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taejo

2,433 karma · joined May 18, 2011

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taejo··on Spaghettifying DRAM
I'm not saying you did and I do think the OP is written with LLM help, but these sentences did make my AI sense tingle: "I just want it to be clear that some of us can pick up Claudisms within just a couple of sentences with no effort. A Claude-generated sentence, in isolation, may not ring any alarm bells. A few of them in a row, however, that's a load-bearing smoking gun right there." The OTT mixed metaphor is part of the problem but I think the sensational tone of the whole post is also part of it
taejo··on Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change
Painting in such broad strokes, the German system also sounds like the ACA, but it's really not: the high level description really erases key differences.

In Germany there is nothing like bronze/silver/gold plans. All statutory health insurance covers what is required to be covered by regulations, with just a few bonus services, at the regulated tariff plus just a few percentage points of variation. So the 90% of people in Germany who have statutory health insurance [1] have essentially the same coverage. The tariff is a percentage of income (up to a cap), not a flat fee.

[1] not everyone is required to have statutory health insurance, for example employees above an income threshold and self-employed people

taejo··on Farmer, marketer at odds over sales of white nectarines
How do you propose to use AI to grow fruit trees faster?
taejo··on I Co-Founded Wikipedia. Now I'm Banned for Life
"I've opposed Wikipedia for twenty years. Now I'm banned for life." would also be a correct headline, and maybe a more honest one.
taejo··on How it feels to practice for IOAI in Iran
Well done! I had a somewhat similar experience twenty years ago in the informatics olympiads. I had no idea about the whole world of algorithms, complexity, etc. until a friend recommended to do the first round of our national informatics olympiad. The first round was pretty simple programming, the second round was a whole new world.

By the way "Ng" is Andrew Ng's surname, it's not NG with a capital G.

taejo··on German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function
Btw a visa is a document allowing entry into a country, while VISA is a word mark used by Visa, inc. for their payment cards and network. I think you're referring to the travel document, but since the context also includes payment networks, I'm not 100% sure.
taejo··on What is f(x) ≤ g(x) + O(1)? Inequalities With Asymptotics
The point GP is making, is that everyday mathematics is not done in Lean, but in a language that's more like JavaScript, where equals doesn't always mean equals, + and • mean whatever seems convenient at the time, and objects sometimes change type without notice.
taejo··on Tomorrow's emoji today: Unicode 17.0
Emojis, however, are a Japanese invention (related but different from emoticons).

BTW, even the word emoji (from Japanese e = picture, moji = character) is unrelated to the word emoticon.

taejo··on Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials
It seems TM SGNL also works when you're messaging with somebody using the genuine Signal app. They aren't gonna make a group chat with your archive bot to message you, and they might not be pleased when you add them to such a group chat.
taejo··on Blue Prince Is a Roguelike Puzzle Masterpiece
NetHack does have ghost files (where you find the levels previous characters died on, including their ghost and their possibly-cursed loot). It's definitely not the same kind of progression as in modern rogue-lites, but it can be a boost to pick up the equipment you found on a previous run.
taejo··on Zlib-rs is faster than C
Mercaptan is a group of compounds, more than one of which are used as gas odorants, so in some places, gas smells of rotten eggs, similar to H2S, while in others gas doesn't smell like that at all, but a quite distinct smell that's reminiscent garlic and durian.
taejo··on Learn Arabic
If the reason someone wanted to learn Arabic was because they thought they could learn one language to do all of those things, it's clear why they might just drop the idea when they learn they can't.
taejo··on Why can't we remember our lives as babies or toddlers?
Rust itself cannot cause tetanus but it can include unsafe blocks which can activate tetanus spores by FFI.
taejo··on Why Does Integer Addition Approximate Float Multiplication?
Excellent comment!

As a historical tidbit I'll add that Romans did develop two ways to write larger numbers.

1. Writing a line (vinculum) over a numeral to multiply its value by 1,000. This was in fact extended to writing a line to the left and above a numeral to multiply its value by 1,000,000, and could in principle be extended to lines below and to the right to multiply by 10^9 and 10^12, and even nested boxes for larger powers.

2. The use |), |)), |))), ... for 500, 5,000, 50,000, ... and (|), ((|)), (((|))), ... for 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, ... These can be continued indefinitely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Large_numbers

Both require an ever increasing number of marks just to write the increasing powers, as well as an ever increasing number of powers being summed, but both increase only logarithmically, so we end up using O((log n)²) marks to write n. This is quadratically worse than positional notation, but exponentially better than just writing M over and over.

taejo··on I tasted Honda’s spicy rodent-repelling tape and I will do it again (2021)
The berries (but not the seeds!) are apparently edible, and I have myself eaten one without noticing any ill effect. IIRC it was indeed the berries that were used in the Agatha Christie novel, so apparently a mistake.
taejo··on Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more
Moreover, in a later picture on the page you can see an example showing a -dóttir name in that field (I had wondered if perhaps it was only used for people who happened to have a "real" surname as opposed to a patronymic, e.g. foreign-born citizens) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_passport#/media/Fi...
taejo··on South Korea's Democracy Saved Itself (2024)
Just a technical nitpick: Hitler was appointed by President Hindenburg, not directly elected. However Hindenburg was directly elected and Hitler was leader of the party that received the most votes (though still a minority).
taejo··on DHS removes all members of cyber security advisory boards, halts investigations
AFAIK it's typical for whitehouse.gov to be completely replaced with every new president
taejo··on Lies I was told about collab editing, Part 1: Algorithms for offline editing
> Do you think that a LLM/"AI" can reliably

No. LLMs definitely have uses where reliability is not a requirement, but that's one requirement which LLMs clearly never meet

taejo··on Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code
The rule is non-free parking. The exception is Sundays.
taejo··on Argentinian farmer finds family of 20k-year-old armadillos
In a few minutes of searching I couldn't find any report in English that doesn't have this error.
taejo··on Argentinian farmer finds family of 20k-year-old armadillos
The OP seems to be at the end of a long chain of broken telephone. The 19 February 2020 press release from the institute doing the dig doesn't say anything about cars [1]. The 21 February 2020 article in Metro [2] correctly states that glyptodonts could grow to the size of a VW Beetle, but leaves out that it's not this species of glyptodont and certainly not these specimens (it also incorrectly calls glyptodonts a genus; the specimens here are in the genus Glyptodon but the largest in the subfamily Glyptodontinae are Doedicurus clavicaudatus). The mixing up of these specimens with the largest ones makes it into the headline.

1. https://www.conicet.gov.ar/hallan-cuatro-gliptodontes-en-la-...

2. https://metro.co.uk/2020/02/21/ancient-armadillo-size-car-di...

taejo··on Passport Photos
Why go to the office when you can take a selfie with your phone and order your passport online?
taejo··on Passport Photos
Don't know about Britain but the US also allows passport renewals by mail, so they can't check the photo against your face but they presumably can check it against your previous passport photo.
taejo··on Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations
> This is an absolute disgrace. And then these are the people who lecture you on "inclusion".

Are they? Is there any evidence of correlation between these two groups of people?

taejo··on Introducing Our New Name
It's G as in "forge" and J as in "yo".

In Esperanto Ĝ represents that soft G sound and the word is spelled "forĝejo", which breaks into "forĝi" (to forge) plus "ejo" (a place), i.e. a place where one forges.

taejo··on Transparent Like Frosted Glass
I don't think anybody's disagreeing that you get better audio reproduction and less fragility from CDs. Just that they aren't learnable or hackable, and learners and hackers lose something (something separate, and maybe even less valuable, than audio reproduction but still something of value)
taejo··on MSG is back. Is the idea it's bad for us just a myth or food science?
It wouldn't suprise me if celery was relatively rich in glutamate given its use in stocks and mirepoix, but I think that celery powder is mostly used for its nitrate and nitrite content as a meat curing agent.
taejo··on Lady tasting tea
There was a post here about it, a couple months ago, I think
taejo··on Lady tasting tea
There are more teas in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

For example Kashmiri noon chai is tea boiled in milk for about an hour with baking soda before adding ice. It is then aerated by pouring between cups to make it slightly foamy.

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