No kidding, I'm spending $10-20 a day on API calls just between summarization and development using aider.
3,524 karma · joined June 24, 2017
That description of chinampas is a popular misconception. They're "floating" in the sense that they're in the middle of a lake but there's no way to float any nontrivial amount of soil on top of mats of reeds, there just isn't enough buoyancy and a cubic meter of damp soil weighs over a metric ton.
The reeds were used to create underwater fences that would keep the underwater pile of soil from spilling out into a giant mound, thus allowing the soil to be piled in a vertical pillar that easily reaches above the water. After the chinampa was filled, they planted trees along the corners and edges so that the roots would further hold the chinampa together. They added night soil dredged from the lake on top every year to replenish the nutrients and replace the soil that gets eroded away by the lake but they're filled to the bottom when they're built.
They've been exploring going on 16 years. It's time to stop exploring and start exploiting.
Three!? Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal Clojure environment that covers everyone's use cases.
Situation: There are fourteen competing Clojure development environments.
And that's how we get Cylon Terminators.
If humanity kills itself, we're definitely taking the rest of the apes with us.
Those stores probably outnumber the restaurants serving pierogi significantly.
If I had a dollar for every astronomical object that turned out to be more common than expected in my life time, I'd be rich!
Exoplanets, brown dwarves, rogue planets, fast radio bursts, super-earth exoplanets, neutron stars, hot jupiters, binary star systems, ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, globular clusters in other galaxies, circumbinary exoplanets, intermediate-mass black holes, ringed exoplanets, pulsars, useful gravitational lenses, magnetars, white dwarves with planetary remnants, ultra-compact dwarf galaxies, quasars with outflows, blue stragglers... I could go on and on.
It's been a delight to watch, especially with the torrent of discoveries enabled by JWST. Maybe the astrophysicists will even be able to get our timeline back on track after the LHC screwed everything up.
We will soon all be Vogons.
CARB has been researching the issue of prescribed burns for decades and ever since the mid to late 2010s is completely on board, but the air districts are slower to follow. On top of that, the difference in land management priorities between the National Forest Service, BLM, and the State of California complicates everything. One of the best arguments for the Federal government divesting of its land in the west is to allow the states to better manage their own resources (states' rights comes full circle).
You need less DMX and more Wu-Tang [1]
How many individuals have actually had their lives ruined, outside a very small number of people like Alexandra Elbakyan? Plenty of companies have been shutdown over the matter and plenty of scene groups have been raided but ever since Aaron Swartz prosecutors in the US seem to have little appetite for such cases and Europe has always been lenient as far as criminal penalties go. The latest scene group raids that made it to HN's front page ended in 60 day suspended sentences for the offenders which is a complete joke as far as penalties go. Nonviolent offenses that are barely worth prosecuting in most jurisdictions if not for media industry handwringing.
Oh yeah? What about... "a mesmerizingly vibrant and colossal T-Rex with an iridescent, shimmering skin that reflects all the colors of the spectrum. It stands in a fantastical, alien landscape filled with towering, luminescent mushroom-like structures and a flowing river of brilliant, neon light. In the background, an otherworldly nebula explodes with the most intense and vivid colors across the cosmic star-filled sky"!? [1]
I have nothing else to add to this serious topic, I just like drawing dinosaurs like I'm eight years old again [2]. I rented a GPU for this weekend and I've got a script using GPT4 to generate random topic-specific prompts for SDXL to test out all the parameters, schedulers, etc (5k images and counting so far). Maybe it's just the fact that I've avoided the reddit firehose but I don't know how anyone could lose their awe so fast. It's just fun and there doesn't have to be any more to it.
That said, given the Heart of Gold improbability drive, I don't think information theoretic violations are your biggest problems.
Lots of absolutely positioned buttons clipped by a resize, toolbars that didn't hide their buttons behind a menu when the window was too small, uncollapsible panels with minimum widths that exceeded the main content, and so on. Most of them were about as resizable as a water balloon when you smash it on the ground.
Theranos is the perfect case in point: no biotech VC invested in Theranos. Not a single one. They avoided it like the plague because anyone who did any due diligence knew that using blood from a finger prick for accurate diagnostics was a physical impossibility.
The list of Theranos investors is all "dumb money" like Rupert Murdoch, Betsy DeVos (that Betsy DeVos), Larry Ellison, Robert Kraft, and the Walton family among others.
There are more web developers because it was a lot easier, even before npm existed and frontend frameworks went out of control. That’d didn’t happen in a vacuum - Electron was really late on the scene as far as frontend tech goes. It was originally made to support an IDE and not regular business apps and still won.
The tide coming out with interest rates will hopefully reshuffle the industry.
I remember how big of a pain in the ass Windows distribution (alone) was in the 2000s with entire businesses like InstallShield built around it. Tack compatibility testing on top of that and a desktop app for a single OS because a massive effort. With the web you could just upload PHP and off to the race. That slowly evolved into what we had today via jquery and electron and friends but what won was distribution and ease of development, despite all the handwringing people do about frontend. The grass isn’t greener on the other side and hasn’t been for decades.
It’s not even remotely competitive anymore. My favorite example is GoldenLayout: it takes me less than a few hours to read the docs and implement a full blown tabbed and split screen interface using a third party library and combine it with any framework I want like React, Svelte, or just vanilla JS. Each desktop framework have their own solutions to the problem usually in the form of commercial components but even in the best case, they take lots more time to wire together.
> The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
I think it's totally doable but you'd need many more microphones in order to deal with real world noise. As MEMS microphone quality improves, this should eventually be possible with a combination of smartphone/headphone/some other device like something around your neck.
I noticed marker downloaded a PyTorch checkpoint called `nougat-0.1.0-small`, do you use nougat under the hood too or is that just a coincidence?