tylervigen

Honestly it sounds like more work than the oven method? Filling a Pyrex container with salt water is more work than “put fish on pan.”

Honestly I found this a lot more compelling than the actual launch video.

There were moments when I forgot that what I was watching was AI generated.

That is not how it works. The images of the room are included in the generative training model. The wifi is "just" helping identify the locations of objects in the room.

If you uploaded a random room to the model without retraining it, you wouldn't get anything as accurate as the images in the paper.

Because he was shot today, it was in the news, and the game pulls a live feed of news articles via RSS to simulate doom scrolling.

It’s a live RSS feed of New York Times articles.

One stat in here supports a third, slightly different statement. The median player has not played 51% of their games, so: "most people who buy games on steam have not played most of the games they own."

How would the game know you are guessing?

This article’s title, subtitle, summary, and first two paragraphs all contain some version of the phrase “reshapes your brains internal networks in real time.” I thought I was going crazy after I read the same thing six times.

Thanks. I did not know this, but it triggers a different problem. Many of my LLM queries are for work. My company has data protection agreements with OpenAI, but not with Kagi. These matter more for LLMs than raw search.

For my personal workflow, I don’t see the appeal of having a separate setup if I’m just going to use the same underlying models anyway.

I love and respect what Kagi is doing and I was a customer for years, but I recently canceled my subscription.

I found that have two main use cases:

1) Search - It is nice that Kagi search is less SEO spammed. That a big appeal. However, I don't reach for a search engine when I have a topical question anymore. I reach for something like o3 with search, so I don't need to dig through a bunch of articles. Over the last few years my pure search volume has dramatically reduced.

2) Maps - I travel a lot. When I toss a business into the search bar, 90% of the time I want to see it on a map. Google's Maps experience is just far superior to Kagi's. I find that I end up typing maps.google.com more often than I am happy Kagi ran the search.

I don't mind paying for a product; it just didn't work for me.

Side note: I personally dislike that their favicon looks like a "g" for google. It's always confused me.

If you’re anywhere near Minnesota, this store has exactly the same vibes as Ax Man Surplus: https://www.ax-man.com/collections/all-products

Their website doesn’t have it, but the handwritten joke signs in the store are the best.

I learned a fun fact this year that completely changed how I think about wheels.

Ancient wheels supported weight through compression: the cart pressed down, the wheel transferred that force straight into the ground. Simple and solid.

Modern wheels? Totally different. Bicycle wheels hold weight through tension. If a bike is standing still, you could cut the bottom spokes and it would stay upright. Cut the top ones and it collapses—the rim is literally hanging from the hub.

Even car tires follow this principle. It’s not just a balloon of air under the wheel. The internal pressure forms a tensioned ring that holds the car up. The car is suspended from the tire, not resting on it.

So while the article encourages reinventing the wheel metaphorically, I can’t help but admire how we’ve already reinvented the wheel literally—by flipping the physics entirely.

If you're visual like me, this video illustrates it perfectly: https://youtu.be/8I7QsgYm_NU?si=Vz1aqpHBAPjayqlG

The explanation is phenomenal. I particularly like the elevation heat map, which helps me intuitively grasp what is going on.

This raises a question for me though: why do we show the tidal bulge graphic in any educational context? Like OP, the "far bulge" was always the most surprising and difficult-to-grasp part of the image. But this explanation would indicate that the far bulge is almost totally pointless as a concept, given the complexities of the system. Given it's the least intuitive part of the image, it invites additional consideration. But it's all the wrong consideration!

The model would be more useful if it only showed the bulge on the moon side, and excluded the far side bulge. It would still be wildly imprecise, kind of like the orbital model of atoms is wildly imprecise, but at least it would be a slightly more accurate (and useful) initial mental model.

Did you randomly bring this up, or are you saying this because you see a Garmin redirect when you click "No"?

I ask because I get directed to the Apple Watch homepage.

I think you are worried about the wrong problem. Forget about the influencers for a moment - what will your source of revenue be if you don't have an ad network?

Users are the content on social networks. If you charge them to join, you will have fewer users and less content on the network. That reduces the value so you can't charge as much, and the cycle continues.

I think the advantage of this one is that it's funny. :)

I've always wished that more games would self-host a wiki. Gamers love wikis with detailed data about the game, and I hate it when I go to play a game which has poor wiki coverage. This can happen with small titles that don't have a big enough player base, titles where the player base didn't "align" on one wiki, or with games where the information is inconsistent across game versions/platforms (Don't Starve is notorious for this). But the biggest issue is competing, hard-to-use, user-unfriendly wikis - and this would be solved if more game studios were willing to self-host a wiki.

You are both saying the same thing, you just differ on the degree to which you see that as a problem.

OK, you send the company two random numbers. One an ID, and the other a unique encryption key to encrypt the results.

Here's the o1-preview answer to the strawberry question:

--

There are *three* letter "R"s in the word "strawberry."

Let's break down the word to count the occurrences:

- *S* - *T* - *R* - *A* - *W* - *B* - *E* - *R* - *R* - *Y*

The letter "R" appears in positions 3, 8, and 9.

> If a worker is working at a company A making $80k, and they try to get a job a company B making $90k, the owner of company B needs to know they were only making $80k at their last firm, so they can make a good offer of $85k. $10k would be too much.

I disagree wholeheartedly with this.

I wish IA had not started this fight. I love libraries, but it's totally unintuitive to me why it would have been OK to rent out unlimited digital copies of copywritten books. Just from a policy perspective, that structure doesn't create the right incentives for authors and publishers to publish books. It's a non-starter unless you make some broader societal change regarding how we fund writing.

IA does plenty of other awesome things - this felt like a waste of time and money.

If a defendant has the constitutional right to trial by a jury, and that jury has autonomy to make an independent decision, then jury nullification is a possible outcome.

If jury nullification is not a possible outcome, then either the defendant doesn't have a right to trial by jury, or that jury is not allowed to make an independent decision.

Defendants don't have a direct constitutional right to jury nullification (the Constitution doesn't say anything about nullification). It's just a logical consequence: if the jury really can make independent decisions, then nullification is necessarily one of those possible decisions.

When I see projects like this one, my mind mostly goes to, "how will this be funded and maintained?"

This requires a lot of specialized infrastructure to be run. I really like the idea of cities investing in measures that make small positive improvements for many people. However, for Google this seems like a side project, so I have my doubts that it will be around in 5 years. Not exactly the kind of thing I want to back with long term infrastructure dollars.

Got ya. There are two studies here. The first study, referenced in the title, is from years ago that purported to show that judges were harsher just before mealtime. The second study was done to re-visit the first, and found that there are confounding variables that made the original findings look stronger than they otherwise would have been.

The article is about the second study, which found that the original study missed these confounding variables.

The author (Matt Levine) is always a bit tongue in cheek about securities fraud and the “socially useful” role shareholders play in pricing securities. He writes about these kind of incidents in a weekly basis, so his typical audience knows to read it that way.

I’m not sure this study does anything to show that hunger increases irrationality. If anything, the authors point to rational, predictive decision-making right before meal time.

Do you see something that indicates increased irrationality?

Perhaps you could just study a criminal court instead of a parole board?

Why does this paper defy common sense?

This is fascinating.

For those unfamiliar, the original study found that judges were kinder in their decisions right after lunch, and harshest right before. (I’m dramatically oversimplifying, but that’s the bit folks usually cite.)

This study contests the strength of that finding by showing that positive rulings take longer, and that you can fit more simple negative rulings in just before a break (negative rulings are denials of parole, if you’re wondering why they are faster). Judges don’t want to start complex cases that are more likely to be favorable just before break. (Again, dramatically simplifying. The article has more.)

I have cited the original study countless times, and this injects a lot more nuance for me. I’m glad it was revisited.