eirikbakke

Second this! And if the papers are in "logical reading order", it would be very useful if this is stated on top!

Ultorg creator here. Ultorg is a GUI for relational databases that knows how to deal with joins and one-to-many relationships. In this demo, I use the new "Fill with AI" feature to generate appraisals for artwork objects in the National Gallery of Art.

The interesting part is in the handling of joins. We can show a list of artworks, and for each artwork, a list of provenance timeline entries, and related data from other tables, and then use all of this data as context for the appraisal task. The UI for this is intentionally minimal; the user enters only a few words for a prompt (Appraisal column: "an appraisal of the artwork, in US dollars, for insurance purposes". Rationale column: "rationale for the appraisal").

The retort is to the statement that the U.S. war in Iran is "pretty cheap compared to all the AI datacenters".

People are conflating destructive and productive activities. These are fundamentally different.

I pay $100/month for Claude Max and it's like having a (nearly) free, very competent employee. Value _way_ exceeds $100/months. But there's a datacenter that has to run that.

The data centers are being paid for by customers, who are receiving greater value from the products than they pay for them.

I'd also expect to see a lot more AI-generated PRs on open source projects.

(Or at least AI-assisted to the point where the author feels like they should mention it.)

"Larry Ellison has been involved with two philanthropic organizations. First he made a $300M donation to Stanford, in exchange for not admitting wrongdoing in an options backdating scandal. All other philanthropic work is to the Larry Ellison institute for prolonging of life--namely his." -- Bryan Cantrill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

I concur. This was my main experience with WSL1 vs. WSL2.

If I'm running Windows, it means that the files and projects that I care about are on the Windows file system. And they need to be there, because my IDE and other GUI apps needs files to be on a real file system to work optimally. (A network share to a WSL2 file system would not let the IDE watch for changes, for instance.)

WSL1 was a great way to get a UNIX-style command line, with git, bash, latex etc., for the Windows file system. WSL2 was just too slow for this purpose; commands like "git status" would take multiple seconds on a large codebase.

Now I switched back to MacOS, and the proper UNIX terminal is a great advantage.

I suspect the non-standard JSON license was in part a strategy to encourage third-party implementations, so that the format would become a standard.

(W3C standards, for example, require "multiple independent implementations to proceed along a standardisation path". https://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/ )

One day, some bacteria is going to figure out how to digest plastic. Then it will take over the world.

In case anyone needs a minimal CPU implementation in 65 lines of Verilog: https://people.csail.mit.edu/ebakke/fic/ https://people.csail.mit.edu/ebakke/fic/code/Fic.v

(I wonder if it would convert cleanly to a redstone circuit...)

Waving a flag is protected speech under the 1st amendment.

Perhaps a better source (but IANAL):

"Judges frequently invoke anti-redundancy principles in the interpretation of legal language, whether it appears in classic private-law documents such as contracts or classic public law-documents such as constitutions and statutes."

Redundancy: When Law Repeats Itself, John M. Golden (2016)

The "rule against surplusage": Where one reading of a statute would make one or more parts of the statute redundant and another reading would avoid the redundancy, the other reading is preferred.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_interpretation

Afterwards, they ship the entire engine, with turkey giblets and all, to a lab where the resulting damage is analyzed. Smells awful, according to the engineer I sat next to at a Thanksgiving dinner once...

In Norway, the card terminals usually go into an "accept with signature" mode if they are temporarily offline. So they print a receipt that the customer has to sign. (This is for BankAxept debit cards, which are standard in Norway.)

In a grocery store line once, I remember a distraught customer whose card was declined due to insufficient funds. The store manager came over, yanked the ethernet cable from the payment terminal, and told the customer to try again. "Accepted with signature."

Spreadsheet formulas have a very simple grammar: expression = reference | exp1 op exp2 | function(exp1, ..., expN)

That's it. It's the math notation from high school, plus cell references, which can be inserted by clicking a cell.

Nations with high GDP tend to be service economies. Service professions tend to require good reading and writing skills, and often a college-level specialization. (No need for PhDs, though, except for scientists.)

No, it's a whole scientific field, with experiments, lit review, publications, peer review and everything.

The engineering artifact is just a by-product. More often than not, the code is thrown away or never used again, once the experiments have been run and the paper has been published.

CS theory is indeed closer to mathematics. But other areas--database systems, computer architecture, networking, user interface design etc., is in fact evaluated via experiments, which is what makes it "science".

For example, if you propose some new technique to make databases faster (e.g. "store tuples column-wise instead of row-wise"), you'll implement it and run various workloads with and without the technique enabled. That gives you a quantitative measurement of the merit of the technique.

That is the correct way to do it for PostgreSQL.

It does rule out some common SQLite use cases, such as using the database for app persistence. The app would never be able to upgrade the major version of PostgreSQL, unless it bundled PostgreSQL binaries for every major version ever used.

The PostgreSQL data directory format is not very stable or portable. You can't just ZIP it up and move it to a different machine, unless the new machine has the same architecture and "sufficiently" similar PostgreSQL binaries.

In theory the data directory works with any PostgreSQL binaries from the same major version of PostgreSQL, but I have seen cases where this fails e.g. because the binaries were from the same major version but compiled with different build options.

Pages 51-54 contain a list of on-the-record quotes from the government itself. Those, at least, are not in contention.

Norway does this. Kindergartens are nearly free ($120/mo), but with a "cash-for-care" benefit for parents who choose to stay at home with the child ($750/mo).

https://www.nav.no/kontantstotte/en

Microsoft Office has many features. Each feature must be reflected in the file format somehow.

(I wonder what the specification-pages-to-man-years ratio is...)

Billions of years of evolution, but still limited to the data that is replicated in human genome/DNA, which is about 3 gigabytes (+epigenome).

Humans require a _lot_ less training data to become, for instance, fluent in English. If a given AI algorithm needs to be trained on the entire Internet to accomplish the same, then it seems safe to assume that the data has not really been "mined out".

Generating more training data from the same original data should not be fundamentally problematic in that sense.

If electronics is involved in the act of voting, the voter has no assurance that the ballot remains secret (even if you're a software engineer!). With paper/envelope/box, by contrast, the voter can see and understand the full process.

A subscription will renew at 2025-08-16 04:04Z, and the billing system must send an email to the user reminding them of this. What date do you show in the email?

A meeting happens every Tuesday at 9am, starting February 18, 2025. What time does the calendar show once DST kicks in?

If that's the topic you were looking for, you may like this "Dave's Garage" episode, where a retired Microsoft engineer talks about implementing... Windows Activation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpKNFCFABp0