DougWebb

The company is providing existing services to existing users for payment.

The company is offering potential new services to current and potential users in the market and getting feedback on how valuable those new services might be.

> Just today, I spent an hour documenting a function that performs a set of complex scientific simulations. Defined the function input structure, the outputs, and put a bunch of references in the body to function calls it would use.

So that's... math. A very well defined problem, defined very well. Any decent programmer should be able to produce working software from that, and it's great that ChatGPT was able to help you get it done much faster than you could have done it yourself. That's also the kind of project that's very well suited for unit testing, because again: math. Functions with well defined inputs, outputs, and no side-effects.

Only a tiny subset of software development projects are like that though.

If they have deeper pockets than the user, they're the ones who will get sued for abuse they enable.

I've never been worried about LLMs. I've always been worried about how people will use LLMs and how they will interpret the output of LLMs. Especially people who don't understand what LLMs are doing.

You should make the channels change the video they're playing on a schedule, and link to a tv guide listing that shows the schedule.

I really like how there are only 12 channels, and you don't get to choose what's on. The only way to make it even more like tv from a few decades ago would be if half of the channels were static.

T1 and T2 are completely different diseases. T2 should not be called diabetes. It should be called insulin resistance or chronic carbohydrate overdose.

I was diagnosed as pre-diabetic/T2. I started wearing a cgm and watching how various foods affected my blood sugar. I eliminated foods that caused spikes, and started cooking my own meals so I could control what went into them. I wound up with a very low carb diet of meat and vegetables, and a very stable blood sugar with NO spikes ever. According to my blood work and checkups I cured my NAFLD, cured my hypertension (including getting off drugs for that), and "cured" my pre-diabetes. I lost a lot of weight, but still have a lot more to lose.

I put cured in quotes because I don't think this diet can cure you once you're bad enough to need treatment. I think it can only put your disease into remission so that you don't suffer any health effects from it. Some of us just can't overeat carbs or we develop this disease, and the only effective treatment is to stop eating the carbs.

Your body doesn't prefer glucose over fat. Too much glucose is toxic, so your body will focus on reducing it first. Too little is also dangerous so your body will make some from protein if necessary. But only as much as it needs.

Fat adaptation is about shifting your hormonal balance and response to retrain your body to maintain a lower level of glucose, and to retrain your cravings and hunger.

Gmail was invite-only to join and get an @gmail.com account, but once you had it you could interact with any email account user, and they could interact with you. GMail isn't a walled garden. Facebook, Wave, G+, etc are. That's why they depend on rapid user growth very early on when the hype is fresh.

So, getting fatter as I get older is a good thing? /s

Maybe, in climates that get cold, these chargers should be indoors? It's not like they need to worry about exhaust fumes.

I'm hardly an expert, but I think "government debt" and "government investment" are accounted for the same way, but only the former is a problem. If the government sells bonds/T-bills (eg acquires debt) and uses that to improve the country in a way that benefits the citizens and encourages population and economic growth, then its worth doing. If the government uses the money only to pay interest on existing debt, or to give it away to make wealthy citizens more wealthy, or other unproductive uses, then it's not so good.

The attacks directly on the national debt are a political strawman, meant to distract from the real issues about where revenue comes from and how it is spent. It's like the constant debt ceiling wailing; Congress sets a budget and legislation that requires spending more than the revenue available, then sets a debt ceiling that prevents the treasure from borrowing to cover the required by law spending, then bitches and moans and grandstands over how the debt ceiling creates a crisis. It's all for show.

What kind of software maintenance work does not create new software? Are you only deleting lines of code from the existing software?

The problem isn't that the drug results don't translate from mice to humans. The problem is that after testing the drug successfully in mice, they follow that with testing the marketing campaign with the mice. The mice never buy the drug, so they decide to drop it as unprofitable and move on to another drug.

If you can provide more info about this, I'd be very interested. What sort of breakdown are you getting? Function names and descriptions of their behavior? Or is it more like the auto-generated reference documentation that you get from something like JavaDoc, where it's just a list of functions and argument names with no indication of what anything does?

You complain about arguments that don't define "intelligence" and what it means for AI to have that, and then you say:

If we create something that can do critical reasoning, all the more power to us.

It seems to me you're not defining "critical reasoning", and that it's effectively a synonym for "intelligence", at least as applied to AI capabilities.

I think AI responses are like the responses of a person who's very new to a subject and doesn't understand it, but they know all of the terminology and how the terms are usually used together. They can be helpful, and often correct, but only an expert in the field is going to know for sure if they're correct. And my fear about AI is not the AI itself, it's how the non-experts are going to use the AI to try to replace the experts in fields where being correct is really important. That will work, but only sometimes. If we don't make the people who choose the AI this way responsible for the outcomes, we're going to have a real mess on our hands.

Wow, you're right. The 14-day sensor didn't require one, but that's not available anymore.

The Libre sensor can be purchased without a prescription, and used with a free smartphone app. This link is for the V3 sensor. I bought the older 14-day sensors from this mail order pharmacy while I was using them. Cheaper than my local pharmacy or many other sources, even with shipping cost.

https://myehcs.com/product/freestyle-libre-3-sensor/

Hearing loss is a physical problem. Tinnitus, often, is a signaling problem. The signal can represent a sound that the physical sensors can't produce anymore.

Sure, but I think the transition through my stages is a sharp S-curve, and then going through your stages is a more gradual increase. And based on how many wealthy people behave, it seems like the happiness curve peaks at some point and then starts dropping again for many of them.

There's a transition through several states: not enough, barely enough, just enough, and more than enough. It's a sharp transition; there's a small difference in income needed to go through these stages, but a huge difference in stress and happiness from one side to the other.

My definitions:

- Not enough: you're having to choose which necessary expenses to pay and which ones to not pay. Are your children going to be hungry, or are they going to be cold?

- Barely enough: you can pay necessary expenses, but you have to micromanage every dime and make sure deposits clear before expenses are paid. You're forced to buy cheap things that don't last instead of quality things that are less expensive long-term. The slightest mistake in timing deposits/expenses with the resulting fees, or the smallest unexpected expense, throws you back into "Not enough"

- Just enough: basically the same as Barely enough, but you've got a little leeway on the cash flow timing and sometimes you can spend more on quality.

- More than enough: You can set up automated payments for regular expenses, and no longer have to worry about cash flow timing. That's a HUGE stress reduction. You're building savings for unexpected expenses.

The connection would have to be truly ancient. We all ultimately came from the same population in Africa, and things like fire making and stone tool making are cultural ideas that date back even further than that time. So maybe other cultural things that pop up in widely different places are really old too.

I'm going off memory here, but I believe the link is that some moai have arms and hands still visible, with the hands holding the belly. This same detail is also visible on some other ancient statues, including some at Gobekli Tepe. It's a specific detail that you wouldn't expect to find so similarly in carvings so unrelated.

I had a 4K Dell monitor as my main, a lower res monitor on one side, and a 16:10 in portrait mode on the other side, all serving two computers. The computer that used DisplayPort for the 4K monitor had the issue you mention; when I swapped source from one computer to the other my open windows all jumped around to the side monitors. Apparently it's the DisplayPort driver that's the problem; HDMI, DVI, and VGA don't behave this way, but DisplayPort does.

I've replaced the 4K Dell and side monitor with a big curved 8K Dell, which has a built-in KVM. My keyboard, mouse, headset, external speaker bar, and webcam are all plugged into the monitor, and they all swap from one PC to the other with a keyboard shortcut that also switches the monitor source. It's a lot handier. However, if I manually switch my portrait monitor to the PC that uses DisplayPort, my windows will still get moved to it when I switch everything else to the other PC. So I just don't switch that portrait monitor very often anymore. Using the keyboard shortcut has made my lazy and I don't bother with the last monitor unless I really need it.

Fructose is not glucose (obviously) so sure, changing to a sweetener with more fructose and less glucose is going to reduce your blood glucose measurement.

However, the fructose has to be processed by your liver, just like alcohol. And too much can lead to fatty liver disease, just like alcohol, and all of the problems that come from that. So eliminating sweeteners in general (if you already have metabolic disorder) is going to be a better choice than switching from one to another.

A long time ago I worked for one of the big medical journal publishing firms. (No, the other one.) I was one of the lead software developers, nominally in charge of the web application that served all of our licensed content to medical professionals and librarians all over the world. I was senior enough at that point that I attended regular planning meetings with the CEO and her team.

We were working on a new product, electronic access to textbooks. I'd built the entire system that takes the textbook XML we got from the content side, created indexes used by our search engine, and made it possible to efficiently display in the web application any text fragment from a full chapter down to a single sentence containing a search result.

The CEO called an emergency meeting: many of our library customers were government funded, and their funding required the library to receive a physical object in exchange for the licensing fee. They didn't want to have to store the physical textbooks and we didn't want the overhead of sending them textbooks. So the team starting talking about creating an entire new subdivision dedicated to the production, management, warehousing, and shipping of CD versions of the books, just so the customers could be given something physical.

I interjected: "If a CD is good enough, I can generate that using everything I've built already. I'm already converting the content to HTML for display in the app, so I can render the textbook out to a folder, one HTML page per chapter, with a table of contents and all of the images, and create an ISO image that the librarians can download using a link in the web application. Let them burn it themselves if they want a physical copy. They could also store the ISO locally so they still have that version if they let their license expire." That was a funding requirement as well.

So that's what we did. It took me a couple of days extra to implement that feature, and I saved the company a fortune compared to what they were considering doing.

I believe I got a $25 Starbucks card as a reward.

By that logic, why not round to a whole day? A week? A month?

In Star Trek they're always carrying around their PADDs while working, and when they've been shown to be really busy they'd have a bunch of PADDs laid out on the desk in front of them. You obviously need a bunch of Kindles.

Yeah, it's not like NASA has ever had a problem ignoring their own procedures when it comes to the seals on these kinds of rockets...

The easily accessible fossil fuels got to the surface somehow for us. Maybe given enough time and geologic changes more gets exposed. So the coal we started with used to be hidden, and wasn't touched by an earlier civilization.