vanderZwan

> Frankly, had he not confessed, they'd likely still be Vermeer's today.

Speaking as a Dutch guy with an arts degree, I more or less agree with everything else in your comment if with "art" you mean "prestige and fame in the art world" (you forgot to mention the gallery art and tax evasion angle though), but I'm not so certain about this one. I've seen his paintings side-by-side with actual Vermeer paintings and you can tell they're not the real deal. The faked aging is pretty noticeable. Aesthetically too, the paintings are still "Vermeer as interpreted by someone else", and you can see the "Van Meegeren" touches. Sure, that is with the benefit of hindsight, but I think a side-by-side view would have raised questions regardless.

On top of that, you have to consider how they tricked the art world: they found a vain professor who also had a selfish incentive to be the person to find one of the presumed "missing" Vermeer paintings. They knew exactly who to manipulate.

Being an art critic who discovers a forgery also comes with some prestige, so surely later critics would have been more eager to be skeptical about these "new" Vermeer paintings.

Also, if "F for Fake" has shown me anything it's that forgers kind of want to be caught, because they ultimately want to brag about fooling everyone. So he probably would have announced to the world that he made the forgeries at some point. But that kind of breaks with your "if he hadn't confessed" condition so it doesn't really count.

At the molecular level biology is chemistry, and I think GP is implying that it's often the kind of chemistry that needs quantum mechanics to be explained properly. Now, I don't know how enzymes work, so I don't know if that's true. But I do know that they can do chemical conversions at room temperature where "naive" human chemistry would require temperatures incompatible with life (or pH levels, or pressure, or…).

So in biology the bag, lock and keys are shaped in such a way that you only have to shake for a short time to have multiple keys come out in locks, and in a particular order or pattern too. That's what makes the whole thing kinda magical. And I would not be surprised if quantum mechanics were involved in the chemistry in ways that classical mechanics cannot explain adequately.

EDIT: I started typing this yesterday evening and hadn't hit "send" before going to bed, I hadn't seen the rest of the discussion that had taken place since.

I think we're talking about different interpretations of the word "latency", both valid. You are thinking more about UI freezes and missing input, right? EDIT: or do you mean that bad latency numbers are less crucial as long as input isn't dropped or out of order? In that case I think it depends on the task.

I meant "time between input and visible change on screen", or lag between writing on a tablet and the screen or eink showing the drawn line. It's not really as crucial when typing, but especially for writing or drawing on a tablet low input latency is the difference between getting in a real flow state or not.

In terms of throughput, absolutely.

In terms of latency... well... we also could do a lot better there, but as I understand it, even if you do your best to cut away as much software bloat as possible, the latency "floor" seems to be higher than in the old days[0]. And the many layers of abstraction that is the average software stack don't help. Like, I'm doing my best to keep a web-app snappy, but there's only so much you can squeeze out of a browser.

[0] https://danluu.com/input-lag/

Another reminder of how easy it is to forget how ridiculously fast computers are these days (especially when you're like me and not writing stuff close to the metal for your day job).

> Are you feeling through memory or through logic?

This feels (feeels, before you ask again) like begging the question. We're talking about a natural language here, not a programming language. It has rules but they evolved through natural usage, and those rules are flexible ("because internet"), and there's plenty of technically correct but wrong feeling constructions ("bad big wolf").

Like, "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" will sound like the raving of a madman regardless of the fact that it's technically valid.

> Commander, General, Loyal Servant, Father to a murdered son.

I mostly think that that's a weird collection of things to all be at once to a murdered son.

I'm not sure why, but sentence feels forced and unnatural, and as a result a bit unconvincing. My intuition is to insert an "and" at the end of those three options and then it feels like you can't drop the "a", i.e. "married, tall, and a doctor in medicine". I mean, maybe you can but the sentence feels odd to me.

And the weird part is that you can put those three properties in any order, and you would not place an "a" in front of the other two.

Eh… I'm fairly sure that most of the people here are old enough to have played Star Craft and Brood War when it first came out, and are fully aware of e-sports becoming huge in South Korea. And I have a hard time imagining younger generations that grew up with e-sports being an established thing instead of a novelty to not be aware of how South Korea looks at Brood War differently.

Also, doing high-effort endurance exercise for long enough suppresses grelin production (the hunger hormone). I've seen 30+ minutes of running or 60+ minutes of cycling as the most common rules of thumb.

So in order to stack all these effects to maximum effect: plan exercise before meal, plan mean before doing groceries.

I think that adipose tissue is the biggest criminal when it comes to unwanted hunger, since it produces hormones to make you hungry the moment you actually risk losing weight.

Not sure how much the digestive neurons are involved with hunger actually, I thought its role was more about telling you which foods make you nauseous so you won't eat them, or subconsciously register which nutrients various foods have so you'ld crave the ones compensating for shortages more.

Just like how not everything is a zero-sum game, not everything is a debate where one side tries to "win" where every exchange is an aggressive retort trying to disprove the other's point. I was trying to clarify what I suspected the intent was.

If even the suggestion of considering different points of view feels like an attempt to disprove your own position, then that mainly says something about how you are approaching this exchange.

I think they're saying America ended up positioning itself as the loser because they framed things as a zero-sum game. Which of course is a generalization, neither America nor China is a monolith, but I can certainly see some presidencies of the last decades leaning more into this attitude than others.

“If you assume everyone only has hammers, you'll end up getting screwed”, or something like that.

It kind of reminds me of Clay Shirky's predictions about the influence of the internet on society from a few decades ago. To paraphrase what he said: when the printing press was invented, everyone predicted it would lead to world peace, and we got the Thirty Years War instead. When modern mass media was invented people predicted world peace, and instead the Nazis rose to power and we got World War 2.

And yet as a society we typically consider these technologies a net positive these days, because alongside all the political instability and violence that followed them at first, some people were figuring out how to do beneficial things with them along the way that did more good than bad. Because the issue really was that the influx of more voices and ideas shifted the power dynamic, required relearning how to communicate, and in the end be better as a society.

The issue was figuring out how to "domesticate" these wild new communication channels. One successful example of which was the invention of scientific journals and papers.

Shirky predicted the internet would probably lead to a few decades of political instability too (about fifty years was his guess), and we definitely seem to be in the middle of that process.

Now, I haven't checked his stance on LLMs. I also don't know if I would quite call them a medium for mass communication like the others (as used today, they take humans out of the loop rather than let more voices join the public discourse), but I feel like they are similar enough to otherwise fit the pattern.

Tao's stance similarly feels about wanting to domesticate this wild animal before we get mauled by it. And to stick with the metaphor, I feel that most of the time the AI industry is trying to bamboozle us with spectacular rodeo displays instead.

Wasn't one other neat thing about Snap! and Scratch that you can translate the entire code (except for the user-named parts) to any other language on the fly without worrying about it breaking? Because in a sense the language is just part of the "presentation layer" of the blocks?

Oh, so you're team IVAR?

BILLY gang forever!

(just kidding, I actually have both, and way more IVAR shelves than BILLYs at that(BILLIES? What would be the proper plural here?))

Is this an ironic "tell me you don't learn from history without telling me you don't learn from history" joke?

The author has a severe case of being oblivious to the fact that not everyone knows what they know, or views the world the way they do. As shown for example by their assertion that "we all stopped coding manually around December 2025", as if AI critics don't exist.

As a result you have to look at what they share about themselves to infer where they're going with things, because they never explicitly state it. All traits amplified for the worse when people use chat bots too much, in my experience.

Scrolling to the end, they write:

> In 2005 a dozen version control systems fought to replace Bitkeeper, and the winner ended up ruling software development for two decades. Nobody in that race predicted that the decisive factor would be a hosting site with a social network on top.

They had a VCM start-up around their own technology, then Git displaced all other technologies, and then Github ate everyone's lunch. So the first revolution not-so-coincidentally overlaps with the time they ran a SCM startup, and they ignore anything that happened before they entered the space. Funny that.

So the implicit context is the business case and programmer culture around VCM systems.

Meaning the second revolution is anything that challenges Git and Github.

They also keep bringing up gigantic mono-repos and how Git can't handle the scale at which AI increases the amount of code bloat or commits.

So what I read between the lines is that they believe that there are enough people who don't want to actually address the automated hyperscaled Wirth's Law in the room, and are willing to pay services and technology to adapt around it instead.

That's their new business case that will power the second "revolution".

Which sounds horrifying to me, and the worst part is that I can actually see it happening if this AI bubble doesn't pop fast enough.

Similarly, according to my mom, by the time I or my sisters were five we rode our bikes to school by ourselves. Granted, that was in a Dutch village with less than a thousand people, where everyone knew everyone by their first name, so it probably was one of the safest places in the world for children to ride bikes, but still.

> Switching to the monthly view

I'd hardly consider fluctuations between 2.2 million and 3.3 million dowloads "flat".

Also, the metric used in the article was "downloads in the first week after a new release", which apparently broke a record. Regardless of the reason behind that record breaking number, switching to monthly dowloads to see if there is a sudden surge in popularity seems like the wrong metric.

Also, before he got famous for inventing diagnosing everyone with penis envy, Freud spent a summer trying and failing to find the eels' reproductive organs.

Using personal websites read by a handful of programmer nerds that work fine if you turn off javascript to justify literally everyone else being forced to navigate bloated, broken company websites isn't particularly convincing as an argument against memory-safe C imo.

We live in a world where my laptop is forced to waste tons of computational power on immensely bloated websites even with ad-block, with now even having to worry about agentic bullshit that I didn't ask for, and plenty of others apparently still think throwing computational cycles at cryptocurrency is good for anything.

Complaining about a relatively small performance price for Fil-C in that context honestly feels like that one famous newspaper photo of a smoking pregnant woman drinking a beer with a caption saying she's wbrried about the effects of the loud construction noises next door on her unborn child.

Except even that is wrong, because at least she had a point about the construction noises, while this is more of a "refusing to eat your vegetables" kind of situation.

> and even for your lightweight game consoles (Firefly Zero).

On that note, does the "shape" of the benchmarks change on lower-powered hardware in any way? (Aside from the obvious change if memory overhead requires switching from direct to indirect threaded code)

Well, I can think of a couplo of reasons why a black Ghanaian man would not be likely to pursue his PhD at the University of Georgia in the 1950s, but I'm not sure if that was the question you were begging for.

> If blue light actually impaired vision, that would be very notable.

It is extremely noticeable for me at night because I can never fully focus on signs using blue LEDs, while red LEDs give me no problem.

And did those studies use the same methods as this one? Because this makes it look like they didn't:

> Methods: In this retrospective cohort study, which is a subgroup analysis of a large prospective trial about visual impairments in European car drivers, we included 853 persons between 20 and 80 years of age and without a history of ocular surgery or any eye disease including cataract. Subjects participated in an ophthalmological examination, grading of lens opacity, and the measurement of visual functions such as IOSL, CS, and BCVA. Dependent on iris color, participants were divided into four groups: light-blue, blue-grey, green-hazel, and brown.

> The straylight function of the human eye depends on eye color, especially at larger angles of scattering. As a potential cause for this dependence, transmission of light through the ocular wall was measured, using a psychophysical method.

Even if this paper turns out to be the "boring" science kind that refines earlier results with different methods, it would still be science.

> Many factors, like light scattering and imperfections in the eye’s optics, keep light from coming into sharp focus on the retina, Buabeng said.

> The study also found that iris pigmentation influenced how far apart the two light points needed to be before viewers could distinguish them as separate points. Using a standardized iris color chart, researchers classified each participant’s eye color before analyzing the results. Participants with lighter-colored irises, particularly blue eyes, experienced greater light scatter than those with darker brown irises.

Sounds like the research took a next step beyond previous studies on the same subject. You know, basically how science is supposed to work. Something anyone giving a flippant reply here could have figured out if they actually had read the article.

> and hilarously, our dogs did too.

Tangent to your tangent, but this is one reason why a guard llama works so well together with guard dogs for protecting livestock.

A llama is much more alert to potential danger than, say, sheep. Which actually is an understatement: sheep have the added problem of not making any noises when attacked or eaten by predators, and therefore not alerting guard dogs.

Dogs can teach themselves to interpret the llama's body language and pro-actively chase away coyotes or foxes or whatever it is that the llama spotted.

I've seen this in action on a family friend's sheep farm.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guard_llama

I know someone whose partner was murdered in an extremely horrible, brutal way. Years later they told me in a completely unrelated discussion that they have aphantasia. I always wondered if in their case it might be trauma-induced, but obviously don't want to ask given the topic. Either way I think it's for the best in their case.

Is this presented by The Yes Men! by any chance?