rogerclark

These things really suck. The novelty wears off instantly. It's uncomfortable having to either stand up to get something from the robot or awkwardly reach over while sitting down. The moment when food comes out is the most likely time for customers to express positive emotion at a restaurant. You don't get to express gratitude toward human staff and the staff don't receive that positive feedback. The people working there are relegated entirely to cleanup and maintenance.

But I guess the robot companies are making money.

I would guess that abiogenesis is often framed around randomness as a strategy to argue for its implausibility. Of course, a completely random system is unlikely to produce enough coherence to convince anyone that it could be possible.

But in reality, the universe is full of patterns. The laws of physics are not random. Water behaves in very specific ways. Our planet revolves around the Sun in 365 day intervals. The planet rotates every 24 hours. Even out of these two interlocking patterns, you can see how energy delivery to the surface of the planet could result in mechanical and chemical cycles that may result in non-random mineral formation, concentration gradients, and thermal dynamics.

Scientists argue that abiogenesis is a result of inherently chaotic but non-random processes, not a hypothetical probabilistic scenario like monkeys with typewriters.

It already has, for better or worse. Why does anyone still take this guy seriously? It's one thing to be skeptical that AI is going to make the world a better place... it's another thing to be skeptical that it exists and actually does things.

You can't grasp this because there is no FTL communication. Quantum entanglement does not enable FTL communication, and wormholes etc. are entirely theoretical.

Is "what is this ?" even a productive comment in itself? That's the point the parent is trying to make. If you click on this link, and you can't tell what it is, you probably don't care what it is. And after that, if you don't care enough to search "Daffy Duck" on Google or whatever, you really don't care what it is. Why would we possibly need a Hacker News comment explaining what Warner Brothers cartoons are?

"Disappointed, but not defeated, they resolved to build a better version of Mario."

Carmack is a great programmer to be sure. Commander Keen, however, was not a better version of Mario. It was worse than Mario in every way -- art, music, and gameplay are all inferior.

Nobody outside of Gen X PC gamers know what Commander Keen is. Everyone knows what Mario is. While copying may be the way design works, copying only gets you so far.

htmx itself is not the future of anything. Businesses are not using htmx to make money and nobody is hiring for htmx. It's an ideological technology rather than a practical one. Maybe it'll inspire something that will turn out to be the future of frontend, but it won't be htmx as it is now.

That first sentence is one of the best-distilled insights I've ever read on HN.

IMO, the most distinct flavors in Dr. Pepper are cherry and almond. Benzaldehyde, an "artificial cherry" molecule listed in this spectrometer video, is found in both cherry and almond extracts.

If you're familiar with the taste of amaretto or marzipan, try thinking of those next time you drink a Dr. Pepper. That will unlock the flavor discrimination for you.

Japanese snacks and drinks also use high fructose corn syrup.

Someone please acquihire Sean and his compiler! This guy is a once-in-a-generation polymath: an expert in compilers (obviously), GPUs (worked on CUDA at NVIDIA), physics and topography (JPL etc).

Buy the compiler, get somebody who could build you a nuclear reactor, drug discovery simulator and a GPU architecture. Deal of the century.

The stereotype premise is funny but the jokes don't land very often. The jump cuts where he repeats words are also not jokes at all.

The recent video about the T3 stack just lists off names of libraries that we're all forced to use. I get that it's relatable but there's a difference between funny and relatable.

This would be a fantastic way to resolve both the gravity problem as well as the nature of quantum uncertainty.

The "random" fluctuations of gravity in Oppenheim's theory could be intuitively explained by the cumulative gravitational effects from all other mass in the universe, which of course is always in constant motion. This isn't explicitly stated anywhere in his work as far as I can tell, but it seems to be implied.

In order for it to fully make sense, you will need to study it from multiple angles. Hooktheory.com, books, and lots of YouTube videos will get you there over the course of 1-10 years. Ultimately, you won't understand music theory without trying to write a lot of your own music. It's like programming: you can read a book about JavaScript, but if you never wrote software and you never plan to, there's simply no way to actually understand the book.

An explanation of how this application might work (haven't verified from the source or letting it run long enough): let's say it chooses a subset of notes ("scale degrees") from a minor key, probably chosen at random. A subset of 5 or fewer notes from a scale (a pentatonic scale) will constrain the possible space of melodies so that most configurations will sound good. Even fewer and you get a more predictably pleasant (but perhaps less interesting) result. For instance, the notes that comprise the root chord will always sound good when played in any order. Acid lines typically suggest some kind of minor chord by playing an arpeggio (usually a repetitive melody consisting entirely of notes from a particular chord).

Also, a subset of notes from one scale are always going to be present in another scale. You can transition (modulate) from one scale to another by having a section use a shared subset of notes, then switching to the new one. In this manner, you can have a single piece of music traverse all possible scales (in acid techno, almost entirely minor scales).

The truth is that the Turing test turned out to be useless. Whether we have passed it or not has no bearing on my life or anyone else's. The way I talk to ChatGPT isn't the way I talk to a real person, despite it already being capable of communicating with human language, teaching me things, and helping with my work and daily life. No real person would tolerate a turn-by-turn exchange of 2 minute monologues, but that's (apparently) what I want from an AI.

And millions of people are fooled into thinking GPT is a real person every day, with spam and robocalls and social media bots. Maybe it won't fool everyone all the time, but it can fool some people a lot of the time. And it's only going to get more sophisticated. The only ones concerned about the Turing test are 70 year old GOFAI professors -- everyone else is dealing with the practical realities of computers suddenly having language capabilities.

And then what? People sit around making animated videos, all of which are completely interchangeable because they're made at zero budget with the exact same technology? Great. Can't wait to ignore all of that stuff just like we ignore the existing low-quality garbage that's already out there.

Bard is a really stupid name. I get the origin of the name, and it's a short word, and in some sense it's a nice vibe with implications of a mystical poet or whatever. But it's a word that most people don't use.

As many have commented, ChatGPT is a pretty bad name too -- people get the order of the letters wrong all the time -- but at least it starts with "Chat", which explains what you're supposed to do with it.

TypeScript only has "discriminated unions" in an extremely busted form. While they are encoded in its type system, there is little support in control flow. Exhaustiveness checking is essentially optional: it's enabled in switch statements by either `assertNever` in the `default` case, or by limiting your function return from within switch cases with the `strictNullChecks` option enabled.

Without a match expression and first-class exhaustiveness checking, discriminated unions are far less useful. Of course, this is because they don't want the TypeScript compiler to actually generate code, so they can't add runtime features. While TypeScript is better than no TypeScript, it seems like a massive waste to build a compiler and then shy away from making people's lives easier when possible.

It seems this way on the surface because everything seems equally inevitable. Maybe it's all inevitable, but many technologies come around and don't look like something described in science fiction.

People vaguely predicted the smartphone, but not really. It is not from Star Trek or Gibson. This technology may have been inevitable, but its design, terminology, and effects were not predicted in detail by mainstream sci-fi, and it really did turn out differently.

On the other hand, the Humane AI Pin is absolutely a Star Trek: TNG communicator badge. There's no denying it. VR and the Metaverse are lifted directly from Neuromancer and Snow Crash. They didn't have to end up that way, but they did, because we had those examples in fiction to steer our thinking.

It's true that predicting things isn't as impressive or as important as making them. But many people predict things that don't happen, and most people don't accurately predict anything. The sci-fi authors are a lot more like the people who make the things than the people who don't make anything and don't predict anything.

At Apple, we had Project Managers (for instance "Engineering Project Managers" or EPMs). These PMs were not our bosses, and functioned as our peers in the organizations. They had a well-defined role: to facilitate the project being completed and to manage the dependencies with other teams and projects. Apple PMs do this through a combination of meetings, Radar (issue tracking), and interfacing with ICs and their managers.

This is different from the "Product Manager" at other companies which typically "owns" a product's direction and has authority over the people building it. That mixes project management with people management, politics, and worst of all, ego.

I never worked with an EPM at Apple that caused interpersonal problems. They all just wanted to fix bugs, figure out what we could and couldn't do in a specific timeframe, and release products on schedule. IMO, this is one aspect of Apple's organizational process that other companies should emulate, but I've never encountered it anywhere else. Maybe this kind of thing can only work at large companies that can afford to hire people for such a well-defined role.

It is a generational thing. If you grew up with Minecraft, you won't be able to see its flaws. Growing up with pixel art from NES and SNES games, the Minecraft aesthetic was obviously low quality programmer art rather than something meticulously crafted for its medium by an artist with real skills.

However, ugly or not, most people don't care, and the gameplay itself was so interesting to its audience that it didn't really matter. Lots of things are more approachable and relatable specifically because they're ugly, and I think that applies to both Minecraft and Roblox. It's easier to imagine yourself making or participating in something that doesn't look like it took a genius to do. They made zillions of dollars and lots of people have fun with their games.

But that doesn't mean I have to like it.

Casual listeners can't detect it, but it strongly affects the possibility space for production purposes. For instance, if you're writing happy hardcore music at 170+ BPM with a kick drum on every beat, you will get surprisingly little time between those kicks to work with the bass and other instruments. While this is a somewhat extreme example, even something like the difference between 128 BPM and 138 BPM can change what you're making. A commercial house track produced at 128 BPM may sound like 90s Eurodance when played at 138. Similarly, a deep house track produced at 122 might feel like radio EDM when played at 128.

While you could certainly make psytrance at 150 BPM, it's going to pack a different punch. You'll make different decisions about what works and what doesn't, and then it's going to end up sounding even more different from the rest of the 138 PBM psytrance -- oops, you've shifted genres. Slow it down to 110 and then people aren't dancing to the track quite the same way anymore. Try dancing to the same song at 100 BPM and then at 120 BPM... you'll notice the difference immediately. Tempo isn't everything, but it's much more than just a number.

Some of us actually like working in person. I'm much more productive in the office, and I think many other people are too.

I can buy the real estate argument to some degree, but it just isn't as simple as a giant conspiracy to get everyone back in a box so they can monitor us.

It's possible. The eye strain is real after a couple hours, though. And I've already run into situations where I wanted to show someone something and had to "change modes". Having the laptop display for auxiliary use still seems important, although you could probably get away with crappier and cheaper screens again.

I've been using XReal (formerly NReal) Air glasses with my laptops lately. They just act as a display when plugged into a USB-C port. After using these seriously for a month or two, it's clear to me that the "killer app" for these HMDs is just using the computer for normal stuff. The ergonomics are great: I don't have to stare down at my laptop screen, and I don't even need a desk or table when I'm using the glasses – it's usually more comfortable to just put the laptop in my lap. And I can turn the laptop screen off, so nobody can see what I'm doing. It's a complete game changer for coffee shops, planes, and working in bed without disturbing your spouse. I don't think the Quest or other VR headsets are typically used this way.

The Vision Pro is obviously just a development platform for apps and for Apple to miniaturize everything, and then it's all going into a pair of regular glasses for everyone to wear all day. Meta is trying to get out in front of them with their Ray-Ban partnership, but those don't include a display yet, although I think they could have done it already.

Great reply. Definitely a less depressing perspective.

"In my head, the way it happens is..." Okay, sure, man. Whatever you say.

Decades of research have proven that people cannot be trusted to describe how their own minds work. We are unreliable narrators of our own experience even in the best conditions, and having a zeitgeisty, quirky trait like aphantasia to wear as a badge will obviously skew the results even further.

Personally, I don't believe for a second that there are a significant number of sighted, otherwise typical human beings out there who have zero ability to visualize anything. Of course, people get better at things with practice, so I buy that some people might be better at it than others. I couldn't recall melodies very well before studying music for several years. But if you know what an apple looks like, and you can describe that or draw it, even crudely, then you have some inner representation of what an apple looks like. Whatever words you use to convey your internal experience of recalling or assembling the relevant information are inconsequential.

Do you wholeheartedly believe this and can you truly not understand why others might be uncomfortable with the direction of generative AI? Defending your viewpoint makes sense, but I don't buy the idea that the other stance is completely incomprehensible.

The grandma doesn't need generative fonts. She already has fonts that ship with her phone and computer. She already has iMovie for her grandkid videos. Does she need the ability to generate videos of political figures saying things they didn't say?

Obviously, what concerns us is a race to the bottom for the value of all human output.

You must not know any designers. Pretty much everyone I know would consider that to be pretty fun – this is exactly the kind of thing artistic kids say they want to do when they grow up. And most of us would rather get paid to design cereal boxes than to do many other things, and almost everyone would rather do it than to not get paid at all.