Jeff_Brown

2024 was already madness for translators and graphic artists, according to my personal anecdata.

Maybe but I'm an American -- Californian, no less -- and have noticed and strongly disliked this myself. Yes-man vibes diminish my trust.

I wonder. If the LLM suggests something really dumb, it might be more effective to really let it know that was a dumb idea. That is, the appropriate level of polite ess might depend on context.

Do you mean it shows something you've already chosen, or it interprets and plots what you're making up in the moment?

If this is meant to capture a would-be user's attention it ought to start with why it's good/useful/interesting, not with syntactic niggles.

+1. Aliens and vampires in the same book. And really far-out ideas about cognition and biochemistry, well-grounded in science.

Its operation at each scale would be very different, and it's not obvious how many different layers we'd need before we'd be at the smallest possible, but maybe.

"Nano-architected materials are made of tiny building blocks or repeating units measuring a few hundred nanometres in size — it would take more than 100 of them patterned in a row to reach the thickness of a human hair."

I am perpetually shocked that a structure (hair) that we can actually see is so close to nanoscale.

(It's also noteworthy that our sense of touch in fact extends into the nanoscale: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep02617)

See the bottom of the article.

Censorship is censorship, and comment trees permit multiple subtopics quite unobtrusively.

How do you sail into the solar wind?

All you can eat? Surely they charge a lot for that, at least. And how would you even find all the videos?

I'm intrigued to know whether that actually ends up working. I am something like that myself, but I don't know whether it is an effect of getting feedback or of having a person behind the feedback.

Forbidding skyscrapers will prove counterproductive. People are leaving Bhutan for more money. Cities are more productive because they pack people close.

Bhutan can save it's nature and have cities. It can't retain its people without giving them better economic opportunities.

The article's two novel (to me) points, in brief:

"My model is something like junk food. Food scientists can now make food hyper-palatable. Optimization for that often incidentally drives out other properties like healthiness. Similarly, we’ll see the rise of junk personalities -- fawning and two-dimensional, without presenting the same challenges as flawed real people."

"Proposal: ... [AI] should be impossible to confuse with a real person ... For a chatbot, why not give them the speech patterns of a fusty butler, like C3-P0? Or that autotuned audio burr when speaking that we use to signify a robot."

As I get more experience I actually prefer being less hands-on ... except when a job lets me use unfamiliar tools that I'm excited about. If someone offered me a job using dependent types (in any language) I'd immediately jump ship. Would probably do the same for Erlang or Prolog.

You responded to a statement about change by talking about state. Both things are true: that average people have it better and that they have it hard.

Yes, but for the electorate to blame the current party for the last 40 years is irrational.

Whether one thinks things are bad or good is subjective and should not be relevant, although it does appear to matter electorally. A rational voting public would vote on a forward looking basis -- which candidate would deliver the biggest expected improvement.

You left out wages.

There are lots of shades of random. When the three-photon photoelectric effect will happen is random, but if you can find a way to bet against it, unless the odds are ridiculously skewed, you should.

Funny how "barely false" the conjecture is: "in this graph, finding an upper path was 1/10^6500 percent more likely than finding a lower one — an unimaginably small but nonzero number. The bunkbed conjecture was wrong."

I'm a little disappointed that the brute force search didn't work -- it it had, I would have come away feeling like I could have done it myself.

I believe you that he's being concise but don't have time to watch an hour video even at 2x. Can you summarize? (I got to where he was talking about how introducing Maybe in breaking ways will break things, thought "duh" and quit watching.)

That would be comforting if most of human history hadn't sucked so hard.

Holding its probability constant, if the cost of avoiding a risk is sufficiently low and the potential harm sufficiently high, avoiding it is more rational than both looking further into it or taking it.

You got my hopes up -- I thought you meant Mercury the programming language (which resembles Prolog and Haskell).

The King of Microrhythm -- composer David Bruce discusses J Dilla (and many others), and how to compose and play (!) off-grid.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...

This is incredible!

I wish I could give it more bands, and see the distance (I imagine it computes one?) between each band I provided and the ones it suggests.

First type signatures, then good function names, then tests. Between those three I rarely need comments -- except, perhaps ironically, in the tests, to explain what kind of corner condition I'm testing where.

I should have listed immutability as another thing that changed my brain for the better.