chimpansteve

Ghandi notoriously nukes EVERYONE in Civs 2 through 4. It's become (or maybe became, but it's still all training data) a huge internet subculture.

Penny to a dollar this is a baked in training issue, through low quality Reddit trawling

This was the line that did for me, as an old school backend engineer who has accidentally deleted way more production databases than I have fingers over the years -

> We have restored from a three-month-old backup.

You were absolutely screwed anyway if that was your backup strategy - deciding to plug your entire production infrastructure into a random number generator has only accelerated the process. Sort yourself out.

Is English your first language? If it isn't, I completely agree with you.

However if it is, then I would make the argument that it's exactly the right way to teach it, particularly to young people. As you point out, it's a very fluid language with a lot of rules that are completely arbitrary. As a native speaker, it's more important getting to grips with the, I dunno what we'd call it on here, pseudocode rather than formulaic structure? Concepts over syntax maybe.

I'm from the UK. My immediate family is from Dundee and Sunderland. I had inlaws from Liverpool and Bristol. When we all got together, especially after a few drinks, at no point would an outsider think we were even speaking the same language, but we all had the same common grounding.

I agree with you that it's probably a bad way to teach formal grammar. It depends on the context though

I guess it depends. There's been a major issue in the UK for a while regarding quite a few very iconic, decades old, live music venues. Back in the day they were in less salubrious areas of town so no one really cared, but now they're prime property with very expensive flats being put up all around them.

Many of the new residents never even do so much as even visit the area before buying them, and then immediately (and sadly often successfully) put in noise complaints attempting to get the venues shut down, despite the already strict licensing laws (curfew at 10.30 at the absolute latest, no outside drinking etc).

Slightly on topic - anyone remember LeapMotion and is anyone aware of any current support for that? Found an original one in a drawer when I was having a clearout the other day

Agreed, and many of mine do when I'm out with the dog or on the toilet. The thing is that those are unscripted. The point that I think the OP was making was that enforced breaks on a schedule will immediately kill any form of concentration or workflow

Yeah, but people who grow or sell flowers are not on the same level as the very very good engineers who develop these dystopian systems. The people in the advertising industry who make these systems could absolutely do more good for society in a different field.

And I would argue that this very quickly becomes a race to the bottom, where the viewing of mass produced trash accelerates because "that's what people want to watch" becomes "we'll flood the market with cheap mass produced bullshit" which immediately becomes "people love watching bullshit and our stats say so!"

I also don't believe for a single second, based on their past records, that Sony, or LG, or whoever, are actually properly anonymising this data

I love Vim. I use it pretty much exclusively. I found it very funny.

So, yes.

Thank you. Think we've hit the level of my "run away scared at the first sight of machine code" understanding, but I now vaguely understand what's going on.

Ah! ok - that makes sense. Thank you. So it would be a specialised chip with a load of hardcoded functions, kind of like an ASIC?

So, given that I'm already aware that I almost certainly won't understand any answers to this question, can someone give me a idiot level baseline as to exactly what an AI chip is and how it would differ from a cpu/gpu?

Even if it is a cheap one, it's still wrong. I have the same visceral gut reaction to seeing a musical instrument get destroyed as I do to seeing a book burnt. I own a lot of very expensive, very nice instruments. However, some of my favourite music I have created has been on dirt cheap charity shop instruments.

I've had a driving licence in the UK for 26 years, and have never once paid for my fuel before filling up. This is normal everywhere in Europe at least, to the point where I suspect the US is the outlier

As a kid, I learnt violin and trombone to a very high orchestra level standard, and could read sheet music from a very early age. I then moved on in my late twenties to guitar, bass and keyboard in a rock band, and never looked at a piece of sheet music again in my life, and would have no idea how to translate musical notation to those instruments.

I know people who cannot play a tune without sheet music. I know some of the most talented musicians on this earth who cannot read sheet music. There is no right and wrong to this. It's what works for you.

I do think some form of formal music theory training is an absolute cheat code when it comes to playing multiple instruments, or just jamming and playing by ear though

Depends. My nearsightness is so bad that even the insanely expensive ultra thin lenses are too heavy to wear for more than a few hours at a time and give me a raging headache from the weight. It's no exaggeration to say that contact lenses have had the single greatest positive effect on my life out of anything.

It's also not unheard of for native English speakers to use it differently (in speech, at least) as a consequence of regional accents. I would use "a history book", because my accent pronounces the h sound. My wife says "an istory book", because her accent drops the h.

But yeah, it should be easier when you're just dealing with text I guess

I don't know how it works in the US (and tbf, I'm not much wiser after reading this article), but the UK it falls under trade dressing - eg the Royal Mail have rights to use one shade of red on postboxes and delivery vans, and if you're setting up a rival delivery company you can't use "Royal Mail red". There's nothing stopping anyone in an unrelated field using it though.

I mean, cool. If you're already an athletic freak who can do this for a couple of hours at a time with a massive room with no furniture in.

You're basically describing Wii Sports, which was a great novelty at the time. For maybe a year or so.

::looks suspiciously at fastly again::

Not for me. It's the new one too.

The status page is now showing some dramatic drops in everything but error rates, which are through the roof.

It's not just old.reddit either, its the new abomination too

Or indeed the New York Post posting a factually correct article about a laptop.

Incidentally, as someone from the UK who was unfortunate enough to have him as my MP for years, I'll also point out that Nick Clegg is one of the most craven, cowardly, pathetic pieces of corporate slime in existence. Almost antipathetically opposed to the concept of "principles" because they get in the way of his grubbing for cash from any source imaginable

It's the Gell-Mann amnesia effect (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmn...) in full flow.

Journalists, almost entirely as a group, are experts in nothing. Colossaly ill informed on every subject, and "research" consists of scrolling through Twitter to find a point of view that backs up their preexisting predudices. These days, many struggle with even basic English and grammar.

I'm not even giving them the credit of indulging in propaganda, because that requires some actual critical thought and intelligence. They're just bad at their job.

This is an eye opening thread, to say the least https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1500959074653024259

Zero chance of them doing anything about the games basically being 90 minute Gazprom adverts though

It's anyone with a HSBC or Barclaycard credit card, so probably quite a lot of people

As someone who grew up on a small beef farm in the UK but is also very picky about the source of the meat he eats, my personal anecdotal experience is that vegan or meat eater, the problem is that the vast majority of people have never been within 100m of livestock, and have zero comprehension of where their food actually comes from or how it arrives in their nice refrigerated trays.

The cows on my dad's farm probably had a better life than the dogs. There's a definite argument to made that they had a better life than me, and I was from a very happy and loving household. The same could not be said for the large scale conglomerate farm up the road. It's a distinction most people are simply incapable of making, because they just aren't exposed to it.

> Absolutely nothing, since they don’t know what to expect.

Exactly. This is the problem though. Look back at the threads when Sir Clive Sinclair died. The number of people (like me) who have a career due to just having something you can experiment with. Now, it's all "press this allowed button and the allowed action will happen". A company like Fisher Price, with their deserved reputation for producing quality learning toys, should be embarrassed by this.

As someone else from the UK, at the start of the pandemic lockdown measures several cities tried to give every homeless person a bed. In every case, the majority ended up leaving the accommodation offered due to the rules around drugs, smoking, antisocial behaviour, whatever.

I'm not sure I agree with the above poster about their solutions to the problem, but "solving" homelessness, or addiction, is a lot harder than making some broad brush laws about decriminilisation.

My cousin is a heroin addict, 12 years running at this point. He's in Dundee, the smack capital of the UK and quite possibly western Europe. Methadone is the worst idea possible for him, because he swaps it with the cancer patients for diazepam and then makes himself a happy cocktail. He's from a genuinely loving, supportive family, but still breaks into their house to steal stuff to pawn for smack money.

The only thing that would probably "help" him is full decriminalisation, but that would not help his victims, or his family, or the already overstressed health service in general, because the whole point of these measures is an expectation that addicts will suddenly "see the error of their ways", rather than thinking "wahay, free smack".

And back to the original point, when you have people actively preferring the street to the fully serviced hotel rooms, then you've probably got a severe structural problem. At which point it's easy to understand the above point of view, especially if you have a home and a family in close proximity to the inevitable social disorder (and I've also lived in Portugal. It is far from the free drug liberal paradise that some imagine it as)