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truculent

1,536 karma · joined August 25, 2018

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truculent··on Pi 1.0
IIRC, this was a deliberate choice from the creator who originally wanted the project to be hard to find!
truculent··on Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm
> the problems with the dating market are not a matching problem but a clearing problem.

> In markets, it can mean buyers and sellers aren’t being matched at the expected price/quantity.

truculent··on It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs
Why regulate gun ownership, if homicide is already illegal ?
truculent··on Rethinking Database Programming
The problem here is that you still have to do some pointless and tedious conversion between generated data structures and your domain data structures. Maybe with LLMs, some of that tedium goes away, but you still have to test, maintain and understand that part of the code.
truculent··on They’re made out of weights
> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things.

That agency or free will exists outside of our subjective experience is an assumption; does any given theory need to explain agency, or is it sufficient to explain that we feel we have agency?

truculent··on The ways we contain Claude across products
The point is that if you have a 10% chance of frying motherboard, at 10 a week, you might expect 1 fried p/w, but it could easily be more which may be catastrophic.

At 1000, the number of fried boards will be more predictable and therefore the risk to the business is lower, even if the long-run averages are the same.

truculent··on Teaching Claude Why
Ted Chiang vindicated again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Obje...
truculent··on Global warming has accelerated significantly
Hypothetically speaking, if people in the last group were right, and that is the logical conclusion to be reached from careful evaluation of the evidence, wouldn’t the other positions indeed be ones of wilful denial of the state of the climate?
truculent··on The Jolla Phone Proved We've Been Using Smartphones Wrong All Along
> This isn’t some hipster nostalgia trip or a flip phone for people who think the 90s were peak civilization. This is something way cooler. A phone that gives you back something we didn’t even realize we’d lost. The ability to actually, truly, shut the hell up.
truculent··on Researchers discover molecular difference in autistic brains
> As an example: I'm autistic and I learn inside-out, building larger new concepts out of smaller existing ones; those with Asperger's on the other paw, learn outside-in instead, breaking down larger existing concepts into smaller new ones; both are part of the "autism spectrum", but differ very fundamentally.

This is a really interesting observation - can you expand on this a bit more, please? How did you first notice this distinction?

When, for example, learning a new concept in math or physics, what would outside-in look like vs inside out? Would you characterise neurotypical learning in one way or the other?

truculent··on Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
Privilege isn't just about wealth. The point is that although anyone can ignore the news, the news won't necessarily ignore them!
truculent··on Blending SQL and Python with Sqlorm
You may enjoy https://pugsql.org
truculent··on "Our research is greatly sped up by AI but AI still needs us"
> For some reason

> _brief_ but enjoyable era

truculent··on We are building AI slaves. Alignment through control will fail
> AGI will behave as if it were sentient but will not have consciousness

How could we possibly know that with any certainty?

truculent··on Gleam OTP – Fault Tolerant Multicore Programs with Actors
I like all of the above but have no understanding of the BEAM or OTP. Can you recommend a good place to start learning about that?
truculent··on Eels are fish
Was it Waterland by Graham Swift (fiction, but has some eel diversions IIRC)?
truculent··on Major reversal in ocean circulation detected in the Southern Ocean
Isn't the issue that historical data is consistent with the overturning model, which adds weight to our assumption that it has previously been stable. These new measurements (and observations?) are consistent with the overturning circulation weakening.

I agree with you in principle - my impression (perhaps wrong - not an expert) was that there are additional data points supporting the idea of a consistent status quo.

truculent··on Fairphone 6 is switching to a new design that's even more sustainable
I quite like the idea of ruling that device sellers have to either offer software support, or allow the hardware to be unlocked
truculent··on Writing documentation for AI: best practices
Lovely idea - thanks
truculent··on Writing documentation for AI: best practices
Is this you have implemented in practice? Sounds like a great idea, but I have no idea how you would make it work it a structured way (or am I missing the point…?)
truculent··on The magic of through running
> I'm guessing even a busy/congested freeway has a greater throughput per lane than transit

Not even remotely close: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity

truculent··on Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole
Are you suggesting that the authors’ “bounce” would only happen if the energy was not enough to put them into different states?
truculent··on Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole
> The black hole universe also offers a new perspective on our place in the cosmos. In this framework, our entire observable universe lies inside the interior of a black hole formed in some larger “parent” universe.

What specifically is meant by interior? Does this mean “within the event horizon” or something else?

truculent··on Cursor 1.0
I think their point is that that is a commit message. You can then review the set of changes as you would a PR.
truculent··on Ugly infrastructure: Why can't we have nice things?
A favourite of mine is the London Underground having warnings about using the escalators, stating that last year there were 100 incidents from people not being sufficiently careful.

Given the number of people using the service, this is incredibly small and I hardly think a sign is going to help the few people at risk!

truculent··on Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated
I think the argument is that the real issue is political will and not structural issues in government.

Personally, it seems fair to call that political dysfunction too, but it’s reasonable to try and make the distinction.

truculent··on Slouching towards San Francisco
It is centrist because it fails to propose a different way of doing things or structuring society. Just because it’s a liberal vision, doesn’t mean it’s not centrist.

There is certainly overlap with right wing elements, too. Although UK focused, it’s hard not to see the right wing undercurrents in this Abundance-type manifesto: https://ukfoundations.co/

truculent··on Waiting 100 years for a home isn't a housing crisis, it's a moral collapse
A nominal increase in value, while becoming more affordable in real terms might be feasible.

However to do this would require inflation of other goods, matched by wage rises, which would require actions that the British political establishment is not willing to take.

truculent··on Why does Britain feel so poor?
Northern Ireland has done much better over the past decade IIRC, with more government spending and investment per head than the rest of the UK. I visited last year and felt the difference was immediately noticeable.
truculent··on Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"
Any sufficiently advanced method of programming will start to look less like natural language and more like a programming language.

If you still don’t want to do programming, then you need some way to instruct or direct the intelligence that _will_ do the programming.

And any sufficiently advanced method of instruction will look less like natural language, and more like an education.

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