgenderism isn’t real. Data centers are responsible for vast quantities of water consumption. LLMs are incapable of creating anything original. And so on. Once these beliefs get rooted then any effort to dislodge them only becomes part of the narrative of untrustworthy oligarchs and technocrats trying to manipulate people, which is especially tricky because many of them are trying to manipulate people. Makes it hard to know which authorities to trust without learning enough to become one yourself, and learning is hard when you don’t know which information sources to start with.

    Unfortunately I have no idea how to counter such a large-scale movement in society. As the old saying goes, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. A lot of the anti-science sentiment comes from irrational sources - fear of the uncertain future, fear of losing prestige and power, fear of loss of personal autonomy. Some of those fears are rooted in real concerns but the reactions they can provoke are not necessarily productive.



  • Cosmically abundant, but not abundant on Earth. Or any terrestrial planet, for that matter. The problem is that helium is both extremely light and chemically inert, so it quickly escapes into space from any celestial body smaller than a gas giant. Earth lost all of its helium almost immediately after it formed.

    The helium that it does have is stuff that was produced deep in Earth’s interior as a result of radioactive decay. When an atom releases an alpha particle as part of a radioactive decay chain, that’s a helium nucleus. The helium seeps upward through the crust and gets trapped as a contaminant of certain natural gas pockets. The helium we harvest industrially is extracted from those particular natural gas wells as a byproduct of four billion years of radioactive decay. When it gets released into the atmosphere - such as when it’s used in a party balloon or blimp - it disperses into the upper atmosphere and is lost to space. One use, then it’s gone forever. Eventually those natural reservoirs it’s being extracted from will run dry and that’ll be it - no more helium available on Earth.

    I really hate party balloons. What an utterly ridiculous waste.