jetrink

This match was broadcast by ESPN on both ESPN2 and ESPN+. In that case, they are presumably paying two knowledgeable commentators to talk about the match before, during, and after it happens, adding context and describing the important events. Are they not providing a transcript of that to the writerbot? That seems like real low-hanging fruit, especially since the commentary is already live captioned.

Starbucks has a 401k with 5% match, as well as medical, dental, and vision insurance for its baristas. It's not an impossibility, it's just not something we expect from fast food companies.

1. https://careers.starbucks.com/benefits/

I had Ambetter for dental insurance when I damaged a tooth and experienced this first hand. I think spent between 30 and 40 hours over two weeks calling Ambetter and dozens dentists all over my state. The worst part, besides not being able to see a dentist, was that to Ambetter, you are always calling for the first time. The system has no memory of your issue or even that you have called five times already that morning. The rep always asks a long list of pointless questions like who your primary care doctor is and if you are still living at your address. (No, I have not moved since I last called 20 minutes ago.) You repeat the same numbers and answers over and over. Then you have to describe your problem again, and plead for help. Even after communicating how many times you have tried, the reps only have one solution and that is to give you three more dentists to call. One time I asked the rep to stay on the phone while I called the numbers so that I wouldn't have to call back after they didn't work. That made him very angry and he hung up on me. The numbers didn't work.

I did finally get to see a dentist though. Near the end of the second week, one rep's voice seemed more empathetic and hearing her listen made me chock up as I described how difficult the process had been. She gave me a line to say to the other reps to have them transfer my call to her and told me to call back the next morning. I don't know what she did, maybe there was even something broken with my account, but she found me a dentist within walking distance of my house.

What if instead of a video game, this was trained on video and control inputs from people operating equipment like warehouse robots? Then an automated system could visualize the result of a proposed action or series of actions when operating the equipment itself. You would need a different model/algorithm to propose control inputs, but this would offer a way for the system to validate and refine plans as part of a problem solving feedback loop.

I don't think you've understood the project completely. The model accepts player input, so frame 601 could be quite different if the player decided to turn left rather than right, or chose that moment to fire at an exploding barrel.

Tip: The Internet Archive's advanced search can return results as an RSS feed, ready to import into your podcast app! Here's a feed of The Famous Computer Cafe episodes. You will need to rename it after adding it.

1. https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php?q=creator%3A%22The+Fa...

I'm allergic to business books, but I think a flywheel is a better metaphor by a mile. A flywheel is a tangible object that everyone has interacted with at some point. They're fun and satisfying to spin up to high speed. They are associated with engines and electricity. In contrast, inertia is an abstract concept. It's popularly associated with dead weight. It makes you think of heavy rocks and ships that are too large to maneuver quickly. It's not at all fun.

> Are the shadows of the runners artificial then?

As the runners' shadows cross the finish line, they are recorded by the camera in the same way that the runners are.

The "area" that you want to minimize is the number of digits, d, times the base, b.

    A = d * b

d is roughly equal to the log of the number represented, N, base b.

    d ~= ln(N)/ln(b)

Substituting,

    A ~= b * ln(N) / ln(b)

Take the derivative of the area with respect to b and find where the derivative is zero to find the minimum. Using the quotient rule,

    dA/db = ln(N) * (ln(b)*1 - b/b) / ln(b)^2

    0 = ln(N) * (ln(b) - 1) / ln(b)^2

    0 = ln(b) - 1

    ln(b) = 1

    b = e

I hope I got that right. Doing math on the internet is always dangerous.

They used to be reliable until Google bought the company. I'll never buy another piece of Google hardware after my last Fitbit. It lasted 18 months and they declined to replace it since their warranty is even shorter. I refuse to buy disposable electronics.

That reads like an extract from a John le Carré novel.

Can't you just ask it to set the volume to a specific volume as a percentage, like 38%? This works on Google Home. In the Google ecosystem, it also usually works if you ask it to raise the volume by a small increment like 5%. (Other times, this sets the volume to 5%.) I think you also used to be able to ask the device to raise the volume 'a bit' or 'a lot', for 5% or 20% respectively, but that stopped working a long time ago and I haven't tried recently.

If neither of these work, then I am very frustrated on your behalf.

Very interesting. An example that users of this forum will be familiar with is Edsger Dijkstra.

I can't believe the manufacturer didn't alert them and they had to hear it from another customer. Surely the manufacturer wouldn't want to be named as the reason that a spacecraft orbiting Jupiter went dark due to their faulty components.

Those don't have to be mutually exclusive though. To take AI out of it, think of those murder mystery parties where actors interact with attendees. Actors have roles to play and things they must do to move the story forward, but they improvise their dialog when talking with the players and sometimes each other. Or if you've ever played D&D, you have experienced talking with NPCs that are controlled by your DM. I think video game AI could be a lot like that, where NPCs use natural language instead of rigid dialog trees, but otherwise, they behave a lot like they do today.

The point is not that he merely continued flying, but that he made the same reckless decision to fly over the mountains a second time. Most people who have a close call on the road drive with more care afterward.

I had a remarkable experience with GPT-4o yesterday. Our garage door started to fall down recently, so I inspected it and found that our landlord had installed the wire rope clips incorrectly, leading to the torsion cables losing tension. I didn't know what that piece of hardware was called, so I asked ChatGPT and it identified the part as I expected it to. As a test, I asked if there was anything notable about the photo. ChatGPT correctly identified that the cables were installed backwards, with the side of the cable that was (previously) under tension on top of the slack end, instead of sandwiched securely in the middle. To diagnose that requires tracing the cable through space and inferring which end is under tension from the geometry, though I can't rule out an educated guess.

What was really remarkable though was that it failed to notice that one of the two nuts was obviously missing, even after I told it there was a second problem with the installation.

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/QqCNzOM

I was doing ecological work in a lake when we came under spudgun fire. Someone (kids?) began slowly firing from a distant treeline on the side of one of the hills that surrounded the lake. I knew the distinctive thump, so I was looking out for the first splash, which ended up being much closer than I expected it to be! I had assumed they would be aiming somewhere else. I informed my shipmates that we were under attack and we rowed to shore as fast as possible. They got in about three or four shots, but we escaped injury and no one was ever caught.

I would guess that it means that 96% of the components come from within China. Self-sufficiency is important in China right now, and it's doubtful that 'localization' refers to just the company itself.

To a technoutopian, scientific advances, and AI in particular, will one day solve all other human problems, create heaven on earth, and may even grant us eternal life. It's the most important problem in the same way that Christ's second coming is important in the Christian religion.

> Given this glaring overstep and our steadfast effort to protect our journalists and our sources, we declined to turn over that information, citing a First Amendment protection called “reporter’s privilege.” Reporter’s privilege, which is recognized by 40 states based on numerous legal interpretations of the United States Constitution, serves as a basis of protection and privacy for journalists and the sources who share important information with the press.

Regardless of inflation or changes in the money supply, new techniques, new technologies, trade, and population growth can cause the value of everything bought and sold to increase over time. You can measure that value in dollars, or you can look at changes in the quantity and quality of goods and services.

One of the aspects I'm most concerned about is the number of people who smoke while driving. I frequently see people blowing vape smoke out of their windows in traffic. I walk past people parked in their cars smoking. So many delivery drivers smell like weed, especially Door Dash drivers and Amazon subcontractors. We're probably headed back to 1950s levels of impaired driving, and at all hours of the day rather than primarily at night.

It's not a terrible name either. Assistant would be better, but they can't use that name[1] of course... I'm having a hard time thinking of something else that instantly communicates this idea of an intelligent subordinate aide that doesn't have negative associations.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant

> create an atmosphere where everyone talks to everyone else.

The company is an interesting example of Conway's Law[1]. I learned from the recent Acquired episode on RenTech[2] that in contrast to how most other firms work, there is only a single model within RenTech that everyone contributes to. You don't have a bunch of small teams working in silos building specialized or competing models. As a result, every new development gets shared with the whole group.

1. [O]rganizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

2. https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/renaissance-technologies

The difference is clear if you go to Ghost Pro's pricing page[1], which looks just like SquareSpace's or WordPress'[2]. The product is the software, support, and hosting. Ghost is focused on providing value directly to the writers. Substack doesn't have a pricing page and their incentives are much more murky. They want to attract writers and subscribers to the platform, but they don't really care if it is the best experience for either group. If they think of some feature that writers hate, but it increases the number of subscribers or some other metric, Substack is going to implement it.

1. https://ghost.org/pricing/ 2. https://wordpress.com/pricing/

> Seattle Times: Computer Pioneer's Death Probed -- Kildall Called Possible Victim Of Homicide

> Kildall was injured at the Franklin Street Bar & Grill on July 8 but refused medical treatment. He was taken to a hospital the following day and released. But he was readmitted Sunday and died the following day.

> Kildall could have died either from a blow to the head or from hitting his head as he fell, said Sollecito.

> The first description of the incident at the bar, he said, was that Kildall had been in the bar between two to 20 minutes. Then witnesses "turned around, and he was on the floor," the sergeant said.

> But Sollecito said stories are changing. "That version isn't going to hold up," he said.

https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19940716&slug...

The source of that story seems to be the Monterey Police Department, but nothing came of the investigation.

> I don't know where to look to confirm that can current computers do 1 billion MIPS (Million Instructions per Second?) as predicted by this article?

An RTX 4090 has AI compute of up to 661 teraflops in FP16[1]. FLOPS and IPS are not interchangeable, but just for fun, that's 6.6 * 10^14 FLOPS, which is just short of 1 billion million (10^15).

1. https://www.tomshardware.com/features/nvidia-ada-lovelace-an...

> The point is that the police can't prove you do or do not remember a code. Consequently, they can't compel you to use that code.

Also, they can't coerce you to reveal the code even if they can prove you know it. Confessions extracted under torture by inquisitors was a recent memory when the Bill of Rights was drafted.

I wonder if small planes aren't actually far more dangerous than motorcycles. A significant minority of motorcycles are operated by thrill-seeking people who routinely drive recklessly and avoid wearing safety equipment. They tend to be young, inexperienced, and unconcerned with risk. Pilots, on the other hand, tend to be serious, careful people. They use checklists. They have to undergo extensive, supervised training. Pilots have a culture of understanding and mitigating risk. For all those differences, the mortality rates are almost the same.