mathieuh

You can use the word “miracle” without ascribing any metaphysical meaning. It obviously just means “an incredibly unlikely event” in this instance.

It’s the same for me. I genuinely don’t understand how I can be having such a completely different experience from the people who rave about ChatGPT. Every time I’ve tried it’s been useless.

How can some people think it’s amazing and has completely changed how they work, while for me it makes mistakes that a static analyser would catch? It’s not like I’m doing anything remarkable, for the past couple of months I’ve been doing fairly standard web dev and it can’t even fix basic problems with HTML. It will suggest things that just don’t work at all and my IDE catches, it invents APIs for packages.

One guy I work with uses it extensively and what it produces is essentially black boxes. If I find a problem with something “he” (or rather ChatGPT) has produced it takes him ages to commune with the machine spirit again to figure out how to fix it, and then he still doesn’t understand it.

I can’t help but see this as a time-bomb, how much completely inscrutable shite are these tools producing? In five years are we going to end up with a bunch of “senior engineers” who don’t actually understand what they’re doing?

Before people cry “o tempora o mores” at me and make parallels with the introduction of high-level languages, at least in order to write in a high-level language you need some basic understanding of the logic that is being executed.

I imagine they are not from an anglophone country and see 9.11 as 9*11

The mechanism of baldness is related to the mechanism of growing a beard isn’t it? For me personally I started going bald in my mid-20s, and since then as I lose hair off the top of my head it seems to reappear on my face. So perhaps it’s just a virility/experience signal.

Maybe in the past the fact that someone had survived long enough to go bald or grow a big beard would signal that they had the skill or hardiness to avoid dying young, which might make them more attractive and likely to pass on the gene.

The built-in translation feature in Google Chrome translated it pretty much perfectly idiomatically for me

Yes same for me on guitar. If I try to play something too slowly or if I really start thinking about what I'm doing it all falls apart.

I think that's when you really know a piece, when you can play it incredibly slowly. Paradoxically it's easy to play quickly and just let your fingers play out their muscle memory, playing something really slowly is the challenge.

Doesn’t work with Slack at least. I’ve had an iTerm window running `caffeinate -disu` for years. I think it used to work and stopped working in the last few months.

Well yes, if you disregard the fact that the last four years of realising that WFH is not only possible but preferable for workers happened. It's backsliding from a situation that was advantageous for many workers.

For many people it's become non-negotiable that a job offer remote working. If where I worked mandated return-to-office I would immediately begin looking for somewhere else to work.

I have to agree with you. It took me until I'd got quite far through their comment to realise they were talking negatively about WFH and not being in-office.

On the point that the prisoners have to prove that they’re no longer a danger: in some cases that means completing courses which are completely inaccessible to the prisoners due to cutbacks.

I agree with Sacks. While taking large doses of LSD or DMT I had experiences with what felt like otherworldly entities, or a sense that some cosmic revelation was imminent, but once I'd come down I didn't think something had been revealed to me or that I had been in contact with some supernatural plane, I just thought "wow I was really fucking high".

It was never a visual manifestation of a recognisable shape, it was just a sense that there was another consciousness in the room with me. I never saw machine elves or anything, I just felt strongly that there was a benevolent female presence in the corner of the room. Why I felt it was female I can't say but in the moment I was absolutely certain.

I am almost pathologically sceptical and I have absolutely zero belief in anything metaphysical. I believe that capability is simply not within me. I can see how other people would believe that there is something beyond though.

It's not quite the same as a traditional hallucinogen but there are some vivid dreams. In fact, that's where the term "pipe dream" comes from, from the dreams that opium smokers would have while high. I have taken a lot of heroin in my life and although I never experienced something to the extent that Sacks is describing I did have some strange and very vivid daydreams while high.

Sometimes these CEOs and "leaders" make mask-off comments and it just demonstrates the gulf between how they and normal people think. It can be quite frightening sometimes to imagine that these kinds of people are the people who wield power in our world, these people who share such little in common with you

It's the same in a few subreddits I frequent as well. Loads of accounts, all a couple of days old, all making the same or similar comments in a tone of voice that is completely different from the tone people usually use in those subreddits. If these incredibly-obvious no-content non-comments are the best that LLMs can do I think our jobs are safe.

Just as our ancestors did.

So what, we should just sit back and not try to improve things? I’ve never understood this perspective. It just seems like a way to try for people who have done well in the current system to justify to themselves the fact that in reality people in wealthy countries do still struggle with poverty. There are millions of people living hand-to-mouth.

Not to mention the fact that the reason wealthy countries have got to this stage of development is often because they are exporting the negative externalities associated with this lifestyle to poor countries.

Trains accelerate and decelerate relatively often compared to planes where you only really notice changes in velocity at take-off and landing so I don't think it would make a difference

That’s Lord Lebedev to you. Almost unbelievably he was given a peerage by Boris Johnson.

It was a big story in the UK for a while, Johnson also attended a party at Lebedev’s villa in Italy after a NATO conference.

I hope the Israelis manage to kick out this government, reading about what some of them were up to is astonishing. Particularly Ben-Gvir[0], he seems like a horrible piece of work with his repeated calls for genocide, but none of the rest of them seem much better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itamar_Ben-Gvir

Journalism seems like possibly the worst industry to do this. As so-called "AI" becomes omnipresent I think people are going to be crying out for things written by real people instead of the LLM-generated drivel that is already taking over the Internet.

Making people pay for bail is an almost exclusively USA thing. Doesn't seem to be causing many problems in the rest of the world to assess bail on criteria other than "is able to afford it".

That doesn't make any sense. What makes hunting any more natural than agriculture? Isn't exerting control over our environment one of the defining characteristics of humanity?

The trends aren’t really useful either unless you are recording strenuous exercise with the watch. I do a lot of cycling and my fitness in terms of how much power I can put out and for how long and my average heart rate for the same power has increased vastly, yet according to Apple my VO2 max has stayed consistent at around 45 for years since I only record walking exercises with it. I guess there’s not much it can tell if you only hit the mid 80s bpm at most during an exercise.

I realise it’s also another estimate but based on my cycling exercises Garmin is estimating my VO2 max at 55 and it does show a progression in my values.

Well, to use a quote from Anatole France who put it more pithily:

> In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.

That site doesn't seem great, but according to Wiktionary "assay" is a doublet of "essay", i.e. the origin is the same but they were borrowed into English via two different sources.

"Assay" came via Norman, "essay" came via French.

There are lots of other examples like this where one word came from Norman and the other from French, e.g. warden + guardian, warranty + guarantee

Yeah I am learning standard notation and I do look at the standard notation for pieces to look at the instructions from the composer. I mean, I can read music but and I could figure out how to play baroque music from standard notation, I would just be glacially slow.

I'm still working my way through Sor etudes so I learn the fretboard.

I'm completely self-taught, so while I am teaching myself to read music I'm learning baroque music through tab. It's just too frustrating for me to try reading complicated standard notation at the moment.

My main resources for baroque tabs would be:

- classtab.org - classclef.com

Of the two I would say classtab is the more accurate.

For example, here's the tab for the prelude from 998: https://www.classtab.org/bach_js_bwv0998_lute_suite_in_eb_1_...

Scroll down to the drop-D one, that's the one I play.

With baroque music I find legato is so incredibly important so really concentrate on fingerings that let the notes ring out. There may frequently be an easier fingering to grab but which means you have to stop the bass note too early, so it takes a bit of experimentation to figure it out.

It's very difficult but incredibly rewarding when you manage to produce the counterpoint yourself, I'm smiling to myself the whole time while playing.

I love 998. The bass-line in the allegro especially is so punchy, especially coming after the fugue.

Always a pleasure to listen to David Russell.

My favourite of his is his arrangement of Handel's passacaglia from HWV 432: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b3D0t1DiEg

If it's baroque don't fix it.

I came to Bach only recently, I bought a classical guitar a couple of years ago and just over the last eight months or so I've been really getting into baroque music.

I don't know why I didn't appreciate it before, I guess I just never gave Bach a chance, but it's some of the most amazing stuff I've ever heard. The counterpoint that makes it feel like the music is spiralling around you is just otherworldly.

Modern music albums aren't really written with that in mind in my experience. They're optimised for people skipping through playlists in a streaming service, not going on a journey through an album.