ryanblakeley

That definitely stands out to me about nicer homes. It's amazing to be able to open the windows or be in the garden and only hear wind and animals, and still be near shops and stuff.

Yes, there's something interesting going on there with smells and body language. It's a matter of how flexible you want to be with the word "story". In a strict sense, there needs to be who, what, when, where, why, and how. I think some of those elements are there for other animals, but maybe not all of them, and maybe not an ability to ask clarifying questions.

That's a great place to look for story-telling, I just don't think it's been shown yet (I would love to be wrong about that). If you could decode in their language something about characters taking actions, time and place, past and future, that would be pretty incredible.

I was hoping this would turn off the full page modal people see when they land on a post, but I already had it switched off, so I guess not.

We should approach animal intelligence and communication with humility.

A lot of it is based on smell, body language, and signals we don't pay attention to. I don't think any animal has been shown to tell stories, but obviously they share information in other ways. Only a handful of individuals have demonstrated some kind of ability to understand a story (macaws and koko the gorilla).

For anybody interested in animal intelligence, that's the focus of my newsletter.

AI training sets keep expanding, and I was thinking about the rate of progress and what natural limits would there be. I took a low-effort stab at estimating the size of a Panopticon text corpus, and was wondering are my assumptions/calculations reasonable?

> The collective annual warming effect of these five chemicals on the planet is equivalent to the emissions produced by a small country like Switzerland.

> When CFCs were phased out, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) were brought in as substitutes. But CFCs can crop up as unintended by-products during HFC manufacture.

> The appearance of CFC-13 is much more baffling. “We really have no clue” where the emissions are coming from, Vollmer says. “We don’t know of any chemical process where this will show up as a by-product.”

It seems natural that straight lines across a landscape would be useful markers. I wonder to what degree bees use non-linear landmarks, if at all. In an environment with many straight lines, like an agricultural field with row crops, irrigation channels, fences, and one wavy creek bed, would the irregular feature be a helpful marker?

It's easier to not understand the risks. It takes extra effort to understand AI safety problems and more effort again to solve them. People who blow off AI safety are being blithe and not engaging the arguments.

This one had a 3:1 size ratio. Oumuamua was closer to 10:1, which was one (of several) reason it was so anomalous.

What's the difference between caring and affecting behavior? If people cancel their subscriptions after a major outage, wouldn't it be reasonable to interpret that some of them cared about performance and reliability?

I know I care. If I pay for something and it sucks, I stop paying for it because it's not up to my expectations.

Corner crossing seems like something that could be solved by saying "where two corners meet there must be an easement xx meters wide to allow the public to cross". I can't imagine any reason why the private landowner should be allowed to put up fencing and signs that block the corner.

In cases where the only way to access a parcel of public land is through private land then an easement should be created. If a road or trail can't be built for whatever reason then a sign with an arrow should be the rule.

*idk about that last part; it's a dumb anecdote. the auto-formatting i'm salty about is prettier. ones that are manually invoked and either 0 config or highly configurable (like eslint) seem sensible. use an auto-formatting hook in your text-editor if you want; i just don't like the absolutism of it being hard-baked into everyone's workflow and a tool with limited non-zero config.

i completely agree with you. i think the people who advocate for auto-formatters must not be very skilled at using their text-editors and/or don't put enough attention on readability/understandability. i'm happy with linters and command line tools to auto-format when you explicitly call for it, like `eslint --fix`; i'm just not on board with the formatter running on git hooks or in whatever automated workflow.

almost every rule has an exception where understandability could be improved by violating the rule, ex. line length. code format is huge for understandability/readability, which makes it worth paying attention to while you're writing.

in my experience the loudest advocates for code formatters are the ones who write really complicated code; which makes sense that they just hammer on code until it works without being able to reduce and simplify their logic and naming.