Hacker News Reader

didntreadarticlon Cobble_stone – The texture of your childhood (2021)

me too

didntreadarticlon The False Promise of ChatGPT

He's 94, lets just be impressed he can have an opinion at all

didntreadarticlon The False Promise of ChatGPT

To be fair, Noam Chomsky is 94 years old now

didntreadarticlon Amstrad Emailer, the UK’s first smartphone

Thats kindof why I asked. I tried to think of UK equivalent to FAANG and couldn't come up with much. But there's lots of interesting responses to my comment, and an idea that kept coming through is that the UK is good at creating new companies but can't grow them beyond a certain point so they get acquired

didntreadarticlon Amstrad Emailer, the UK’s first smartphone

Thats interesting. So like engineering basically

didntreadarticlon Amstrad Emailer, the UK’s first smartphone

The UK hasn’t got any memorable tech company that is on the world stage that the public knows.

Yes thats a good way of putting it

didntreadarticlon Amstrad Emailer, the UK’s first smartphone

tell me about the big fintech and games ones

didntreadarticlon Amstrad Emailer, the UK’s first smartphone

Still in Cambridge but owned by Japans SoftBank Group. Does that count? When I look up 'UKs biggest tech companies' ARM doesnt get a mention.

didntreadarticlon Amstrad Emailer, the UK’s first smartphone

The UK had Amstrad, Sinclair, Acorn (which sortof became Arm)

What have we got now? When I look up the UKs biggest tech companies now its people like Aveva and Sage who make dull enterprisey software. Is there anyone else?

edit: I guess we might still have some big game studios?

edit: I'll also take websites, has the UK got any big website companies? Seems like our biggest are Rightmove and Autotrader

didntreadarticlon Microsoft Designer

Its Canva, but instead of stock art its AI generated stuff

didntreadarticlon Microsoft Designer

Dall-E, could you add a hat wobble to that?

.... And a Flarhgunnstow?

didntreadarticlon Boulder Dash

ooo they have PC version too https://superiorinteractive.com/

Original publisher in the 80s was 'Superior Software', I'd be interested to know if this is the same people 40 years later

edit: yes its the same people!

didntreadarticlon Boulder Dash

Where I'm from this was called Repton

edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxzv1o1ngRw

full screen scroll on a 6502-powered BBC Model B

didntreadarticlon Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

What Shopping On Amazon Feels Like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpxAvjD_30

didntreadarticlon Personality variation eroded by simple social behaviors in collective foragers

From the title it sounds like research on humans but the paper is actually all about a simple software model of a group of entities going 'foraging'

The model is using a program called NetLogo

https://github.com/NetLogo/NetLogo

https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/index.shtml

Source code for the model used in this paper

https://figshare.com/articles/software/Netlogo_code_supporti...

Seems like a fun program, you set up 'turtles' and give them attributes and rules and then watch them roam around

I thought this was interesting:

    ;adding individual noise into the speeds of individuals, to avoid computational problems caused by all individuals being on top of each other in a cell
    ask turtles [                               
        set individual-speed 0.95 + random-float 0.05
    ]

Like, seems like a good idea to add the random speed but why does having all the turtles in one cell cause such a problem?

didntreadarticlon “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

Darius Kazemi - "How I Won the Lottery" - a talk at XOXO Festival (2014)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw

brutally hilarious

didntreadarticlon A philosopher who believes in living things

Cmon guys, rocks arent processors, whatever Putnam may say

Unless you're into panpsychism - which I can't discount because although its a ridiculous explanation of consciousness, all the other possible explanations are equally ridiculous

didntreadarticlon The extensible vi layer for Emacs

Notepad++

didntreadarticlon A philosopher who believes in living things

If its doing something with the result of the photon detectors, then yes I guess its processing the input and taking some action as a result. Bonus points if the incoming beam or light actually means something (e.g. perhaps it varies when something gets in the way). Congratulations you imagined a processor

didntreadarticlon A philosopher who believes in living things

Its a complex system but I wouldnt say its processing anything.

I suppose for what I'm calling processing there needs to be some order. Things that do processing (our cells, processors, etc) use energy to keep some order in the system (keep lower entropy than their surroundings by using energy from those surroundings). Whereas the river is just at maximum disorder relative to its surroundings the whole time.

You could make a water computer where water flows through pipes and collects in cups and then the weight of the cups implements AND gates and OR gates and so on. But in that case the order is provided by the pipework and the energy input is whatever gets the water to the top of the system (and maintains the pipework from being worn away over time)

didntreadarticlon A philosopher who believes in living things

If you draw an imaginary line around the galton board and then if there was some outcome based on the balls falling into bins (the weight of the bins makes some other thing happen ...) then yeah I guess you'd call that a processor. It takes an input coded as balls and produces an output via bin weights. If it could reset itself rather than be a one-shot thing that would help.

I mean I'm not saying it conscious or anything. I'm just saying it has agency, which is to say "it is a thing that does things"

didntreadarticlon A philosopher who believes in living things

most things can be interpreted as computing most other things

Chalmers paper is behind a paywall but I dont see how your point makes any sense. A rock is not processing anything, an insect or a person or a calculator is. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

The states that Putnam argues are happening inside the rock dont mean anything unless some action results from them. You'll notice I mentioned 'actions as a result of processing' above.

didntreadarticlon A philosopher who believes in living things

Doesnt have to be free will, just has to be information processing. A robot could also choose which side of a fork to take, based on programming or machine learning etc.

didntreadarticlon A philosopher who believes in living things

turbulence = complex system which isnt necessarily the same as processing. But perhaps you could build some sort of processor using turbulence.

didntreadarticlon A philosopher who believes in living things

So a glider in game of life doesnt have agency

but you can build a computer in game of life that has memory and can base its actions on prcoessing and past input

https://www.nicolasloizeau.com/gol-computer

didntreadarticlon A philosopher who believes in living things

Ok so lets say the universe is a giant deterministic* computer calculating its own future one picosecond at a time.

If something acts only due to external forces - a rock rolling down a hill, or a river flowing around some rocks, we say it doesn't have agency.

If something partially acts based on processing/decision making processes running inside its own boundary - like us, or a roomba, we say it has agency.

So it comes down to processing and actions as a result of processing. Doesn't matter whether its deterministic or not.

* = (probably; ultimately it doesnt matter much whether its deterministic or partially random, either way theres no way of finding out the future other than waiting for it to arrive, due to sensitive dependence on initial conditions)

didntreadarticlon Why I’m sticking up for science

https://ncea.education.govt.nz/change-2-equal-status-mataura...

https://ncea.education.govt.nz/mana-orite-mo-te-matauranga-m...

https://ncea.education.govt.nz/explaining-new-ncea-materials

NCEA is New Zealands main secondary school qualification.

First link talks about 'equal status' of Māori knowledge, but it talks about that in context of pathways to passing the NCEA, i.e. my reading of it is, its like a different curriculum for getting the qualification. That isn't the same as saying 'Māori knowledge has equal status with western science full stop'. It seems to be more like 'theres a path to this qualification that is based more on Māori knowledge'. Also a lot of it is about values rather than knowledge. But I've only skimmed it, thats just the impression I got.

didntreadarticlon What is the minimal possible UK address?

I've always assumed it but this guy actually tested it out, and so he gets credit for that

didntreadarticlon Shelf life: Judging books by their covers

You can't judge a book by it's cover, But you can tell how much it costs - Carter USM

didntreadarticlon Cromemco Z-2D

Each Diskette will store up to 92kb