twarge

I'm not here to argue about Chomsky's basic claims (which I do not find useful), but I am here specifically to argue against the idea that children easily learn language with somehow way less data than ChatGPT. Those who claim otherwise simply have not spent a couple years with a baby.

Chomsky's article really seems to show the results of decades of living in an echo chamber.

>On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information;

True, but then

> it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.

This is such an odd dichotomy, and feels really wrong to me. Explanations are to me just further correlations.

> a young child acquiring a language is developing — unconsciously, automatically and speedily from minuscule data — a grammar, a stupendously sophisticated system of logical principles and parameters.

Chomsky apparently has children, but clearly may have forgotten what it's like for them to learn language! It's years of trying to communicate, constantly, failing, and learning.

Now, go ask ChatGPT to Write an ode to <obscure topic> in iambic pentameter and I bet that it will be as astonishing, creative and fluent as a native speaker.

I live on the east coast, paid for excellent insulation and thick windows with good seals, installed solar, and don't pay a dime more for energy. That includes heating, cooling, hot water, and our two EVs. This is possible almost entirely because of the insulation.

We were generating a surplus, so we installed an electric clothes dryer, which seems to have balanced everything nicely.

Same here. Highly recommend Horizon for its library management and overall excellent code quality. It is far superior to kicad for everything I do.

I too had to bail out of Fusion and landed in FreeCAD quite happily.

There’s a tendency to be unable to delete things that work in large collaboratively developed software. But it feels like that’s what’s needed with regards to the legacy workbenches so that new users don’t go astray from the intended path.

So where do these folks look for work these days? Is there a jobs site that is dominant these days?

And the car batteries can supply peak demand instead of having a blackout.

Perhaps Dr. dr Vicente is talking about ITER, but surely not a real fusion reactor.

Here's something talking about an actual fusion reactor:

"While the radioactivity level per kilogram of waste would be much smaller than for fission-reactor wastes, the volume and mass of wastes would be many times larger."

and

"To reduce the radiation exposure of plant workers, biological shielding is needed even when the reactor is not operating. In the intensely radioactive environment, remote handling equipment and robots would be required for all maintenance work on reactor components as well as for their replacement because of radiation damage, particle erosion, or melting."

https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-the...

I have a PhD plasma physics, I think I am qualified to make these statements without this sort of dismissal!

Remarkable. It's still nuclear energy, and the sobering part for me is that fusion neutrons are an order of magnitude more energetic than fission neutrons. Add the fact that fusion plants are an order of magnitude larger, and you get orders of magnitude more nuclear waste with order of magnitude higher activation/radioactivity.

If you don't like nuclear for these reasons, you'll probably hate fusion.

It's the micron-precise alignment of the four beams that is astonishing. I can't see which part(s) is actively aligned to line up the beams.

Tom

On macOS, how is sublime text better than Nova and perhaps Textmate?

You can use it with most any lock set. You’re paying for the bolt, not the lock.

Can most offices get a sufficiently fast link to properly utilize servers on premises?

What should it use?

Yes. We use it for professional stuff.

I think it's better than KiCad in so many big and small ways, starting with library management.

I evaluated both this and Horizon EDA last year and found Horizon to be far more powerful and polished.

https://horizon-eda.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Central New Jersey: Same day shipping, cheaper than ground: Order before 11, get it after lunch.

This seems to be a shadow of Calca.

https://calca.io

As a PyX user for 17 years it's more that the software is complete and does everything most people need perfectly.

Oh seaborn does look like an improvement.

Honestly there is no need to update it because it is already perfect. It is like TeX in that way.

However there is some missing stuff like contour plots.

Personally I find the style and whitespace defaults in matplotlib to be surprisingly displeasing. It always looks like "I just threw this together—I'll fix it later." Sure, you can fix it, but it's a huge fight.

PyX is a much better alternative. Like TeX, everything you make looks great.

edit for links:

https://pyx-project.org/examples/graphs/index.html

https://sourceforge.net/p/pyx/gallery/index/

That doesn’t sound like much time spent fusing.

This is a scaling claim, and I don't know, but it feels super weak.

Of course a high beta plasma beats a low beta plasma. The problem with high beta is is instabilities, and you know, actually getting high beta.

Most galling was that they glued Eagle into fusion and killed off Eagle, the largest EDA tool.

Agree. There have been no breakthroughs. The projects getting funding are just different enough to be not immediately disprovable and continue to spectacularly overpromise without solving any of the real problems. Chamber embrittlement? Nuclear waste? (activation of the apparatus by the 12 MeV fusion netrons is a lot worse than the 100 keV fission neutron.)

“Ability to read in YAML, make changes and write it out again with comments preserved.”

How are the comments preserved in the Python representation? Is it some kind of ordered dict?

Sensors help, but this is just a fan, and it needs to be on all the time in my experience.

Yes, these are energy recovery ventilator (ERV) units. They exchange air while keeping both heat and humidity in. They are absolutely critical to health in tight house construction.

Is $899 for the M1 Air overpriced?