gumby

Something that it isn’t.

I was in Germany in those days and I sure remember the CDU and other more-right wingers using this argument, and convincingly. I’m sure there’s some long and worthy essay on the topic in the archives of die Zeit. Of course it was long ago now.

Good question (I thought I implicitly mentioned it but I guess I didn’t).

Does it matter that we’re talking about “recording” within the envelope of typical human capability? I think that distinction does matter and the summary as described is within that region (note: we haven’t seen Apple’s product in the real world, and we know Meta’s is well outside human capability.

Remembering that you talked with Anupam and Joe about fishing is something people do.

Remembering most of the words uttered, specific phrases, etc (the hoary “on your permanent record” joke from RaRHS) is far outside human capability, which is why we have rules about actual recordings.

I consider this kind of capability a kind of prosthetic, like a hearing aid.

By the way I could have scribbled a little note after the conversation (I do this, though these days in my phone): “Joe, Anupam: fishing”. That’s a straight up (if extremely compressed) recording, but no, I would not ask permission for that either.

Not trying to persuade you BTW, just clarifying how I think about the solution space. But don’t forget that the camera case IS handled by human assistants today.

Don’t give them ideas!

I like the idea (we’ll see about the execs). It seems to record what I would remember anyway (“yesterday you and Joe and Anupam talked about going fishing a chose a date”) unless I was distracted.

It’s like the cameras in the glasses. If all they said is what _I_ know (“That’s Julie who worked in the same group as you at company Z three years ago. You also ran into her at the grocery store shortly after you quit Z and it was awkward” but not tell me anything about Julie I wouldn’t know, like spouse or where she now works or anything like that”) it would be an excellent prosthesis. Public figures have humans who do this for them.

Unfortunately the glasses makers don’t understand the difference and make it too general and privacy destroying. This Apple thing might be OK in my opinion..but the reality remains to be seen.

Funny this was downvoted: I was thinking the same as I was reading this thread.

True mass market means optimizing your product for the fat part of the population bell curve. This is some point or region in a space of { cost, features, use cases, durability }. The Apple Watch works for everyone from a stay at home parent, stocker at the supermarket, executive, and so on. If you work in a machine shop or spend a few hours every day working out it may not be for you.

There’s a marginal but valuable exception: think of prosumer cameras. There are indeed pros, and the feature set is good enough for some of them to shoot with a prosumer camera (any actual pro can shoot better photos with an instamatic than I can with a phone, much less an SLR). But most people buy the high end aspirationally. Why not? That penumbra pulls more people in who really need the plain old features.

And anyway once you really are at the high end your needs can be idiosyncratic.

“Robinson projection” makes me think of Canadian fasteners.

For a while, France had its own prime meridian with 0 degrees passing of course through Paris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_meridian

Very nice!

The problem is that 0 is a valid UID in POSIX systems like Linux.

If you automatically initialize variables with a garbage value, use-before-initialization (the program’s initialization) them the use of that variable will likely fail due to error. By using what turns out to be a legit UID on every system you have the opportunity for this case not to be detected, perhaps causing a problem immediately or else allowing some nefarious actor to write what they want into that variable instead.

> Ironically, if we do get "investment in mothers" and "universal childcare", it will be for the profit and benefit of the ruling class that will want to make sure your child is indoctrinated in the regime's propaganda as early and deeply as possible

This feels over the top/paranoid to me. But I also acknowledge that East Germany’s universal child care was dismantled after German unification for being exactly what you describe.

Just my memories of being at the AI lab back then.

This is the general consensus in DE (I watched the election during the day on TV). AfD is a cancer on the electorate.

There was a lot of swapping of what was in other peoples’ inits (there was no security on ITS at all). I discovered that others just linked to my (compiled) init file due to people complaining when I changed it.

Since Wikipedia didn’t even exist until emacs was more than 25 years old and little was written down in a way acceptable to Wikipedia, consider pages on topics of that vintage to be vague

Have you been to the UAE? Sure t the beach there re women in burkinis and more, but also women in two piece bikinis.

Hah, is this a troll? It’s a lot older than those editors.

EMACS started as Eugene Ciccareli’ init file for the TECO editor (which was also a programming language) around 1976. Hence the name (Eugene‘s Macros). It was later rewritten in Lisp for Multics, the MIT Lisp Machine (I worked on one for the Xerox lisp machine as well), and later Unix (in those cases using lisp only as an extension language)

They are smarter than that: Siegmund says he doesn’t want to form a government. After all then people could see how they function in office, and that might hurt the AfD in upcoming national elections. Better to wait until the AfD is in power at the national level.

No, and I would be surprised if it did (but medicine is still so poorly understood that surprises do happen, though rarely).

The article was more about the social dynamics which are interesting. Despite being poorly understood, the medical field is surprisingly effective (the smartest ppl I’ve worked with have been in that field) to the point where we’ve pretty much wiped out most of the common ways ppl die in wealthy countries (e.g. heart disease) so instead people die of less common “long tail” problems, increasingly to the single-patient case.

Addressing that via billionaire special cases is not a fix.

BIPV* has always failed for difficult-to-address reasons and the “Tesla” version was no different from the others in the market so had no differentiation that would allow it to survive. I know why Tesla bought the company (bail out musk’s cousin) but don’t know why they kept trying to sell the product for so long.

* BIPV is “Building-Integrated Photo Voltaic” and the company Tesla bought was a late entrant to an already failing sector.

Census bureau works pretty hard to get as accurate a count as possible, and hires mathematicians specifically to work on privacy. This is about the administration trying to put its finger on the pans

GOP Voters don’t care when the ones they vote for are in power. Meanwhile the Dems reduce the debt and are pilloried for it

Then the reader can use an LLM to compress it back, and you can then interrogate it for details.

I used to say this was the future of advertising (cr sales person prompts “we have some new EV SUVs on the lot”; GPT generates an ad email with a synthetic video, blinking text etc; then the recipient’s spam processor tells them “that dealer has some new SUVs”. I suppose the same could happen with so-called “long form”.

On Friday I had a hamburger in the cafeteria of $BIG_COMPANY … in Belgium, the home of the “French fry”.

It was served with boiled potatoes.

Our PR firm asked us what web sites we like as an idea of what we want to do and I sent them “Computers are bad” (computer.rip) and they thought I was joking.

They should have asked me what sites I thought our prospective customers read.

Ronald Coase got the Nobel prize for answering your question, most famously in his essay "The Nature of the Firm", considering it to be transaction cost.

So there is no real benefit to couple the decisions of the catering staff with the company’s marketing or engineering teams; on the other hand an organization that just does commercial catering might do better on, say, hygene (practical or following regulatory requirements), or developing local suppliers of organic food in various locations.

On the other hand there could be the world’s best team in thermal management, but the company still would be better off having an in house team that’s still quite good but can be tightly coupled to the engineering development teams.

Clay Christiansen (the “The Innovator‘s Dilemma”/disruption guy) once pointed out to me that hospitals were subject to the same disruptive pressure that kills successful companies.

He gave an example (this was 25 years ago) of heart attacks: people used to get bypasses that needed an entire operating team and weeks of hospitalization. But then angioplasty and stents were invented, a treatment you could get and be home the same day, and that could even be done in outside clinics. But while they handled most cases, the hospital still got the rare but super serious ones. So they had these big expensive facilities and staff but not enough “business” to support it. Just like the steel minimill they lost their cost structure but couldn’t see it as it was happening.

It’s explained in the article

This is the only way I’ll refer to a video, so I hope it starts to happen. I know some people like them but personally I skip them, and skip HN submissions that are obviously links. Unfortunately this was was washed through a URL.

TL;DR: IV;WW (It’s Video, Won’t Watch).

Think about it this way because the issue isn’t specific to allocators: it’s pretty good in general but can often be beaten if you have special understanding of what you need to do. That’s OK.

You can buy cars and trucks that are optimized for driving on freeways and residential streets carrying stuff people often carry. But then there are special vehicles like fork lifts and such that are kinds of large special cases. And then there are weirdo specialised vehicles that have four wheels but are rare and their users can’t live without them.

Languages like C++ let you plug in special allocators if you want. But most people don’t. Some, like HFT people do crazy headstands to avoid slow allocations. I don’t ever want to do that but if they want to, why not. I don’t think they complain that the default case doesn’t fit their needs!

In theory we will delegate this to agents, but really companies can already do that (plenty of software does upgrade itself in backgroud (some doesn’t because the user may want to peg an older version).

But really that cacophony of upgrades etc isn’t about user control, but just companies reminding you they exist. It’s spam, and like spam fighting, agents will not be able to handle it adequately.