wanderingstan

Anecdotally, almost every day I’ll overhear conversations at my local coffee shop of non-developers gushing about how much ChatGPT has revolutionized their work: church workers for writing bulletins and sermons, small business owners for writing loan applications or questions about taxes, writers using it for proofreading, etc. And this is small town Colorado.

Not since the advent of Google have I heard people rave so much about the usefulness of a new technology.

Years ago I built a service that would print family & friend Instagram and Facebook posts and automatically mail them to an incarcerated loved one. I joked that it will be technically possible to convert the videos to flip books, and here you have gone and done it!

Just spitballing, but in C it was always the convention to use zero-based indexing. Probably because you were often adding these indexes to pointers (literal memory addresses) to index into an array, so you needed a zero to index into the first slot of the array.

As a kid hacking away on an Apple II this was apparent; all the good Basic games were written in Woz’s Integer Basic.

And two thousand years ago Socrates said the same thing about writing:

> For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=3894

I love to mention this whenever someone taking the “this new tech is bad” angle. We have to be careful to not just have the bias of “whatever existed when I was born is obvious, anything new that I don’t understand is bad.”

In general conversation, “intelligence”, “knowledge”, “smartness”, “expertise”, etc are used mostly interchangeably.

If we want to get pedantic, I would point out that “knowledge” is formally defined as “justified true belief”, and I doubt we want to get into the quagmire of whether LLM’s actually have beliefs.

I took OP’s point in the casual meaning, i.e. that LLMs are like what I would call an “intelligent coworker”, or how one might call a Jeopardy game show contestant as intelligent.

> Sumerian is 5,000 years old. We understand Sumerian. We are not going to forget Sumerian. A warning written in English is not going to be unreadable in 10,000 years.

It’s worth noting, however, that Sumerian was forgotten for nearly 2000 years: from ~200CE until the 1900s.

I agree it seems unlikely for a language to be completely forgotten again, we can’t be sure.

> In some alternate reality where atoms materialize in random configurations out of nothing maybe

Quantum mechanics says that this reality. Look into virtual particles.

> Gravel races forbid team tactics, which opens the door for more creativity and storytelling.

I haven’t heard of team tactics being forbidden in gravel, just that they don’t work as well. Can anyone give more color?

I worked for a time in an AR research lab and there are teams making good progress on adjustable focal lengths. The demo I saw three years ago was impressive.

Forget the sources, but I recall people saying the same about syntax highlighting even.

I’ve come to the similar conclusion, and realized that I’m slowly learning how to wield this new tool.

The sweet spot is when you need something and you’re sure it’s possible but just don’t know (or it’s too time consuming) how. E.G. change the css to to X, rewrite this python code in typescript, use the pattern of this code to do Y, etc.

Reminds me of the early days of Google where you had to learn how write a good search query. You learn you need more than a word or two, but don’t write a whole essay, etc.

Good find! While it doesn’t say it in so many words, this text seems to say a that the camera’s finish line is the official finish line (especially given the implied requirement that the finish camera be a line camera):

> Book C 19.22: Times from the Photo Finish System shall be regarded as official unless for any reason the appropriate official decides that they obviously must be inaccurate.

Because this is a line camera, the entire image is the finish line. That is, each vertical column of pixels is what was on the finish line at that particular point in time.

That’s also the reason for the distortions. It’s not a single frame taken at one time.

According to Reddit thread on this, the led board behind is specifically animated with the right timing so the content shows up correctly in the line camera.

According to this Reddit thread, the camera actually is the finish line:

> According to UCI regulations, the camera is the finish line.

> The painted line on the road or track is placed there as a visual reference for riders and spectators, and obviously organizers try to align the painted line with the photo finish camera as best as possible. But that's all it is - a visual reference. The finish line is officially defined as the plane of the photo finish camera, not the painted finish line.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bicycling/comments/1emivk1/dont_if_...

I checked out a WiFi hotspot from a library recently and was surprised to find that they blocked DDG. (Was less surprised to see they blocked Reddit.)

Isn’t it just using the Bing API?

But didn’t Apple and openAI ink a deal recently?

Believe it.

We used it extensively in the 80s for birthdays, Christmas cards and more.

Anything made by computer was instantly special, and the ability to customize card to the recipients interests was viewed as magic.

As more of our neighbors and friends got computers, print shop was one of the first programs to be acquired. (Okay, often pirated!)

> Sitting is bad because it displaces physical activity…

This is at odds with the article, which states:

> Since 2010, researchers have been keen to point out that sedentary behaviour is distinct from a lack of physical activity. You can get sufficient exercise per day, and still sit for too long.

The key section being:

> The model village includes a scale model of the model village (which would be at 1:81 scale). This model, in turn, contains a scale model of the model of the model village; being at 1:729 scale this measures around 1 foot (30 cm) in width. This model also contains a scale model (in paint only) of the model of the model of the model village (which would be at 1:6561 scale).

FWIW, my interactions have been with the federal system over 10+ years. I never heard of any blocking of google voice numbers there. It appears to be common knowledge among the inmates as a way to avoid the long distance charges.

This is great news. It’s appalling that the prison system is the only place left in the country that charges more for “long distance” calls (like 3x IIRC).

I’ve helped several families set up Google voice numbers in the region of their loved one’s prison just to save money.

I suspect you’re taking that excerpt too literally. By my reading, the author is expressing their surprise to learn something to improve their writing from an unexpected source (a book about mathematics), and is even more surprised at this source being written by someone very different from the author culturally (Hungarian) and philosophically/politicaly (Stalinist).

The author did not imply that sugar addiction is anywhere as bad as heroin addiction.

They observed a technique that was shown scientifically to be effective for the more serious addiction and decided to try it for their milder addiction. That’s just good reasoning, and it worked for them.

> The main conclusion from the study is that a change of environment as radical as Vietnam’s during a war period compared to the US was critical for their recovery.

There is not enough information to draw that conclusion. Anyone familiar with academia (or even a R&D tech project) can imagine what could take 3 years: ethics board approval, getting permission from the relevant government agencies, finding and hiring local Rhino experts to do the tagging, iterating on design of the drill and placement of isotopes, waiting to find enough rhinos that fit the high-standards demanded for a POC study (extra large, extra healthy, etc), and so on.

Or the other way: If it really took three years to tag 20 rhinos with everything working at full speed, don't you think the University and the researches themselves would be the first to realize this is impracticle? Don't you think the journal reviewers would point this out?

This is a proof of concept project. The “3 years” is not because of some inherent difficulty, it’s just a typical research project.

From the article:

> …will closely monitor the health and vital statistics of the rhinos over a period of six months, in order to determine the viability of this approach.

If this approach is shown to be healthy, I’m sure it could be done much faster.

Yes, for the first few.

But the idea of the test is that this could be done in a wider scale. If a significant portion of horns are being confiscated (via radiation sensors) then there’s fewer horns being sold and less money available for all those middleman groups. Over time the market goes away.

Perhaps similar to how the market for stolen iPhones dried up once people could remotely brick their stole phone. There’s just less money to be made so thieves move on to more lucrative targets.

I’d like to see it go exponential: “one million websites of one million checkboxes”

Perhaps every checkbox in the toplevel site spawns a new, million-checkbox page? :)

> Over 11 000 radiation detection portal monitors are installed at airports, harbours and other ports of entry, including thousands of trained personnel equipped with radiation detectors, all of which can detect the smallest radioactive particles.

I didn’t realize this. Injecting small, safe radioactive material into rhino horns seems like an incredibly good hack: turn all that nuclear monitoring equipment into poached animal artifact detectors.