spuz

There's some evidence for that if you try these two different prompts with Gpt 5.2 thinking:

I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50m away. Should I walk or drive to the car wash?

Answer: walk

Try this brainteaser: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50m away. Should I walk or drive to the car wash?

Answer: drive

Thanks - I think this is the article I was thinking of that really helped me to understand git when I first started using it back in the day. I tried to find it again and couldn't.

I think this is a great idea. I wonder if it's technically possible to only unlock the apps when you have a certain other app (i.e. the Quran app) open for a given amount of time. Right now it just starts a 5 minute timer which means I can go and do something else but not actually spend time on the thing I want to practice.

So what was the programming error in the TPM?

Not sure if it's just Firefox, but a lot of things seem to be rendering incorrectly and very slowly for me. The text for the descriptions is very small compared to the rest of the text which makes it kind of hard to read. Also, on the Spectrum demo, the prism is displayed up and to the left of the light rays. After a few minutes the pages just grind to a halt so I can't really explore the rest.

This completely killed my OS and nearly took the PC with it. It started running ok but as it filled the screen, the FPS dropped and then my browser stopped responding, then the mouse started moving VERY slowly and then the screen went black and my Bluetooth got disconnected. At that point, even long-pressing the power off button did nothing and I had to switch off the PC at the wall...

I am going to put the blame on Firefox and Linux Mint but it's honestly impressive how a simple animated simulation can do this.

You think Meta secretly wanted to remove 4.7m Australian users while saying:

> "We call on the Australian government to engage with industry constructively to find a better way forward, such as incentivising all of industry to raise the standard in providing safe, privacy-preserving, age-appropriate experiences online, instead of blanket bans,"

because ultimately they think it will attract more users to their platforms?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-15/social-media-ban-data...

https://www.9news.com.au/national/australia-social-media-ban...

Why can't we just call it "play". That is what we used to call doing things without a purpose.

I wish people would disclose when they used an LLM to write for them. This comes across as so clearly written by ChatGPT (I don't know if it is) that it seriously devalues any potential insights contained within. At least if the author was honest, I'd be able to judge their writing accordingly.

Thinking more about the "best results". Could this not be done by transforming the ascii glyphs into bitmaps, and then using some kind of matrix multiplication or dot production calculation to calculate the ascii character with the highest similarity to the underlying pixel grid? This would presumably lend itself to SIMD or GPU acceleration. I'm not that familiar with this type of image processing so I'm sure someone with more experience can clarify.

In the appendix, he talks about reducing the lookup space by quantising the sampled points to just 8 possible values. That allowed him to make a look up table about 2MB in size which were apparently incredibly fast.

> The higher end TV, needless to say, didn't do that

Actually it is very much needed to say that. Manufacturers get away with crappy unbearably slow UIs even on expensive TVs because it's not something that gets enough consideration by reviewers or indeed buyers.

This was really fun. I actually went back to the beginning of the archive to find more puzzles to solve. I think it would be nice if when you have solved one of the historical puzzles it would give you a button to click onto the next day's puzzle.

I actually never came across the situation where my grid was unsolvable. As I was playing I was wondering what kind of algorithm you used to come up with grids that have no possible dead ends. Since this is clearly an issue, I wonder if it's possible to come up with puzzles that always have a solution similar to how the algorithm for creating Sudoku puzzles always guarantees it can be solved without guessing.

Very cool. It's fun to see what triggers the "bang" effect when you are at supersonic speeds and in "Moving Source" mode.

My elderly parents asked me to install Linux on their laptops this Christmas after finally getting sick of the adware on Windows. If Microsoft can make them switch, anyone can.

I honest felt like the tide had turned when my elderly parents both asked me wipe Windows and install Linux on their laptops this Christmas. So far they have both had an overwhelming positive experience. They say it's such a relief not to have to dodge the minefield of popups and upsells and ads.

I can imagine this job website implemented this criterion to guard against some kind of abuse but I cannot imagine what that abuse might look like or how this prevents it.

In this case, you'd be judging the AI made assets as simply AI made and the human made gameplay and programming as human made. I'm not suggesting the AI assets would be transformed into art just because they are part of some human creative work.

There is a small irony that the Indie Game Awards rejects nominations of games using AI but The Game Awards does not. It is independent teams of developers who are less likely to be able to afford to pay an artists who may be able to produce something of value with AI assets that they otherwise would not have the resources for. On the other side, it is big studios with a good track record and more investment who are more likely to be able to pay artists and benefit from their artistry.

To me, art is a form of expression from one human being to another. An indie game with interesting gameplay but AI generated assets still has value as a form of expression from the programmer. Maybe if it's successful, the programmer can afford to pay an artist to help create their next game. If we want to encourage human made art, I think we should focus on rewarding the big game studios who do this and not being so strict on the 2 or 3 person teams who might not exist without the help of AI.

(I say this knowing Clair Obscur was made by a large well respected team so if they used AI assets I think it's fair their award was stripped. I just wish The Game Awards would also consider using such a standard.)

The link to the paper I gave is the latest research on contrails and the potential effect of contrail mitigation and answers all the questions you have asked here. The video I gave boils all that information down into an easily digestible format. It honestly baffles me that you start your reply with "Finally some science" when the very same information was already provided to you. If you want to reply to my comment without digging into the links I shared then you should specify that you haven't had a chance to look into them.

It does not state that half of aircraft pollution is from contrails. It says half of the climate impact of aviation is from contrails. Soot can have other effects and cause pollution in other ways such as reducing air quality but I suspect that is very minimal compared to other industries.

The guide presented by the map gives a very good explanation on how contrail formation can be mitigating by altering the course of flights to reduce the formation in areas where it will have the most impact. This is based on a recent study that showed contrail avoidance could be one of the most cost-effective methods of reducing warming that we know of.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2634-4505/ad310c

Simon Clark did a good video on this recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoOVqQ5sa08

Did you ever find the video again or another like it?

It's uncharitable because the comment purports to summarise the entire paper while simply cherry picking the worst result. It would be like if asked how did I do on my test and you said well you got question 1 wrong and then didn't elaborate.

Now I get your point that a function that is 99.7% accurate will eventually always be incorrect but that's not what the comment said.

That's a bit of an uncharitable summary. In bases 8, 12, 16, 24 and 32 their model achieved 99.7% accuracy. They would never expect it to achieve 100% accuracy. It would be like if you trained a model to predict whether or not a given number is prime. A model that was 100% accurate would defy mathematical knowledge but a model that was 99.7% would certainly be impressive.

In this case, they prove that the model works by categorising inputs into a number of binary classes which just happen to be very good predictors for this otherwise random seeming sequence. I don't know whether or not some of these binary classes are new to mathematics but either way, their technique does show that transformer models can be helpful in uncovering mathematical patterns even in functions that are not continuous.

I'd recommend you watch the video which is linked at the top of the Reddit post. Everything matches up with an individual learner who genuinely got stung.

> My view is that the approach to building technology which is embodied by move fast and break things is exactly what we should not be doing because you can't afford to break things and then fix them afterwards.

- Demis Hassabis "The Thinking Game"

There are a lot of people who don't know stuff. Nothing wrong with that. He says in his video "I love Google, I use all the products. But I was never expecting for all the smart engineers and all the billions that they spent to create such a product to allow that to happen. Even if there was a 1% chance, this seems unbelievable to me" and for the average person, I honestly don't see how you can blame them for believing that.

The earliest use of this term I can find is here: https://andrewbrown.substack.com/p/the-inhuman-centipede

It was also used as the title for this post by Cory Doctrow discussing the same problem: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshit...

Yeah, it's also why you should install Windows first and then Linux not the other way round.

> So really, why wouldn’t I blow that up and start over?

I really wish more people would mention the option of dual booting. Use another separate SSD to install your linux OS and that way you always have the option of going back to your Windows install. You can even reserve some programs for Windows and do everything else with linux.

There's really no need to approach it with a "screw it" attitude. You'll probably get yourself in too deep with that approach.

Then who are they targeting? Who else would currently be "implementing every single step"?