chimprich

Thank you!

Currently it is just a bit of pattern matching and polymorphism that pulls in various libraries according to entity type. If it picks up any interest I'll put some thought into how could be a bit more elegant / modular.

From the article: "70% of the soft plastic that reached a known destination was burnt, not recycled".

That doesn't seem too bad. That means 30% got recycled, which is more than I expected given the general cynicism around plastic recycling. 30% definitely seems worthwhile.

For the plastic that got incinerated, it is presumably more efficient to burn products for energy reclamation that are already separated by type.

Having these recycling pathways set up is a necessary step towards improving recycling rates. We should be able to improve on that 30% over time.

A small, cute CLI app that gives overviews about files and other entities. I've called it `what`. It's inspired by being able to right-click on stuff in a GUI file manager to get an overview about what it is.

https://github.com/richsmith/what/

> This could probably slip up a human at first too [...] > breaks the illusion that there's real human-like logical reasoning happening

This does seem like the sort of error a human might make. Isn't the problem here that the model is using reasoning that is too human-like? I.e. error-prone pattern matching rather than formal logic?

Ukraine hasn't postponed elections indefinitely. They have postponed them until they are no longer at war.

Other countries have effectively gone from moderately democratic elections to sham elections. Turkey is one major country that is going through this process at the moment.

> They will now build another factory in the us to be able to avoid tariffs and keep selling their goods at competitive prices

They won't be competitive prices though; they'll have to charge more because of the capital costs in setting up a whole new factory and supply chains, increased labour costs, and having to pay tariffs on importing parts.

I imagine that not being able to export cars from this factory due to reciprocal tarrifs will also drive up prices, due to things like lost flexibility, redundancy, and economies of scale.

I agree that sometimes organisations conspire against people. My point was, in case it wasn't apparent, the irony that somenameforme was talking about how LLMs were of little use because they hallucinate, whilst apparently hallucinating a conspiracy by AI companies to overhype the technology.

I wasn't making a political point. You see similar evidence-free allegations against international organisations and national government bodies.

> Remember the "leaks" from Google about an engineer trying to get the word out that they had created a sentient intelligence?

I presume you are referring to this Google engineer, who was sacked for making the claim. Hardly an example of AI companies overhyping the tech; precisely the opposite, in fact. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62275326

It seems to be a common human hallucination to imagine that large organisations are conspiring against us.

> what we have right now are LLMs, not AI

LLMs are a subset of AI. The field has been called AI for over 70 years.

Let's try to at least keep the terminology correct on HN.

That is possible, but the evidence doesn't suggest that. E.g. if I am reading the paper correctly, they say that there is evidence of two distinct spillover lineages, which wouldn't be consistent with a simple visit from a lab worker.

The CIA is not a neutral party in this. Discrediting China may well be their goal here.

A lab leak is not impossible, but there are good reasons to suspect a natural spillover event. There have been a number of studies that point in that direction; e.g. recent genetic analysis that suggests that the Wuhan wet market was the origin.

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2

> Suppose that a person feels that Black people aren't being helped to succeed in our society, and are actually being harmed, by the way they are being told they are always victims

> The idea that people can be harmed by hearing ideas they disagree with

You seem to be arguing that Black people are harmed by being exposed to ideas about victimhood, and then ridiculing the idea that being exposed to ideas can be harmful.

"Community belief", or the appearance of it, can be engineered by a bad actor with sufficient resources: an authoritarian state, a think-tank with sufficiently rich sponsors, or the platform itself.

> When you suppress ideas in this way, they become more attractive to a large number of people.

That sounds superficially reasonable, but I don't think that it's true.

Turn the sentence around: "when you spread ideas more widely, they become more attractive to a large number of people". Repetition works. It's why trillions gets spent on advertising each year.

> You do realize [...], right?

You are correct, but I don't like this idiom. Your point would come across better if it wasn't delivered in a patronisation sandwich.

> autocomplete word salad generators

People get very hung up on this "autocomplete" idea, but language is a linear stream. How else are you going to generate text except for one token at a time, building on what you have produced already?

That's what humans do after all (at least with speech/language; it might be a bit less linear if you're writing code, but I think it's broadly true).

> There still isn't. Bsky is no competition in that regard. There's nothing of value for 'normal' people there.

I'm finding Bluesky a perfect Twitter replacement so far. Twitter was becoming a cesspool; an increasingly rancid algorithm that promoted one particular person's politics, and a lack of moderation that meant many conversations just degenerated into abuse.

> How many of these supposed giant exoduses were we supposed to have by now?

All platforms eventually get superseded.

Twitter only thrived over competitors because of the network effect. Other platforms were technically superior / had better QoL, but either had flaws or didn't achieve critical mass.

Bluesky is different. It's as easy to use for the average person, gives more control to the user, is far more civil, and is now big enough already be a replacement.

Almost all the people I was following on Twitter are now posting on there. I followed a lot of scientists, and many have moved entirely. That fewer people are on Bluesky is a feature, not a bug; the signal to noise is more distilled.

> It is patently false that the loss of sovereignty is fictional.

It is not "patently" false. That is an absolutist view of the type you are complaining about. UK law still had priority: demonstrated by the fact that the UK was able to withdraw from the agreement.

> This is still the very narrow-minded view that "we are correct they are wrong"

You seem outraged by this; why? Why shouldn't we think that we were correct and you were wrong? Presumably you thought you were right and we were wrong.

Anyway, the empirical evidence since suggests that we were correct and you were wrong. Most of the predictions made by Remainers turned out to be correct. Can you accept that?

> Effectively, "we" are smart and correct and "they" are stupid and racist

No one in this thread has claimed this. The official campaign never said this. You are attacking a strawman.

Meanwhile, Trump: "Crazy do-nothing democrats", "horrendous people", "the Dems are vicious"... and about 10,000 other insults whilst seizing on one offhand comment from Biden.

> This is the real, dangerous divide between the well-offs in and around London and the rest of the country.

Above you said "It disparages those who voted for Brexit instead of trying to understand them". Why are you disparaging those who voted remain instead of trying to understand them?

> which may be easier with the truth but is also much harder when insulting half the electorate

I'm not sure this is correct. In both the Brexit campaign and the Trump election, the winning side spread insults freely, whilst meanwhile spinning a narrative that the other side were talking down to their supporters.

In both cases, the more aggressive and less truthful campaigns won, and the more "proper" campaigns that tried to reach out actually failed.

Being bolder seems to work better in the current political climate, not pussyfooting around being safe and trying not to insult anyone. I wonder if refusing to apologise and doubling down on the "garbage" comment would have worked better.

> Obama was chastising black men

Can you quote what Obama said that seems relevant to my post? I doubt he outright insulted anyone.

> And what a surprise that they went hard for Trump instead

According to an exit poll, Black voters voted 86% Democrat this year, compared to 87% at the 2020 election.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

It was a single remark by the outgoing president who wasn't standing for election, and something he quickly rowed back on. It was clearly something he didn't intend to say, but at some point in an election campaign someone is going to misspeak.

Anyway, you're moving the goalposts. The allegation was "calling half the country racist sexist fascist inbred stupid genocidal monsters".

> calling half the country racist sexist fascist inbred stupid genocidal monsters

The Democratic campaign did no such thing. Can you point to any examples? As far as I can see they went to great lengths to avoid saying anything like that.

As far as I can tell there was far more venom from the Republicans. Maybe the lesson is that a winning strategy is to be more insulting.

> instead of insulting the people they were supposed to convince (as the Remain campaign did)

Can you point to any examples of this? I don't think the official Remain campaign did anything of the sort. Insulting the people you are trying to convert is a poor strategy, which is why I don't believe they did it.

When you say "were called bigots, uneducated, stupid, racist, etc", what I think happened was that the Leave campaign alleged that that was what the Remainers thinking/saying and it gained traction.

> It disparages those who voted for Brexit instead of trying to understand them,

But why? Why is it the job of the people who are on the side of established truth who have to understand the views of the fantasists? I saw more "disparagement" from the pro-Brexit crowd than the Remainers. Why isn't it their responsibility to understand the realist position?

We told them Brexit would be a disaster. We were told we were scaremongering. It went ahead anyway, and it turned out to be awful. It was a stupid decision, and it was terrible judgment.

Why can't we tell people that some proposals are stupid? And why can't we tell people after the fact that they made a stupid decision? How is it our fault that they make bad decisions?

It's pretty hard to define what populism is; it's kind of a "know it when I see it" kind of definition for most commentators.

My best attempt at a definition would be a platform that denies known truths in favour of superficially popular positions. For example, claiming that tariffs don't increase prices, or that legal convictions are lies, or even that solid, established scientific evidence (like vaccines are safe and hugely effective or climate change is real) are untrue.

> That government was founded on an entirely different principle, the principle of individual rights. This principle says that man, due to his nature, has rights that no one else, not even his government, is allowed to violate.

That's far from a uniquely US principle. See, for example, the European Declaration of Human Rights.

The US places more emphasis on individual rights over the rights of the community, which is its prerogative, but the US is an outlier; most liberal democracies accept a little more restriction on individual rights for the good of the community.

You can argue it either way, but a lot of US commentators seem to get outraged that other countries might have a different viewpoint.

> I recall one such poster getting upset over the word 'Chinaman'. Something this Englishman, sharing an office with two Irishman, a Frenchman and a Dane, found rather bizarre, particularly as the chap complaining was not Chinese themselves!

And yet "Chinaman" is considered derogatory. If you believe the Wikipedia page, it has been considered so since at least 1965 in British English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinaman

You might not consider it logical for "Chinaman" to be considered derogatory when similarly structured words like "Frenchman" are not, but the reality is that if you use the term then you will be evoking the current meaning.

> and needs to stop

The point of the article is that you can't stop the euphemism treadmill, no matter how emphatically you request it.

Your first graph shows diminishing returns for both battery storage and solar. It's also not clear whether that's the marginal cost or includes the capital cost to build the structures and all the infrastructure.

To compare nuclear against solar you have to compare it against the sum of the cost of solar plus battery storage.

Investing in solar/wind/nuclear energy sources, storage, and research for improving all of the above seems like the best strategic option for at least the next decade.