I helped put up trail markers on backcountry ski trails, we used orange 3M ones with the micro cube corners that reflected an insane amount of light, life savers when in the middle of a storm. I always wondered what a jacket out of that material would be like, thanks for the link!
Some of our local farms do corn mazes around Thanksgiving. You can see from above (done) that the mazes make Disney figures or cool patterns. A friend of mine showed me how they do it, it's basically a program that goes on the GPS in their tractor and controls how they plant corn over a few acres, completely automated.
I tried a few apple watches, and almost got used to the routine of daily charging, but other annoyances made me try others. Eventually I settled for a Garmin smartwatch and the difference that having to charge once every 10-15 days is huge (you give up a few features, but surprisingly little, at least for my use case). I hope this new emphasis on energy efficiency enables this on laptops (and cellphones)
There's also the possibility that the state doesn't really want to stop SBF from incriminating himself, he seems to have been doing a pretty good job so far.
I'm typically a bit wary of Wolfram's posts, but it is very often the case that the content is good enough that I don't mind a bit of self-aggrandizing. This one though I found to be just pure great, super easy and clear intro into the "magic" of LLMs. Thank you.
Latent reservoirs are super interesting. They've seen in experiments that they keep copies of all of the HIV strains that infected people go through (HIV is one of the viruses with the highest mutation rates). When people have gone off meds sometimes they've managed to sample their blood and seen how all of this viral strains activate around the same time.
A startup I knew had someone take professional-looking pictures of new employees, and add them to the Who Works Here page, with a nice blurb. After years of employees being poached by Big Tech the Who Works Here page is gone. To me this is also part of the loss of innocence.
I wonder what's going to happen in the new Vancouver office. Amazon bought the old Post office building that spanned two half-blocks in downtown Vancouver and built two massive towers inside it. Seems hard to imagine they'll need all that real estate
Pina2bo here we go! I think the first 1/4 or so of the book was a riff on the famous `How do I kill 30-50 feral hogs ...`[0] tweet. I did like the book though.
I've dealt with two large Japanese tech corporations that people here have probably heard about. One thing that I found extremely unusual (on both companies) is that many (most?) people in high level roles got rotated every two years or so to completely different parts of the company. Building good relationships and then having to restart from scratch was complicated.
HN is my `ping google.com`, first thing I check whenever I connect to a new wifi connection (or when I hear my partner complaining that the internet is down).
I used to follow Naltrexone trials: blocks opioids by having higher affinity in brain receptors), in principle it can work as a one month injection, but the results were also pretty poor. Even in well functioning medical professionals with opioid addiction, adherence was pretty poor. The hypothesis I remember was that the drug didn't have any tangible benefit, so it was hard to continue using it.
Just wanted to point out that Scott Aaronson is not one of those anti quantum curmudgeons. Besides bashing on companies with questionable claims, I think he's been pretty open minded about looking for problems and algorithms with actual quantum advantages.
Not really a program, but this year the Tabu [0] heuristic saved me at least on that order of time. I work on combinatorial optimization problem (think traveling salesman), typically we use local search heuristics like simulated annealing or parallel tempering that work well but require a lot of hyper parameter tuning. Tabu is super simple, has very few parameters to tune, and works great.
Agree! I found it super interesting when inside photos of one of the seized Russian-owned super yachts came out [0]. This one had a whole hovercraft, a couple of Land Cruisers with appropriate landing vessels, etc.
Someone asked Thomas how he managed to come up with such an awesome prompt [0], and his reply (another ChatGPT promtp) had me laughing out loud in a coffee shop, although it also removed a bit of the magic in the original ChatGPT response