Yeah, but I'm sure your microwave isn't mechanical. What makes a mechanical watch cool, even a cheap one, is that there are no electronics at all - just gears and springs and things. I think that's worth a trivial bit of inaccuracy even if a boring $10 digital watch can easily beat a $200 mechanical one in accuracy.
Is it a Seiko 5 (self winding)? Yeah, those aren't that accurate, but I wouldn't call them "junk" - they do lose or gain a minute or two a day in my experience - I generally correct mine every couple of days against my phone or computer though.
In the 1980s, you often had programmers create the art and music for games, but for the last three decades at least there have been dedicated artists and composers who often have no coding skill at all.
I love how Moby Dick suddenly puts the story on hold and diverges into a chapter dealing with the classification of whales. 19th century novels do that a lot with Victor Hugo diverging into the architecture of Paris or whatever in his novels.
They only joined the UCC (Geneva Copyright Treaty) in 1973 though. That was less than twenty years before the USSR ceased to exist. All the works published in the USSR before 1973 weren't copyrighted in the West (it wasn't retroactive).
And also, if you put an actual parrot in a room full of programmers, it might learn a few word of programming jargon, but it never will become a useful coding partner the way LLMs are.
Biden wasn't "far left". The "far left" in US politics is basically Bernie Sanders and AOC's "squad", neither of which have ever come close to running the country.
I'm not against students working together -- as you note in some classes it is encouraged and often group projects are assigned. But this is different from the idea of a "take home exam" where students are supposed to work alone on the honor system, which is naive at best from the professor.
Yeah, lack of Vitamin D may or may not be a problem (well, obviously in extreme cases it leads to rickets, but that's rare). But skin cancer unquestionably is a problem, and not infrequently a deadly one. Pick your battles.
These days, yes! Gemma4 is only a few gigabytes and is surprisingly capable and can run on normal consumer hardware. You could certainly run it off a thumb drive
Even before AI, take home exams were a bad idea. In theory students were supposed to promise to work alone and not share work but in practice many people, especially those taking the class with friends, worked together.
The problem with that argument is it is trivial to write a Markov chain program that takes in text and then can generate the most probable series of words given a starting word. I myself wrote such a program in BASIC on a 64K 8-bit computer in the 1980s after reading one of A.K. Dewdney's columns. That wasn't at all an LLM though. There's a connection, sure, but one that is equating a paper airplane to a jet airliner.
The US military thought a lot about how to entertain its soldiers because there was a lot of downtime during a war and most of them were draftees who didn't necessarily want to be there, Another thing they did was publish pocket paperback editions of books back when paperbacks were less common.
Scientific American hasn't been the magazine it was for decades -- there's nobody writing columns like what Martin Gardner or A.K. Dewdney used to write that made the general public interested in some mathematical or computational problem. These days it is basically a clone of Discover, and being purchased by its publisher makes sense.
The obscure Russian nicknames! How is anybody supposed to know without being told that Sasha and Alexander are the same guy? (I do realize that while some English nicknames like Johnny for John are pretty self-explanatory, other like Jack for John or Dick for Richard are as opaque to foreigners as Alexander/Sasha)
Well, Crime and Punishment is often taught in US high schools. Or at least was back in the 1980s. During the Cold War there was a lot of interest in Russian literature in general in part because in the bipolar world they were seen as "the other civilization" that we needed to understand if we wanted to avoid nuclear war. You'd think these days people would be more into Chinese literature but except for the Three Body Problem series, I haven't really heard of many Chinese books becoming popular here.
While that's a bit cruel, I do have to wonder how exactly Doctorow got in the position he has -- he isn't somebody who has done great things and is now a tech critic like someone like Geoffrey Hinton. He seems a pleasant enough fellow, but basically he got fame from writing SF books that he gave away for free. How does this translate into being an expert that journalists fawn over?
All democracy is a "two party charade" then. Countries that have a dozen parties still have them form a left-wing and right-wing coalition in order to actually get enough seats to form a majority. I'd call those coalitions the real parties.
Even though I'm American, I was living and working in Montreal at the time of 9/11 and it was weird how even there in the weeks after there were American flags displayed "in solidarity" with the US.
But that isn't the purpose of academia -- the purpose of it is to discover new phenomena not to make products. It is true that there is a lot of work to turn a new advance into a product whether it is software or turning biological knowledge into a drug, but without discovery of new phenomena new products will come to a halt. While it is true that some corporate labs, most famously Bell Labs in its heyday, but also for example IBM's T.J. Watson and Xerox's PARC did do basic research besides product-focused work, this is pretty rare because it is hard to justify the cost of something that may only be practical in decades and often help your competitors as much as yourself.
For some value of practical, I could see it being useful in making handouts for an RPG where the handout is supposed to be a photocopy of a section of some rare book the players need to scan for clues.
Office coffee is not what people drink for pleasure -- it's a caffeine delivery device. If you go to a coffeehouse in the US you'll find that people often order drinks called Lattes which is espresso and steamed milk. And the word is Italian like espresso itself, so I think this isn't some weird Americanism but pretty traditional.
It got me exactly right and also academics more famous than me that I tried. I think it is pretty bad if you are expecting it to know you from highly rated github repositories or whatever, but if you have a traditional journal and conference record it seems okay.
Not really even that. The 1950s had a lot of problems in terms of racism and sexism, but wealth inequality was much lower than today with extremely high tax rates for the wealthy (under Eisenhower, a Republican!) And most relevant to this discussion, science and scientists were respected and well funded.
Basically he did it by developing the first version of Mathematica when he was a professor at the University of Illinois. They were not pleased (although they've settled since and Wolfram is still headquartered in Champaign-Urbana near the campus)
Well, Perrifractic has no connection to the original Commodore in the sense of having worked there (he was a child in the heyday of the C64 and Amiga), but he isn't just some random person trying to cash in - he's a long time Youtuber focusing on Commodore and other 1980s computers and his enthusiasm is genuine.