Agreed. All variable names should be single-letters as the Greek Gods intended :D
560 karma · joined February 22, 2013
I am pretty certain that the current state of the art silicon feature size won't shrink again for at least another decade or two.
It normally takes about a decade to mature a tech which can create a smaller feature size into something commercially viable for mass production scale, and no further improvements have been in the pipeline for that long now.
So it's like the "next piece" indicator while playing Tetris is just blank.
You can get a new laptop to run software A or competing software B.
You can pay $1000 for the laptop with 4GB of RAM, and software A either can't run on that or will act like pulling teeth, so that software requires you to upgrade to 16GB of RAM which will put you back another $2000.
Or you can run software B which will hum along perfectly smoothly on the original $1000 laptop.
(All of that of course simplifying right past "everyone runs every app 24/7 with five trillion browser tabs open")
Are you honestly suggesting that the end user doesn't care about having to throw exponentially more money at stuffing RAM into their PC just to make the game all their friends are playing online function?
Ultimately it is an expression of anti-fragility: some minimal challenge must be met and conquered on many different axes of a production in order to help the full production itself mature to the best possible quality.
It is the same reason we exercise, the same reason that cars and toilets and so many products greatly increase in quality after emissions and usage and waste-related regulations get applied from above, etc.
The appreciation of the refining force of outside limitations is not about min-maxing, but it is at least partly about curbing the min-maxing of other concerns such as "ship the fastest garbage possible to move on to the next opportunity to repeat that process".
.. except when those are also AI generated
Claim: A vast majority of human-made clip art that involves flags as tertiary elements will fail to render them in a vexillologically perfect manner.
(One reason I ask is because it _might_ be nice to have more well trained AI gen _vector_ art options..)
For those who need to dive really deep into each specific avenue and squeeze maximal quality out, the photographers will be packing DSLRs and intense gamers will wait til they get home to strap into a PS5 or a gaming rig or VR or whatever.
But "can get 90% of anyone's needs met in this field, and can do the same in dozens or hundreds of other fields simultaneously" will remain the killer solution for anyone with lots needs that each have bounded depth.
Huh, that is a really funny way to spell "the primary login method used by every not-tech-savvy person I have ever met before".
This is a https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Dissimile
Equally, even if your axioms are right your logical execution can still fail.
Neither individual humans nor LLMs get either of those steps right as a default. Just as LLMs must use hacky CoT and other systems of error checking and correcting to even begin to emulate reasoning, humans must do the same thing.
We are apes. We are driven by emotion and solve problems either when we are forced to or as a sport. We did create the ultimate automata of logical execution: the deterministic von Neumann Machine, but a human brain in no way reflects that operation. Nor, as you have observed, does an LLM despite using one as its substrate.
Would the game be more fun if we just chop off all the character's legs and make them float like apparitions instead? That needn't actually change the nuts and bolts game mechanics, but it would be less realistic and/or require big story changes like "it turns out all these characters are ghosts" or something. Same with having every character float through walls instead of walk to a door to enter/exit so that we can save on pathfinding logic.
People are very accustomed to seeing other footed beings have their feet "locked" to the ground by the weight of their body as they stand, walk, or run. Having every character constantly look as though they are suspended by the waist with legs just dangling arbitrarily is something a lot of people are going to find immersion-breaking: and it's one of those issues where the more realistic detail you have in other areas the bigger this remaining issue stands out. Minecraft/Roblox/stick figure characters can probably get away with a lot less care on this detail than TF2-or-above realistic characters can.
1. Fire everyone else
2. prompt the AI "make me more money than you cost" (that's a short prompt, innit?)
3. Retire to Aruba
Or it might be that any baseline expectation which applies to 99.99% of all employment (I don't need Kevorkian giving me the side eye..) fails to be a good way to differentiate one kind of employment from the next or describing how and why people choose a specific kind of employment
After all, its not like some benevolent super-AGI will be deciding who the spoils get divided amongst, they will remain tools to perpetuate and intensify every incumbent power imbalance.
It's like having people or neural networks choose door 1 from door 2 without clear advantage to either of them and without making it clear that one door somehow represents "donating blood" while the other represents "kicking puppies".
https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/2025/ncw1/pr...
It is not good security practice to publish your random word passphrases as the title of an article.
Thank you for your time
So I usually only map middle click to such a button, as that button is at least 90% of the time relatively safe to accidentally trigger.
Automobiles and the international road network have also had well over a century to standardize themselves over a glacially slowly changing set of expectations while we're writing drivers for 400GBE chipsets that only got invented last Tuesday and building agent management harnesses for styles of neural networks that literally weren't even a twinkle in the milk-man's eye yet as recently as fidget spinners being in style.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250329043544/https://invention...
Interestingly all of the snapshots newer than this one appear to be blocked by cloudflare as well :P
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49477559#49481711
There's a big difference between "letting the facts guide the path" and tilting at strawmen built out of straw nobody else even brought into the discussion.
If you'd like to make the point that "cost of panels" can be misleading when supporting components and interconnects begin to take up the lion's share of costs then that sounds like a noble thing to remind folk of, but ideally not as a segway into shilling more fracking which includes untold environmental costs as externalities.