fumblebee

Comedian Peter Serafinowicz's website for his character Brian Butterfield takes web design to the next level[1] /s

Sadly, the original website was taken down last year, but thanks to the Wayback Machine this masterpiece is still available to marvel at.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210330113905/http://www.peters...

Except, progress isn't guaranteed by the march of time.

Take something more objective than fine art, like Roman Concrete [1]. To this day the Pantheon is the largest freestanding dome in the world because of the concrete's disproportionately good durability and longevity. It puts modern mass produced concrete to shame.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete

The author cites London as being a desirable city given the historical lack of disasters, steady government, and cultural preference for preservation etc. London was also my first thought as a safe haven for a long lasting build.

On the other hand, I can't help but feel London would be an obvious target for nuclear annihilation in some future conflict; UK commerce / industry / power / wealth is deeply centralised in London.

A better option would be to stick to the UK, but maybe a 100 miles outside of London proper.

The relentless march of language. Back in my day, TikTok was just the sound a clock made.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change

BIOGRAPHY: The Power Broker by Robert Caro - one of the greatest biographies you'll ever read. Long but absolutely first class. I've been meaning to read his trio of books on LBJ but for now they're on the later-base.

CLASSIC FICTION: The Master and Margarita Novel by Mikhail Bulgakov - a magical text of immense imagination. Had it not been released posthumously Bulgakov would no doubt have gotten shipped to a gulag or worse.

CHILDREN'S BOOK: The Little Price by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - I read this charming book at the age of 28 and found it to be one of the most enchanting books I've ever read. Full of life lessons.

NON FICTION: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Once every while you read a book that forces you to view the world in a whole new light, this is one such book.

COMEDY SCI-FI: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - delightful book with immense irony and is absolutely hilarious.

Similar but different: a company called MicroAcquire[1] facilitate the buying and selling of small companies, though unlike tiny[2], don't acquire them themselves.

[1] https://microacquire.com/ [2] https://www.tinycapital.com/

Hm, on Safari mobile, hold down on image and “Add to Photos”, downloads fast and fine. How come?

For short documents (~1-3 pages) I use a scanning app on my iPhone to scan them as a PDF, after which I store them in my Password Manager (which can also store docs), with appropriate filenames and tags for easy searching.

The take-home assignment seems to me a slightly broken system; it's easily gameable because there's zero supervision.

Let's say there's two candidates for a position who are both asked to complete the take-home assignment, Candidate A and Candidate B.

Candidate A is the superior candidate and spends only two hours on the task (as requested), and Candidate B spends 2 days. Candidate B submits the better assignment and is more likely to land the job as a result, despite Candidate A being the better candidate.

I’m in no way surprised it was Jonny Greenwood who discovered the record; imo he’s far and away the resident “nerd” of the group (intended in a positive light).

The Small Robot Company in the UK, whose "Head of Intelligence" worked at DeepMind for 7 years, is another such company working on this (and other) problem(s).

Their solution has three robots named Tom, Dick, and Harry. Tom maps the field, assessing soil conditions and weeds. Dick zaps weeds. And Harry is the haulier of nutrients for crops.

That cookies landing page is a crime against humanity. When will this problem be solved!

I will struggle to reply to everyone here individually, but I’m really grateful to everyone who commented with advice. The HN community never ceases to amaze me. Thank you all

I spend a lot of time working in "normal" cafés.

I'm struggling to see the benefit of paying for time and having sustenance (e.g. coffee) be free, instead of paying for sustenance and having the time be free.

I've never once been asked to leave a cafe after I've paid for __, and subsequently spent a few hours there.

There's probably scores of Apple employees working on Siri week-in, week-out.

But in all the time I've had it, I use it for literally two commands, both of which I use often:

1. "Set timer for x minutes" 2. "What song is this?"

Using it for anything else bubbles up too many false positives to make the experience worthwhile.

This is how I feel about most meal recipes I encounter on the internet.

The writer's backstory for the recipe is so inconsequential to my wanting that specific set of instructions. Yet there it is, every time.

I also feel this way. In the past I was completely satisfied with the recommended content.

I now find it over-calibrates to recommend based on recently watched videos, whether the same channel or the same style.

For example, I watched a video the other day, something like "Boris Johnson pronouncing the word _____". Next thing I know, my recommendations are flooded with similar videos that I don't really want to spend my time on.

This deters me from watching videos that come up that I'm mildly curious in watching, but don't really want to watch more of.

Is this something SpaceX eventually plan to commercialise, like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are doing?

Seems to me that orbital spaceflight as a proposition is an order of magnitude more enticing than scratching the Kármán line. And for the people who could afford it, they'd surely pay an order of magnitude more.

“Sounds like someone’s got a case of the Mondays.”

The opening sentence sort of broke my mind. It reads:

> Macbeth is a creepy play.

But my brain wanted really badly to swap the emphasised word:

> Macbeth is a creepy play.

Edit: Maybe that was the point of the author. A couple of paragraphs later they say “Actors and critics have long remarked that when you read Macbeth out loud, it feels like your voice and mouth and brain are doing something ever so slightly wrong. There’s something subconsciously off about the sound of the play, and it spooks people.”

What fantasy world are you living in where you think Netflix and Facebook don't already do this? They constantly run paid interviews with people to source this information.

The issue is many-fold: 1) formalising multiple half hour interviews into something you can A/B test is non-trivial, 2) given the logistics of these interviews the sample you end up with is small and therefore bias.

I'm not certain what you mean by human factors, so correct me if I've misinterpreted.

If by human factors you mean basic heuristics based on human intuition, that fails too. It might satisfy 50% of viewers but there's too much diversity in taste for this to be a good model.

I'm not defending the metric as described, but there's obviously good data driven approaches and bad ones. The trick is to find a solid proxy for the business problem and to try to weed out any dark side effects by applying it.

Hm, I really don't understand the approach of choosing shows/films based on what the algorithm tells me I'll like. Watching a series is such an incredible time sink that it's necessary to gather more information in advance of choosing.

I've found a much better model is friends or critics' recommendations cross-checked against Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb ratings. (Which implies you need some people to use the scattergun approach, but I'd rather not be the guinea pig).

This way it doesn't matter if good Netflix shows are "needle in a haystack".

I'm curious, is there an advantage of doing style transfer implicitly via adding text over explicitly by providing a target image to copy the style from?

That link is incredibly extensive, great resource!

I find the "tattoo" effect to be extremely disturbing.

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my Qs; all useful insights and is much appreciated.

Mostly I'm excited about the direction and innovation velocity that AI art is going, but partly I'm anxious about what the eventual implications will be for human artists.