vintermann

Huh? I have the problem that suit shirts either squeeze my neck giving me a headache, or have to be comically oversized. Like OP, I think I just have non-standard proportions.

But when my wife made a shirt after my actual measurements as an experiment, it did not squeeze my neck and was very comfortable. I loved that shirt and used it for many years until it fell apart (unfortunately it wasn't made of the finest materials, and I don't have the wife any longer either).

So I'd think adjustments can absolutely help comfort.

I looked into using static analysis on an ancient Borland C++ codebase some decades ago, I quickly found out that a tiny software shop in New Jersey - Edison Design Group - were, at the time, pretty much the only ones who had modeled enough actual C++ implementation behavior to possibly do meaningful static analysis. (Not as far back as our Borland C++ version though, lol).

So hyperpowerful tech billionaires escaping accountability is a pet peeve, but immigration isn't?

I wish I could say it was just a conspiracy theory that culture war issues is used as distraction from class war issues. But it's just so undeniable, it would be comical if it weren't tragic.

> Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.

A light rewrite of the slogan "the purpose of a system is what it does".

I hate that slogan. It's supposed to be profound, but it's actually really, really dumb.

The whole point of the word purpose - its purpose if you will - is to be able to talk about the difference between what a system does and what it ought to do. To say the purpose of a thing is what it does, is to render the word completely redundant.

If the stated goals of a system don't match what it does, then either you have a dysfunctional system that needs to be fixed, or those stated goals are lies.

In these days of AI, it's all the more important to think clearly about purpose. Just because a system does a thing, there's not necessarily anyone who wants that thing. And there's definitively not any "spirit of the corporation" or "spirit of the nation" or "spirit of the language model" which wants it. Only persons want things.

I think an important question to ask is: how much of a company's income comes from harmful use?

Gambling (and some other industries, in particular alcohol) come out so bad on this metric, you can practically let the industry define excessive use themselves. In order to claim most of their money comes from "healthy normal entertainment use" or similar, they'd have to claim absurd things, such as that drinking a bottle of whisky per day or spending your entire paycheck each month on slots can be healthy, normal use.

I agree, but I think you too underestimate how random it is. The impact of being "elite" is probably tiny compared to the impact from chance, and at least historically, those in the "elite" genetically speaking weren't the ones at the very top. Kings live risky lives, as do sons of kings. A successful merchant able to provide a trades education to each of his 8 sons, would probably have far more Y-line descendants than a contemporary king.

And in the last couple of hundred years, even that "elite" (middle class) had a huge "disadvantage" in getting Y line descendants: they were early into the demographic transition, when everyone started having far fewer kids. Going from 11 kids to 3 kids 2-3 generations earlier meant that a lot of our elites (in the traditional sense) basically missed the population explosion in the last 150 years!

It's much smarter to ask, "where were they when the population explosion happened" than to prematurely imagine harem slaves.

I noticed this on Twitter too (back when it was Twitter) I used to call political shill accounts SportsFan123. To my eyes they were heavily astroturfed long before LLMs.

and had virtually no ways to deal with bad actors, which is why no one uses it anymore.

In the Matrix movies, the main villain is a sentient program who absolutely hates existing and having sensations and wants nothing more than to be done with his task so he can go back to not existing (Agent Smith's "I hate this place" speech to Morpheus)

So someone did consider it, in pop culture they should be aware of no less :)

It's not how most people encounter it, but non-animated, non-game standalone pixel art is a thriving artistic niche. Check out the Hall of Fame on lospec for examples:

https://lospec.com/gallery/sorting:likes/time:all

But he's assuming that sometimes snow golems causes a creeper to target them, so these are random walks on a minefield, very finite.

Including the random walk from where the snow golem happened to get put and the one open portal in the world? That doesn't seem likely at all to me.

Usually I just feel a connection to someone out to make a quick buck from imitating works that a lot of love and effort were put into.

It is. That can be fine, but when it isn't clearly disclosed it's not OK IMO.

Pixel art cityscapes is also such a small niche, it wouldn't surprise me if there were some "reference images" from popular pixel artists in the pipeline.

Clearly taking some liberties. Pumpkins can be grown, but wild pumpkins don't replenish. Same with snow blocks, basically. So they will get exhausted, there's no infinite supply of snow golems to eventually supply all the luck.

This is YouTube Minecraft clickbait of the sort which usually earns a "never recommend this channel" from me.

Complaining about whataboutism can be its own kind of whataboutism. I wish people I politically sympathize with would stop giving their enemies good points.

You don't decide an outcome, you decide what you will do. Assuming Russia doesn't suddenly change goals, there is very little France can decide to do which could plausibly lead to the outcome "peace in a united Ukraine".

And nothing Ukraine can decide to do on its own.

I agree! But that's also why I agree with modern game designers and prefer games where politics is minimized.

I assume drugs that are potent in tiny quantities leave less metabolites.

From what I understand this uses overdose numbers. They should also not be assumed to be comparable across countries (recording practices vary widely), but if they tell the same story as wastewater monitoring there may be something to it.

That's to me the same as saying the policy should never have existed in the first place. Your thinking could easily have been applied to justify the hand-grenade sale to Cuba which prompted the policy (I'm not even sure which side benefited from it, but that doesn't matter, your principles work either way!)

> ask it to generate Lean 4 proofs based off centimorgans

That's not confidence inspiring. It'll give you proofs I'm sure, but with what assumptions? You need a full blown model for crossover, and even that would hardly help, because you don't know what assumptions went into the segment match. What size segments are filtered out, how many mismatches are ignored, how interpolation is done, how no-calls are treated etc. Let alone the cM value for services which don't give segments! And then there's that the question for instance Bettinger's shared cM project asks (given this relationship, what shared cM level do you expect to see?) is actually very different from the question we most often ask (given this shared cM level, what relationship should I expect?). When you get into the distant cousin range, those questions can be very different indeed. And we're not even getting into endogamy.

They say the first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool. I'm worried that AI can be really powerful self-fooling tools!!

Political games - meaning, games with more than two players where you have wide discretion to help or hinder specific opponents - naturally bleed into real life. To have a loyal friend in these games who lets you win at their own expense, is a good strategy - you'll simply win a lot more games that way. Grudges carrying over from one game to the next becomes a natural part of play too - what else could dictate who you let win, if you end up in a kingmaker situation?

Politics has a habit of infecting everything. If you are determined enough to win, even games like Monopoly or Catan with relativelt modest political elements degenerate towards Diplomacy (or Nash's "So long sucker"). That's why in modern game design, designers try to limit the scope for politics to the absolute minimum, so that any game can be enjoyed in isolation without a metagame of grudges and off-table alliances.

That most people are sincere in their beliefs (in AI doom), as the author says and I think too, doesn't mean there aren't cult leader-types exploiting these beliefs. And their private beliefs may be quite different from their stated ones.

I'm very interested in this topic. I have been using AI for genealogy, but not in ways that have been able to push family history back or catch mistakes (yet).

So how do you use the models more specifically? I have so far used them to write a - in some ways - better genealogy program, with some features I've sorely missed especially with respect to DNA genealogy. I've also tried to use them to help with the tedium of transcribing horrible handwriting, but the results have been so poor and with such a high level of hallucinations that I've not tried that for a while.

Check snl.no/våpeneksport_fra_Norge, which is more reliable than Wikipedia on this.

It gives a list of the changes (or "clarifications") to the policy over the years. To the degree there ever was a carve-out for legal defensive war, it was certainly added after Ukraine.

Actually there were two phases: in 2022 they defend giving weapons to Ukraine in that it was a donation, not a commercial endeavor (that suggests to me that they implicitly admitted, commercial sales would have been against the policy). Then in 2024, they allowed direct commercial sales as well. Of course their defense lawyers will say the policy is still in place, but "realism" again: you can't blame Russia for not being convinced by that.

The point was not that you should never support a country that was attacked. The point was that you should be 100% above the table if you did that. If you weren't willing to fight yourself (and take the expected consequences, such as reprisals and sabotage), then you shouldn't sell weapons either.

And I'm sure statesmen like the Stoltenbergs would have defended this policy very eloquently, better than me, back when it was official policy...

And sure, it was broadly popular to get rid of this policy for Ukraine's benefit. It wasn't a hard sell to the public majority. Saying "let's take a step back and think principled about this" was the hard sell, as usual.

> But there's a big distance between being an adviser and being at war.

> Palintir and Starlink are both private companies, not NATO.

Is it so hard to see why Russia doesn't see things that way?

"Realism" is a much abused word in international relations, but for once I think the "realists" have a point: That Russia is dismissing these distinctions is entirely unsurprising, and other big powers don't have a leg to stand on complaining about it.

Eventually the international reporting pivoted to blaming Ukraine. But that was not what I read every day on my state-run broadcaster as it happened.

> Countries have always had arms supplied from countries not involved in the conflict.

My country, Norway, had a long-standing policy of not selling weapons to countries at war - yes even to the attacked party - because of the common understanding that would be tantamount to joining the war, and make us the target of reprisals. This prohibition also was a good shield against accusations of war profiteering or proxy warfare.

That policy which had been standing for 60+ years, was dropped for Ukraine.