Anyone else unable to access what I assume are supposed to links for the centred bits of text throughout that article? I had a hard time understanding parts of it...
Pretty sure your maths is off - even if it did steadily fall by 20% every 20 years, it'd still have a population of 16 to 17 million in 100 years' time. So no, not especially dire.
I don't care for the use of terms that imply appreciating the fine arts is somehow on a "higher plane" and places those who do so above those who don't, but I do think it's worth acknowledging that it takes significant time and effort to develop such appreciation, and that the rewards are subsequently substantial. Personally I've invested significantly in the study and appreciation of Western classical music and I believe what I've gained from that could not be achieved simply by listening to top 40 hits on the radio - but I don't believe those who do only the latter are in anyway "lower" on any sort of ranking system, just that their brains are wired differently, and their cultural background etc. is such that it probably wouldn't make sense for them to make the same investment into music appreciation that I have. It's almost certainly true that they've invested considerably into appreciating other worthwhile aspects of life that I haven't - we can't do it all!
Yep, they're definitely still rising, despite a slight drop in 2020 (thanks, COVID). Not sure there's any point in talking about per-capita emissions.
That US emissions have been falling since ~2007 (and China appears to be leveling off) is some reason for hope but the likes of India, Indonesia and other large developing nations are more than making up for the difference.
I haven't upgraded to ChatGPT 4 yet, but given it can now supposedly do web searches (including searching github?) I've signed up for the wait list.
Is it worth it, based on feedback here?
I'm particularly interested in how it might be able to help me with source code found on github. Does anyone know how much of that source code is part of ChatGPT-3's training data? I asked about it about a few slightly esoteric classes/ids etc. but it didn't know about them.
The other thing I was hoping to do be able to do is process much larger inputs - e.g. ~20k of HTML I wanted it to simplify for me. Is that realistic?
Well there's certainly a conceivable one, and it's one probably many would agree would be much nicer one to live in. But accepted, not a realistic one any time soon.
"almost always" - agreed, but the specific case where your application has clearly gone into a temporary mode where no user interaction is permitted (other than perhaps "cancel") I would think was the exception. But simply adding the disabled attribute to the existing input controls probably isn't the best way to do it if it's an issue with screenreaders etc. Though it's not clear why such tools couldn't deal with it in a better fashion.
I'd also say I'd have no issue with a button showing as disabled provided when you attempt to click it or hover over it, it tells you why it's not yet a permitted action. But again, might be an issue for accessibility etc.
It baffles me how they can have one single point of failure for their entire national cellular + fibre voice & data network, and for it to take so long to fix.
Isn't iOS still essentially the same way? It was one reason I stopped using iOS devices as I frequently wanted to open, for instance, pdf or image files from multiple apps.
Good managers for dev teams should have enough technical knowledge themselves and demand explanations from participating devs why a candidate is or isn't good enough to see through that though.
Further personally as a tech lead I've always been keen to take on new devs that clearly are a cut above, as they usually mean an opportunity to work more effectively as a team. And I really don't want to spend even more of day doing reviews of mediocre code.
And yet some of the worst performance issues I've had to deal with were in code typically dealing will merely 100s of items, but using algorithms and slow network-based operations that caused everything to run sluggishly most of the time and not infrequently making the resulting user experience intolerable.
I do agree though that a lot of time is wasted on premature or even completely counterproductive optimisations for situations where the data being processed is too small to cause noticeable slowness in processing.
Oh I suspect it was quite common in much of Europe for fairly long periods too, when there very limited options for travel for vast majority of people, who were in fact farmers. Yes, the farms were small, but most of your energy went into tending those, and interactions with those even only a km or so away was possibly often only once a week. I don't think it's an environment most people would thrive in though.
Arguably any period of history where the majority of people lived as subsistence farmers and rarely interacted with others not part of the household was an anomaly though, and very different to how pre-agricultural societies lived.
I was curious to know what sort of studies had been done in that regard, I didn't notice anything mentioned by the article, though admittedly I only skimmed the 2nd half. FWIW I don't think I've ever met or known of anyone being home schooled in Australia, though I'm sure it must happen.
> any condition that doesn't impact survival until sexual maturity
Diseases that impact even just appearance can surely make you less attractive as a mate though. And larger goiters can impede breathing or swallowing. So I'd be suspicious of the idea that we've been significantly deficient in iodine for extended periods of our evolutionary history.
I gather the GP's point was we that previously we'd eat kidneys or livers or tripe etc. in "unprocessed" form, whereas now they're all only used for pet food or gelatin etc. Whether that's true because steak is now so cheap and most people prefer eating it instead I'm not sure, but seems plausible. But that steak is cheap because of hyperprocessing of off cuts seems more contentious - I'm fairly sure we're able to more cheaply raise, slaughter and butcher cows in general, and the beef industry would still find a way to be profitable even if offal etc. was still widely consumed in unprocessed form.
It is odd that I remember regularly tucking into things like beef liver as part of a meal as a kid (30 odd years ago) but virtually never hear of it these days. I still do see steak & kidney pie in bakeries etc. but it's not super common. Oh I did have tripe in phở not too long ago (and still see it on menus regularly), though I can't admit to being a fan.
That light pollution has only existed for a tiny tiny fraction of the time since life first evolved on Earth. It's entirely conceivable that in another 1000 years (a blink of the astronomical eye) it will no longer occur - so trying to detect whether life exists on any random planet/moon that way seems a low probability exercise, but granted if it's cheap to do you might as well (conceivably there might be other detection methods based on electromagnetic radiation etc. that would reveal more information on the dark side of a planetary body too).
Plenty of people I know handwrite faster than they can type! And have they tested those using shorthand?
What I could believe is that our brains might be better at remembering the sorts of movements our hands make while handwriting (essentially using your wrist and elbow) vs those made while typing (fingers only), perhaps because the former are closer to the act of manipulating the physical environment in ways that might needed for survival (gathering food etc.) and because you're physically tracing out a desired path in 2d space, though it seems tenuous at best.
(I did mention in my other post I can sort of see why handwriting is a movement more akin to other ways we manipulate the physical environment - but in fact I use the "swipe" style keyboard entry on my phone, which is surely not that dissimilar - using my finger to draw shapes. Touch typing is certainly very different and hard to correlate with other actions we need to perform in the real world, in some ways it's surprising we're able to become so competent at it, though obviously our ability to make finely tuned manipulations with our fingers is a huge part of our evolutionary success).
I can't really begin to imagine what selective pressure could realistically have acted on this, certainly given the tiny period of time over which any substantial percentage of the population would have been using their hands to store information in any way.
If there's any correlation between use of computers and any loss of ability to memorise concepts (which I'm not convinced we actually have proof of) it could just as easily be explained by our tendency to "offload", knowing that any gaps in our memory/understanding can readily be filled by technology as needed.
I do worry about a possible future where we literally stop bothering learning how to handwrite at all, but mainly because there's still sufficient chance you might need such a skill at some crucial moment when computers can't be used. But it's surely sufficient just to know how to block print capital letters.
Just as bad as having 31 days a month, for randomly chosen months.
If any periods of time need to fixed it's surely weeks and months. How about 5 day weeks (3 working, 2 not - and yes, therefore 10-day "fort"nights) and scrap months altogether...