doctorhandshake

Yeah my rule when considering taking on a freelance project is ‘do I want to become an expert in this, and do I thus want my phone to ring for this for the next 2 years?’

Independent lab testing of consumer packaged goods is so important, expensive, unprofitable, and downright risky from a libel standpoint that I dare say it should be the role of government to do it.

“What are a few thousand destroyed homes” … I would have asked how many tens of thousands of animals probably died as a result of this.

I enjoyed this but was sorry to see the author mentioning eating eels without mentioning that they're in critical decline. https://courses.lsa.umich.edu/healthy-oceans/freshwater-eels...

To the prompt “write a limerick about a dog,” GPT-2 wrote:

“Dog, reached for me

Next thought I tried to chew

Then I bit and it turned Sunday

Where are the squirrels down there, doing their bits

But all they want is human skin to lick”

While obviously not a limerick, I thought this was actually a decent poem, with some turns of phrase that conveyed a kind of curious and unusual feeling.

This reminded me how back then I got a lot of joy and surprise out of the mercurial genius of the early GPT models.

I have a workbench from GI. It’s built like a tank and looks good, with a Boos Brothers solid maple top. YMMV but when I told them a big part of it came bent in shipping, they DGAF. That was not a good experience.

One of my art axioms: one thing is boring; one thousand of that thing is an installation

I found that for a period of time Claude was almost excessively negative when reviewing its own work. It was only after some contemplation that I realized that it was the phrasing of my code review slash command that framed the review with a negative bent, essentially prompting Claude to dump on its own stuff. The phrasing of that prompt has been a focus of a lot of effort on my side since.

I’m not sure what you mean. The 2025 F150 starts at $39k. https://www.ford.com/trucks/f150/

I wish this was a viable solution. Linked page says, effectively ‘you’re on your own’. My municipality has two events coming up - August and late October, both calendar events say ‘no electronics’. I really don’t get how this is supposed to work.

I have a recalled Anker battery sitting on my stoop, lest it burn my house down. Who on earth (NE USA ideally) will accept this for safe disposal / recycling? Normal battery recycling places don’t want a recalled battery, natch. Serious question, pls help

I think optical illusions are a poor choice to illustrate this point. They are manifestations of the corner cases, peculiarities, and side effects of our visual processing system and neither cameras nor Lidar are without their own analogous issues.

Try using /clear instead of quitting. Doesn’t clear scrollback buffer but does clear context

This is the plot of the Stephenson novel Termination Shock. Not endorsing the book but the hypothetical it poses is interesting.

Stumbled across the new voice this afternoon after months of not using voice mode and after being impressed by the naturalness, was also let down by the disinterested tone. That combined with the platitudes and tendency to repeat back to me what I was saying without new information left me disappointed with the update.

I envision this system as an evolving, fluid mapping of things to hashes, and hashes (or hash-space locations) to meaning, all controlled by users, institutions, experts, and authorities. So if you were to radically change appearance, it’d be down to those who have something to say about you to update where it’s pointed. You raise a good point in general, though, that all kinds of things can change appearance for all kinds of reasons, even to the point of being unrecognizable, and while I can’t think of any examples right now, I bet there are things that do that with some regularity. It’s down to the inputs to the system and their amalgamation into a hash to be robust to that within reason, and the rest of the way for the authors of data to take care of the rest, much in the same way everything written about the artist Prince still applies to him under his later name/symbol, whether it was updated or not. Same for brands that rebrand, countries that change hands, etc.

With the acknowledgment that it’s a controversial opinion, I think the most important ‘domain’ tied to our identity is our appearance, most importantly our face. I’ve been advocating for a time that we need to think about a ‘DNS’ that, in discrete, decentralized, decoupled steps, goes from the appearance of real-world things to meaning/language to links to digital things.

I’ve also written a little speculative fiction about what that might look like. https://open.substack.com/pub/noahnorman/p/all-the-kinds-of-...

I’ve got X - the entire service - muted and I’m reminded why almost daily

Ironically (and perhaps proving the author’s point), when reading I couldn’t help feeling like this was at least AI-assisted writing, if not prasted directly.

I agree with this. And it doesn’t help that the President uses it like one would usually use ‘furthermore’ when he’s vamping one more element to a list.

Ah thank you I was not aware of that one.

Do you mind if I ask what library or algorithm you’re using for pitch estimation?

I don’t remember where I read it but I heard David Lynch recounting a conversation with his doctor in which he asked if being prescribed antidepressants could interfere with his creativity. The doctor said he couldn’t rule it out, so Lynch decided he’d rather deal with the symptoms of depression.

I would assume the name is a reference to the use of strobes in examining high speed periodic motion, like that in motors or on production lines, eg: https://www.checkline.com/inspection_stroboscope

That rings true to me and probably has some truth on other platforms as well. We’re trying for transparency but it does feel like there’s a gap in perspective and goals that could only be reconciled by making space for two really different objectives or, as we’ve been doing, remain focused on the original goal and hope that users who want to pursue other activities in the space do it on one of the other forums for the community, like FB or Reddit.

No just a community server.

Not sure why you would assume that.

GP was on track - they wanted voice channels, many of them, before we had any demonstrated demand for it at all.

They wanted additional, opt-in roles, so anyone could @ a cadre of self-appointed ‘question answerers’ if they, I guess, (and this still isn’t clear to me), felt as though their question was more important than the questions of those who didn’t elect to do so.

They wanted auto-mod stuff that would maybe somehow automatically answer people’s questions (‘AI’), etc

The software in question (TouchDesigner) is a complex, idiosyncratic, node-based programming environment with a tough learning curve and a GUI dependency that makes question-asking and -answering more onerous than non-graphical programming.

As mods we’ve put a ton of effort into helping the torrent of new arrivals ask better (often less lazy or broad) questions and thus get better answers, more often. Many of the requests we get are well-intentioned but seem to think the reason questions go unanswered is because no one saw them, when it’s obvious to us that in many cases, they’re just extremely lazy questions.

Unreal has a similar problem, in my experience, with the difficulty of asking a question with sufficient information making it common that those willing to help are still only inclined to go the distance with people who are willing to meet them halfway.

I started and mod a server of about 6k users for a community around a niche software used by professionals, students, and hobbyists. We keep it really simple and focused primarily on people getting questions answered. Recently a small but vocal cadre of hobbyists have been demanding more Discord-y features oriented towards socializing with other users of the software, and our reticence to complicate the server and add features just because Discord offers them has been a point of contention. They seem to think we mods don’t understand Discord. We are having trouble getting them to understand that we are aware of what other servers are like and that we’re deliberately choosing not go that route.

This is how I use stars - as bookmarks. Am I doing it wrong?

Agreed - MMDDYY is truly unintuitive but even DDMMYY is ambiguous if it’s early enough in the morning.