10,753 karma · joined February 15, 2015
> "Dad, why did he steal the biycle?!?!"
> ".... what?"
[0] https://www.kleinezeitung.at/artikel/3915285/Kaerntner-Wunde...
> Everything is sorted out!
> Everything is now sorted out, and I hope this solution works well for you.
A lot of what current LLMs are good at seems to boil down to translation:
* Translate some prompt into a planning list of individual TODOs
* Treat each TODO as a new translation (e.g. from TODO to code), or call some external tool (lookup something on the internet, static code analysis, database request)
* Translate the result(s) of these TODOs into a final text, or into a new TODO list
To me, this is interesting, because maybe the Homo Sapiens intelligence simply developed as a side effect of communication (translating words into actions).
End times are nothing new, it's the historic default mode.
https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/bahnhofsuhr/343129269...
My wife really enjoys talking to Swiss people in German first (she has no accent anymore), and if the reaction is hostile, she seamlessly switches to full Swiss German in mid-sentence. The reactions are often priceless.
The board arrived from Shenzhen after a month or so. I then had to manually fit (including drilling away some parts) the X60 LCD into the X61 chassis, which was extremely stressful. But in the end it all worked out perfectly. This X62 has been my private machine for 8 years now, and I always travel with it. The display still works perfectly, the 32 GB RAM are still more than enough, and it is still very easy to get X61 replacement batteries on Amazon. But the best thing is the form factor; this thing is just so neat and small and practical. Also the quality of the chassis is incredible. Apart from many, many scratches on the lid, it is still in flawless condition.
It really feels strangely familiar to me: you could get very far very quickly without any real deeper knowledge and have a working web application within a few minutes. It felt like magic. Then you could customize it within the framework by skimming documentation and googling around until... you couldn't, because you had no clue how any of this really worked internally. And just like with vibe-coded web apps, you could recognize the standard framework web app that was patched together in an afternoon from a mile away, but it very much impressed managers.
Amusingly, I sometimes find that developers talk about their go-to frontier model in the same way that GUI developers talked about their favorite web framework ~15-20 years ago. Personification of the tool, even identification with it, frustration that things that worked with version X got worse with version X.1, "I am developing things 10x faster now", "I am going back to writing XYZ by hand", etc.
There is a third shape. Experts who have become so reliant / accustomed to AI that it dilutes their previously sharp judgment and, importantly, taste. I am seeing more and more work produced by experts which seems strangely out of character. A needlessly verbose text written by someone who was previously allergic to verbosity. An over-engineered solution (complete with CLI, storage backend, documentation, unit tests) for a trivial problem which that person would've solved by an elegant bash one-liner only 3 years ago. The work itself is always completely immune to any rational criticism, as it checks all the boxes: extensive documentation, scalable, high test coverage, perfect code style, and for texts perfect grammar, non-offensive, seemingly objective. But, for lack of a better word, it simply lacks taste.
In the late 90ies, I regularly played with my uncle's old LEGOs from the late 60ies and early 70ies. They were stored in an unheated attic for 25 years. I remember that some of the old bricks didn't "snap" at all anymore to my newer bricks. They were either extremely difficult to stack onto a new brick, or didn't have any friction left.
I would add Thunderbird to that list.
There is your problem right there. A family member worked for a large German company which used in-house developed software for exchanging and preparing lab reports for customers. The software worked well since the 90ies, was perfectly tailored to the company, and the people writing it were in the same building and could ship bug fixes within hours. Everyone was happy. Around 2015, someone in management had the idea to move the entire process to a customized off-the-shelf SAP product because of <buzzwords>. The software engineers were in effect degraded to administrators. The new system missed so many edge cases of the lab process that they had to fall back to pen, paper and phone. Customer complaints and employee turnover started to skyrocket immediately afterwards.
After we bought our house, the property tax was still billed to the previous owner for some time. We called our local city hall, and their answer was basically "just talk to the previous owner and pay the tax for them, we don't care where the money comes from".
Pecunia non olet.
For 8.25 EUR/month, you get 250 GB of data per year, and for 12.40 EUR 450 GB/year.
We had a nice family vacation last year in the UK (beach town in Wales). One day, we wanted to make reservations in a restaurant just a few blocks away. This was only possible by calling them. They asked for my phone number, then replied: "Sorry, is this a UK number?" When I said no, we are tourists here, the reply was that they could not make reservations for us, sorry! Same experience with two other restaurants.
We ended up preparing some hamburgers from Aldi UK that evening.
Recently my parents (in their mid-60ies) were visiting us. At some point I realized that both of them had been quietly sitting at our dinner table for over on hour, eyes glued on their smartphones. They are massively addicted. I have noticed that they get nervous as soon as the smartphone is out of reach, or even in silent mode. They mostly talk to friends via Whatsapp and are in constant fear that they miss out on something or that these friends (which also seem to spend most of their days on Whatsapp) will be offended if they don't reply within 5 minutes to the latest Whatsapp trivia. It is quite a struggle to even get them to turn off their phones when we are having dinner. The Whatsapp messages just keep coming in. My wife recently learned that her mother mostly spends her evenings with posting photos of her life on social media, and broke off contact with her brothers for a few days because they failed to quickly and enthusiastically react to some photos she posted on a family Whatsapp group.
But I guess for Anna Possi, our parents are "young people" and could be her grandchildren...
Weeds between tiles / slabs or on gravel: just pour boiling water over them. The weeds will become mushy and die within 1-2 days. Repeat every 6 weeks during summer.
Source: we bought a house with a garden full of goutweed [0], which I consider the final boss of any garden owner, and which we have in control now through regular mowing / hot water. Goutweed will just laugh at any herbicide you throw at it, and regrow from its underground rhizomes. I also doesn't seem to require sun, because I have seen plants grow to a height of 10cm completely underground. The joke in my family is that it could grow on foreign planets. As Wikipedia dryly puts it: "Once established, goutweed is difficult to eradicate."
> Fever is used by organisms as diverse as fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals (see for reference Basu and Srivastava, 2003). Since fever is metabolically expensive, it must provide substantial advantage to the host. Surprisingly little is known about immunological effects mediated by fever, a lack of understanding that might be attributable in part to the common ignorance in clinical practice with respect to benefits fever might provide. Post-operative infections can be prolong survival: patients developing empyema after lung cancer surgery have improved 5-year survival (50% (n = 18) vs 22% (n = 411)) (Ruckdeschel et al, 1972). In this light, it seems unfortunate that fever is usually suppressed in hospital routine.
> The phenomenon of spontaneous regression and remission from cancer has been observed by many physicians and was described in hundreds of publications. However, suggestive clues on cause or trigger are sparse and not substantiated by much experimental evidence. [...] At least in a larger fraction of cases a hefty feverish infection is linked with spontaneous regression in time and is investigated as putative trigger.
> Professor Busch in 1868 introduced the infection of cancer patients by purpose as a novel strategy to treat cancer. He achieved a dramatic regression with his first patient using live Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria, the pathogen leading to erysipelas, published in the German Journal ‘Berliner Klinische Wochenschrift’ (Busch, 1868). Beginning in 1891, this strategy was exploited by Coley, who had some reading knowledge of German (Hall, 1998). Coley systematically applied Streptococcus pyogenes extracts – later called ‘Coley’s toxin’ – to cancer patients and achieved a remarkable rate of regressions. A retrospective compilation of cases considered inoperable at the time of treatment between 1891 and 1936, which was conducted by Wiemann and Starnes (1994, Table 2), determined a remission rate of 64% (108/170) and a 5-year survival rate of larger than 44%. Coley used to inject his extract once or twice a week over a period ranging from a few weeks to several months. His method became quite famous and was tested on hundreds of patients by him and contemporary physicians, but overshadowed by the development of X-ray treatment which was regarded to be much more powerful and of broader applicability.
> Since cancer is usually a slowly progressing disease with occasionally long periods of dormancy, putative beneficial fever effects should also precipitate as preventive efficacy. This can indeed be found. In a cohort of 603 melanoma patients compared to 627 population controls, an inverse correlation was found between melanoma risk and number of recorded infections on the one hand and between melanoma risk and fever height on the other hand, leading to a combined reduction of melanoma risk of about 40% for people with a history of three or more infections with high fever above 38.51C (Koelmel et al, 1999). Mastrangelo et al (1998) report a striking inverse correlation between the number of infections and mortality from tumours in Italy in the period 1890 –1960: every 2% reduction in the number of infectious diseases was followed by a 2% increase in tumours about 10 years later.
You must have a pretty broad definition of useless / toxic if you think that reading, writing and basic math, but also geometry, calculus, linear algebra, probability theory, foreign languages, a broad overview of history, and basic competency in physics / electronics fall under these categories.
Sure, I learned a lot in school that turned out to be pretty useless for me (chemistry, basically anything I learned in PE, french), but I did not know that at the time and I am still grateful that I was being exposed to these topics. Some of my classmates developed successful careers from these early exposures.
Note: each of the tabs on the left has their own "vendors" you may grant access. In total, there are over 800 toggle switches.
Indeed, looking at the map of his route, the longest distance he had to actually travel on open sea seems to be around 120 km from the Kei islands to Papua New Guinea [0], which is (at least for me) completely counter-intuitive for a Kayak voyage from Ulm to Australia.
His route: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Speck-ma...
Photograph of him at the Timor coast: https://cdn.mopo.de/uploads/sites/4/2024/04/farbe-oskar-spec...
This seems to be a photograph taken after his arrest: https://lovedaylives.com/app/uploads/2021/03/SPECK-2.jpg
According to the German Wikipedia, he had a small electrical company which went bankrupt during the Great Depression. His original plan was to "only" paddle to Cyprus to work in a copper mine.