lucaslazarus

I’ve been using em dashes since I was 17 once I realized that they—when used without spaces—allow you to squeeze a few extra words past the Common App website’s word counter. Not exactly a strategy that works to your advantage these days.

AI vs Aye, it was I

This seems less like a proof and more like a "pretty please" with test cases?

Wow a corporate TLD in a wild, never seen this outside of the erstwhile domains.google

Not true, the Tesco meal deal shocked my American sensibilities!

You mean the People’s front of Pareto!

Depends, is P = NP?

4chan is down the hall and to the left

It’s pretty much a religious eschatology at this point

No. Firstly because it is spelled “typo.” Secondly you typically use the diaeresis to tell the reader to not confuse it with a similarly spelled sound or diphthong. So it tells a reader that “reëlect” is not pronounced REEL-ect, “coöperate” is not COOP-uh-ray-t, and “naïve” is not NAY-v.

Yes, this is exactly correct, and I will die on this hill. Additionally, I don't like the way a hyphenated "techno-optimism" looks and "technOOPtimism" is a bit too on-the-nose.

> I think it's the first time I'm asking myself: Ok, so this new cool tech, what is it good for?

I feel like this is something people in the industry should be thinking about a lot, all the time. Too many social ills today are downstream of the 2000s culture of mainstream absolute technoöptimism.

Vide. Kranzberg's first law--“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”

Your criticism is entirely reasonable despite the pedantry. Yes, these people are bad people, but I think that could be the point here. Not to mention, this is just another chapter in SF's long history of being the vanguard of drug experimentation.

You may enjoy Didion's 1967 Slouching towards Bethlehem[1], a similarly anecdotal (and substantially better-written) piece about the drug scene in SF's Summer of Love.

[1] https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/06/didion/

Strong parallels with Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1967):

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/06/didion/

Knowing Google’s tendency to kill things they try and fail to revamp, I’ll take this stagnation as long as they keep updating it with new imagery. Street View is the greatest project in human historiography; there’s too much to lose to silly Google management.

re: consistency

https://xkcd.com/927/

Au contraire, in a rather realistic way

What about this policy has anything to do with English language skills? And how is this “good policy” if it penalizes important next-generation researchers even when they speak English well? I am not denying your observation re: English language skills among Chinese graduate students—it’s just unclear what this solves that checking for English language skills during the live video interview stage does not.

This is possible but you'd have to deploy it right by a black hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_sphere

Not to mention you would need an order of magnitude improvement in on-device inference speed to make this feasible at current smartphone costs. Or they could offload it and sell an insecure overpriced-subscription laggy texting device that bricks when you don’t have cell service…

The U.S. is ranked #17 in that list at 101,900 tonnes, not #55.

Honestly, even getting through 1/3 of it in a night is pretty impressive. Certainly took me several weeks freshman year of college.

Erratum: I meant to say that REI is an initialism but not an acronym

Looks to me like initialisms get periods unless they are acronyms or trademarks. So "ICE" is fine because it is read as "ice" and not I.C.E. (eye-see-ee). REI is not an initialism though, but presumably they have kept it as-is because it's their trademark/"doing business as" style.

Yes, of course that is terrible and should be made way more clear. My response was a joke about how it technically sure does eliminate distractions.

Matter of time until markets reckon with AI investment crowding out non-AI investment (cf. the massive oversubscription of Meta's latest bond offering). Must suck to be a small-cap firm squeezed by tariffs raising costs, unemployment lowering demand, and AI investment raising your own non-AI cost of borrowing.

What did you think they meant by distraction-free? Vibes? Essays? Papers?

A good time to remember that Cisco was briefly the most valued company in the world: https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/24/technology/cisco-briefly-...

I met a traveller from an antique land, // Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone // Stand in the desert…

I see, thank you!

This is not true. Obviously the underlying effect is real but not nearly to this scale—for instance, neither the CPI nor the S&P500 are even remotely close to 17x higher than they were at the turn of the millennium.