Sharlin

A fate even worse than turning the universe into paperclips: turning it into a bureaucracy.

Probably researched and written entirely by an AI…

Honestly IPv4 addresses should always have been formatted in hex, like FF 00 00 69, with whatever delimiter. Would make it trivial to write directly as a 32-bit int, and parsing and formatting a string would also be cheaper. And you could have funny blocks like CAFE.0.0.

> until software and hardware has been updated

Yeah, about that part. This is a "now draw the rest of the fucking owl" type of idea.

The mul-shift part is what any optimizing compiler does for known divisors and has done since the 90s, if anything it was more vital back then when the gap between div and mul was wider than today.

That’s a rather interesting interpretation. Why would a ship name prefix stand for a verb phrase rather than something that describes the vessel? To be honest the exact meaning was TIL for me too, I always assumed the obvious "Steam Ship", similarly to other common prefixes like "MS" for "Motor [ICE] Ship" or "SY" for "Sailing Yacht".

Right. Many communities and project teams saw a real need for an IRC replacement, whether literally or not, and Discord was the least bad choice simply by existing. And IRC channels were of course just as un-googlable without setting up a logging bot and a crawlable archive.

I think tech people often have a very mechanistic interpretation of law (also leading to the common misconception that it would be possible and desirable to encode law as a computer program!) and like Orthodox Jews, a certain kind of people seem to treat law as some sort of puzzle to be solved.

Yeah, there are certain exceptions.

25%-80%.

Certain (mostly AI) workloads. Depends on how hot you're comfortable running your card. The real-world improvement is considerably less due to other things being bottlenecks.

That applies to NA English. And even there, as the reference says, notional agreement (verb/pronouns in plural) can be used when it’s more about the individual members of the collective doing something. So GP’s rule that only grammatical agreement (verb/pronouns in singular) is ever correct is wrong even in NA. But in BrE notional agreement is the most idiomatic choice while grammatical agreement is certainly also fine, just not standard style.

I’ve no idea what you refer to with "laziness". The "rule" that you claim you were taught simply does not always apply.

A smart writing assistant will give advice that’s appropriate to the context, register, the recipient’s culture, communication style and tastes, and the author’s relationship with the recipient. Sometimes writing very normatively and by the book is part of the message. Sometimes the exact opposite is true. If the assistant is unaware of all the context relevant to the communication, it’s likely to be a bad assistant.

Dropping articles is wrong because English as natively spoken doesn’t work like that. Except when it does, like news headlines, condensed "telegram" or SMS style, and so on.

In British English it’s entirely standard (and common) for grammatically singular collective nouns to take a plural verb and be referred to with a plural pronoun:

"The ManU have won three out of their last four matches."

"The Parliament have had heated debates over the NIH budget."

"Tesla introduced their newest EV model last week."

Any competent English teacher should know this.

Also, there’s no "correct" language outside of how it’s actually used. Linguists are the first to explain that their job is to describe, not to prescribe.

I’m not sure most physicists would make that specific distinction between "theory" and "model". We know QM is wrong or at the very least incomplete as long as there’s no theory of quantum gravity. Every theory, like every model, has a domain of applicability and gives wrong or even nonsensical answers when applied outside its domain.

What a theory is, is more like a model (or maybe meta-model) with a particularly broad scope or high explanatory value, often a mathematical framework that gives a common foundation and theoretical justification for multiple experimentally-derived models.

And whether it’s a positron or an electron (beta+ or beta- decay) doesn’t seem to matter that much as far as equivalent dose is concerned, the energy deposited is only fractionally higher in the case of a positron. (But PET can only work with positrons because it’s exactly the pairs of 0.511 MeV annihilation gammas that it’s designed to detect!)

I wish it were more often even generalizing from one case, that would be a big leap in epistemic hygiene compared to the more common generalizing from zero cases!

You mean they don't accrue knowledge during the training?

No, either you misunderstood or there was misinformation in the other thread.

There are two things that Google would’ve been allowed to legally do without an environmental review:

* Log the trees for economic use, then plant new ones on the same property, definitely not do terrain alterations. Like your average forest owner. But obviously that’s not what they wanted to do, they wanted to build a data center.

* Log less than 150 hectares, do any earthmoving etc needed within that area, build a data center.

These are mutually exclusive operations.

There’s no world in which Google would’ve been allowed to log the 300 hectares and do all the other preparative work on the property that they’ve done. They were told that they need a YVA (environmental impact review) process before doing anything beyond some very light reversible preparations because the area they wanted to modify exceeded 150 ha.

Somehow, even with the ability to hire the best lawyers in the country, they either fucked up and misunderstood the relevant legislation and the quite clear communication from LVV, the govt office responsible, or they just ignored all that and reasoned that they can get away with it because they’re big and – unfortunately – there’s no sanctions specified in the law for skipping a required env review.

There’s this thing called rendering, pretty important for maps.

Honestly this is starting to feel like a "God in the gaps" argument.

Not nearly enough time has passed to make any conclusions about long-term maintainability of LLM-written code.

People nowhere pay for the full external and opportunity costs of cars, particularly ICE cars, in the purchase price (or even in fuel price), including carbon emissions, particulate emissions, noise, waste of space, perceived and actual safety, and so on.

Cars are literally an econ 101 textbook example of negative externalities.

Two-wheel vehicles are much more reasonable in all ways, I’m not arguing against them (although two-stroke ICEs are definitely terrible things).

Because recent events have abundantly shown that dependence of any US SaaS is a big liability.

The point is, obviously, that we should be decoupling from all gas. The past four years have made it very clear how risky it is to depend on foreign fossil fuels, economically and geopolitically.

Like Putin in Ukraine. But decoupling from Russian gas is still slow going and controversial in Europe, and the "moderate" right is more and more inclined to collaborate with Putin’s little fringe-right helper parties, likely partly because they’re massively bleeding votes and partly out of real sympathies for fringe policies that just used to be unmentionable in polite company.

Yes. Which is exactly the problem. If cars cause traffic jams - never mind their other externalities only some of which are fixed by EVs - then that just means cars are too cheap and their true costs aren't reflected in their price. Cars are a classic tragedy of the commons, everyone in traffic would prefer that there be less traffic so they could get to places faster.

Cars make themselves not-fast by their sheer inefficiency unless huge amounts of taxpayer money is continually poured to the infrastructure. What’s incredible is that cars have been getting even larger, an example of astonishingly perverse incentive structures.

Thanks for your opinion, we’ll give it all the attention that it deserves.

How can you say that? Even if their future livelihood were 100% guaranteed at the same or even higher level, the loss they feel would be the same. If you don't understand that, you probably just aren't empathetic enough.

Your employer probably would, and Anthropic as well.

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In any case, these Netflix and LLM subscription comparisons are utterly beside the point, the equation is hilariously different when it’s a surveillance tool used by the state violence monopoly that we’re talking about. The standard should be absurdly higher than "no big deal, everyone shares their Netflix".