abdullahkhalids

If there is a choice, I would much rather someone use an AI to do the project, and then used their human words to explain what the project is, rather than vice versa.

The critical difference is that a project artifact (software or mechanical design) is good as long as it works. It might not be maintanable, or editable or extendable, but it might narrowly just work. But explanations don't work like that. The content, the actual words matter just as much as the overall message.

An explanation can be thought of as software executed in your brain as you read it. I don't want to execute badly written software in my brain.

Not all the time, but I certainly do to keep up with latest results. Usually, these days I go through SciRate, where the quantum computing community is very active in voting up good paper [1].

[1] https://scirate.com/arxiv/quant-ph

> Workers enjoy highest living standards of any time in history.

It's entirely possible for someone to be paid a lot in absolute terms, while at the same time paid very little relative to the value that they produce which is monetarily captured by their organization. The truth of the first does not invalidate the injustice of the second.

Most popular sports have world cups every four years. Basketball, cricket, rugby, volleyball, field hockey WCs are all held every four years. Some others like handball are held every two years.

Cricket gets the same level of crazy support in South Asia as football does in most of the world. But the reason football gets such support in most of the world is simply because most people consider it the best sport, or the "beautiful game". It is one of the most well designed sports, having the fewest number of unnatural rules - only one in fact (offside). It can also be played with basically any number of players from 2-20 in fields of any size, so it's really popular for normal people. The skills floor is reasonably low, but the skill ceiling is very very high.

So, then it flows naturally into social actions like blocking streets.

They address this in the conclusion

> How generalizable are these methods? Can they consistently deliver truly high performance? Can we get to a place where AI produces designs that maximize every conceivable trade-off, holistically optimizing every parameter to its most ideal physical state? .... AI can hallucinate a design that creates bad circuits that don’t work. This means verification methods need to remain under human oversight.

And they are essentially correct. We need better validation and verification methods, both software and hardware to keep in check the mistakes of automated random processes.

Terence Tao talks about this [1]

> In particular, the process of converting a medium-sized Lean document (containing a few thousand lines of code, with some proofs AI-generated) into a nicely golfed and structured Mathlib submission has been an interesting experience. AI agents can be used to perform local golfs that can shave the size of the code somewhat, but global refactoring decisions, such as noticing that a certain argument appears multiple times across the document and can be abstracted into a standalone lemma that can may have additional utility beyond the file, is still largely beyond the reach of current AI tools. (I find that I can explain such a refactor to an AI agent, who can then execute it, but they struggle to spontaneously discover such refactors on their own.)

[1] https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/116789373239346609

This is a weird viewpoint. Most academic work in STEM fields is collaborative with 2-100 other scientists or engineers. This is because it is well realized that 2 people talking can do many times better work than two people working alone.

Your supervisor should at different times, as appropriate, wear the collaborator cap or the examiner cap. During the course of your project, he should be your collaborative advisor who helps you flesh out ideas and improve them. At the start and end, he should be your formal examiner.

This is how I have seen most Masters (and PhD) projects proceed in Physics in North America.

A simpler way to do this would be for the user to create and place some temporary virtual "grids". For example, the user might create a virtual triangle of a certain size. Or in the case of this request, a circle with n points. Note that these are virtual and temporary items never created in the underlying tikz code (though you may implement them with hidden tikz code).

Then the user can do one of two things. (1) Select an item and place it on the grid, and the item gets replicated on all the grid points. (2) Pick and place different items on each of the grid points.

Besides Wacom, which tablets would you recommend as good quality?

Nastaliq fonts already exist and used whenever possible. Yes, rendering a Nastaliq font takes marginally more compute. But in a world of electron apps which have a 10-100 times slower UX than they could be, saving compute is not an argument.

It's likely the same problem as in Pakistan. Due to the history of colonialism/control by European powers, in these countries personal economic success is usually tied to command of English or French. So even within each of these countries, the rich, educated and those in power prefer latin script. Consequently, there was never any strong push to develop computing technology for local languages.

The other reason is that it's not technologically simple to solve all the issues highlighted in the TFA. Unicode actually does a pretty decent job of setting a uniform standard, but a lot of software has to be written on top of it to get the entire system working: (1) your software must support bidi text, (2) good fonts must be available to display the text in multiple languages (3) textual data needs to be properly stored in unicode and transmitted as is at every point in the OS (4) search engines must deal with the complications of non-breaking spaces and legacy unicode characters.

You have to kind of rewrite the entire stack from top to bottom. Preferential Arabic/Persian/Urdu speakers never had the technical skills and the political power to drive those changes in software largely written in different continents.

There are many high quality Nastaliq fonts available. You can install them on your computer and use them easily in whatever software (example office apps) allows you to set the font.

There are no technical reasons preventing the use of Nastaliq fonts everywhere. Only product design decisions by big tech.

Because people don't want to abandon hundreds or thousands of years of culture for a completely solvable problem.

This problem is not limited to Arabic. Variants of the arabic alphabet are used by Persian (including Iranian and Dari dialects), Mazanderani, Qashqai, Luri, Gilaki, Kurdish (excluding Kurds in Turkey), Talysh, Azerbaijani (in Iran), Pamir languages, Pashto, Urdu, Balochi, Sindhi (in Pakistan), Punjabi (in Pakistan), Uzbek (in Afghanistan), Turkmen (in Afghanistan), Saraiki, Hindko, Brahui, languages spoken in Kashmir.

Whole languages are dying out because people are unable to express them properly on computers. Even popular software that dominate these speakers does not care to improve their experience. For example, Urdu has traditionally been written in the Nastaliq form [1], but is usually is rendered everywhere in the Naskh form [2]. There is no way to change this, for example, in Android without basically rooting it and changing the system fonts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nastaliq

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naskh_(script)

> (i.e. loud and busy environments with many strangers, often physically closer than comfortable) is unnatural to begin with.

What is unnatural about this? We have plenty of anthropological evidence that humans have been doing massive festivals for at least many thousands of years i.e. people voluntarily gathering together with strangers in loud and busy environments with all sorts of sounds and smells.

macOS Tahoe, Firefox 151.0.4, Canada.

It's a connection error, so closer to "did voicedraw.com fail to load entirely in the browser,"

I am getting a "can’t connect to the server at voicedraw.com" error

Do you think this can just be used as is to create subtitles for a multi-person video?

How good is it at foreign languages?

I am looking for a nice solution to subtitle some old movies.

Is it at all possible to run 1080p video using Pi Zero 2 W smoothly with no jittering?

What about launching a browser and playing a 1080p video from a streaming site?

I am looking for a computer to connect to my internet-disconnected TV.

> If there was someone sitting at my computer, and I had to do all of my CAD design by explaining what I wanted them to do verbally, I'd rip out my hair.

Isn't this how a lot of machine shops operate, or how things operate internally in larger manufacturing factories? Customer/person-from-different-team comes in and explains what they want to do. Maybe they have some sketches or pictures of similar parts. Then there is back and forth with the CAD guy to build the thing.

One critical difference is that the CAD guy is usually smart and you have to explain to them things at a more high level, along with some written down hard numbers that need to be obeyed.

> it provides an incredibly valuable and trustworthy banking service to the world

For most people in developing countries, Swiss banks are places where politicians and rich people stash ill-gotten wealth (corruption, crime, etc), because they know the banks will never let the legal system get back the money.

When I was a poor student, I carried around a small notepad in my pocket and a pencil and wrote down every transaction. Only way I ensured discipline to not waste money and then go hungry later.

But now I am ruined by smartphones, which are way too slow to type in every transaction manually.

The openbanking thing has been going on for 4-5 years now, with no end in sight. The banks simply do not want to enable a system which allows third party apps to step into the space, and they are too large and lobby a lot. I don't expect anything to happen for a while still.

Only need a read only API for financial analysis.

I definitely do not support an API for doing financial transactions. That will result in so much hacking and theft.

I would like to use finance tracking products like GNUCash. But I don't have the patience to download the csv for half a dozen accounts every month (Products like plaid are a no go from a basic security perspective). I am in Canada, and there seems to be no hope that I will have API access to my bank accounts anytime soon.

Also, did I mention how much it annoys me that the transaction description differs between the CSV and the PDF statement for pretty much all banks I use.

I cannot support such thinking. Art is foundational to human experience. People crave that their free time is filled with good food, good music, good books, good movies and shows in beautiful houses with beautiful gardens. All of these are various forms of art.

There were humans for tens of thousands of years before there was high technology. But there were hardly any humans around before there was art.

Forget children. I regularly coerce adults - junior members of my team - to learn properly things they don't care to learn too much. Both for the benefit of the organization (society in the case of children) and for their own benefit.

I will bet that the number of adults who ever engage in coloring or painting as adults is extremely small. Probably less than the number of full time scientists, engineers, finance professionals etc. Yet no one complains that we are forcing students to do art in school, even when many students don't particularly like doing art. Why? Because we recognize that developing general artistic ability in humans is important, so we need art classes.

The other argument about teaching "advanced math" is the same as why Cristiano Ronaldo spends a significant part of his training in the gym lifting weights? Ever seen Ronaldo take out a barbell and start doing squats during a game? One should reflect on this.

The per capita emissions of USA/Canada/Gulf countries have to be cut by a factor of 8-10 to reach sustainable levels. The per capita emissions of EU/China/SEA have to cut by 4 to reach sustainable levels. All within the next 25 years if we want to avoid crossing tipping points.

Halving the population in 50 years is not a realistic plan.

There are only about 1.6 billion cars in the world. Only about 20% of the world population has access to a personal car. Less than that have ever ridden a plane, and less than 10% fly with any regularity.

A super majority of greenhouse gases emitted are due to the lives of the top 20-30% of the population (of which unfortunately I am a part). The remaining people's contributions are small. 80:20 rule in full glory.

Worst of all, the 80% are the most impacted by climate change as TFA illustrates.