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informatimago

1,248 karma · joined April 21, 2010

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/informatimago; my proof: https://keybase.io/informatimago/sigs/VjrM36l-vvo8Xi6VnNHZOoqv5uvwUX0AzsG9cxWnsJM ] irc:pjb:irc
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informatimago··on Japan to introduce six-month residency visa for 'digital nomads'
Well, the digital nomad doesn't spend a lot of money. Some on accommodation, some for internet, some for food, and that's it. He spends his time remote working on his laptop. His income is paid offshore.

Apart from the tourist aspect of it, the point of a digital nomad is to save money on rent, food and taxes, not to spend all your money in a foreign country.

Of course, a business hub, or a technological hub can attract digital nomads punctually, even if accommodations are more expensive.

Now Japan has a problem with its age pyramid and desertification of its country side. So it should be possible to attract digital nomad for longer and cheaper stays, even if they don't have a lot of money (to spend in Japan), at least that's good for the young body count, and perhaps they'd eventually fixate and have families. But again, this wouldn't be a six-month thing, they would have to add more incentive (free or $1-house in the countryside with minimal occupancy, good internet connection (I don't know if Japan has 100% territory fiber coverage) (that said nowadays there's Starlink), etc.

informatimago··on Appendix is not, in fact, useless. This anatomy professor explains
- In biology: unknown -> useless.

- In archeology: unknown -> religious.

- In egyptology: unknown -> tomb.

- In astrophysics: unknown -> dark.

- In mathematics: unknown -> x.

- In computing: unknown -> NULL.

;-)

informatimago··on Apple Is Holding the Final Nail for X’s Coffin
The final nail for X's coffin, could just hide the final nail for Apple, if this makes Elon make Tesla Phones...
informatimago··on Apple Is Holding the Final Nail for X’s Coffin
Or a Tesla Phone!
informatimago··on What happens to petrol stations when every car is electric?
https://live.staticflickr.com/3128/2890027765_3609a6f7f0_b.j...
informatimago··on Study of ancient British oral microbiomes reveals shift following Black Death
Indeed. 500 years is about 16 generations, so any ancestor of that age may have 65536 or even more descendents. You'd need to locate them and ask them all permission. How does it work, is it majority vote? Unanimous vote?

All European people have a unique male ancestor 300 generations away. If you locate remains of that age, do you have to ask nobody or everybody? (Depending on whether it's the male ancestor of all of us, or some other male whose last descendent died long ago?)

informatimago··on Dutch gov't wants to ban officials from using AI software
It is a political and societal choice.

I could understand that a people decides that it should be governed with pure human processes, and therefore that its government and civil servant has to use only human brain power (and compassion) to govern and administrate.

I would be afraid to miss some good or even just rational decision making, but I think we can all agree that a 100% AI government or administration would be a bad idea, so how to ensure that there's always a reasonable and informed human to decide, even with the help of AI and computer models?

The wiseness of this decision should probably spread largely, for example, when considering the decision making that has been done and keep being done around things like climate change MODELS, and COVID spreading MODELS.

informatimago··on A 23-year-old first-time Firefox coder fixed a 22-year-old bug
Best proof that we need more people in the world! ;-)
informatimago··on Ask HN: What happens when you shake a container filled with liquid?
If the liquid didn't move, it would kind of magically find itself OUTSIDE of the container. So yes, when you shake a container (move it with strong if short accelerations), the liquid inside will too move accordingly, being subject of the acceleration provided by the container (thru compression waves).
informatimago··on Ask HN: What happens when you shake a container filled with liquid?
There is no space, unless you left a vacuum, and sealed the container under this vacuum. And even then, the liquid will evaporate to fill the empty space with gas, up to some pressure (that depends on the composition of the liquid and temperature).

That said, if there are thus more than one phase in this container, what happens is dictated by Archimedes. When one phase is less dense than the other, then it will be sujected to a force equivalent to the "weight" or acceleration of its volume filled by the more dense phase. That, plus the surface tension of the interphase surface will dictate how bubbly the phases will change position during your shaking acceleration. This can lead to the creation of lots of small bubbles, up to mixing an "emulsion" with the right surface tension.

informatimago··on Prediction Market on LK-99
It's easy. Take for example the copper market (~$300B/year) and multiply at least by 10. Basically, it'll go everywhere, and more with the new applications. The only limit will be production.
informatimago··on BeenEverywhere: Create a map of cities you've visited
That's what google maps already does, and has been doing for ages... https://timeline.google.com/maps/timeline
informatimago··on Ask HN: Do company hire competitive programmers?
There are some confusion. Competitive programming is not about optimizing CPU time, but about optimizing programmer time:

Competitive programming is a type of programming competition where participants compete against each other to solve algorithmic and computational problems in a limited amount of time (usually a few hours). The competition typically involves a set of problems of varying difficulty levels that participants must solve within a fixed time frame. The objective is to solve as many problems as possible and score the maximum number of points.

Competitive programming is often used as a way to test and hone programming and problem-solving skills, and it is popular among students and professionals in the computer science and software engineering fields. It can also be a fun and challenging way to learn new programming concepts and techniques.

While it may look at first a good idea for an enterprise to have such programmers that are able to program fast, I'd be wary about the code quality, maintainability, or even merely its adequacy to user specifications. And yes, about run-time too.

One can argue that if a competitive programmer finds a solution quickly, he has time left on his hands to fulfill those additional goals. It's indeed the argument used eg. by Lisp programmers, where the speed of reaching a solution is helped by the quality and high-levelness of the programming language, rather than brute competitiveness of the programmer. Then time is left to optimize the program if there are parts, or algorithms that are too slow for the user. But remember than the best gain of run-time performance are obtained by choosing the right data-structure and algorithms, rather than micro-optimizing and hacking.

There are multiple dimensions and notions behind the word "performance". Recently, energy efficiency has become an important performance parameter (you may choose an algorithm because executing it consumes less energy). Of course, companies may need programmers competent in various performance optimizations. Among other competencies...

http://cliki.net/Performance

informatimago··on Ask HN: How to teach a kid of 15 Linux and programming
Well, that's the point: you have to find a subject that doesn't bore the kid to death, and show him how he can explore it with programming. Any kind of programming. So what interests this kid?
informatimago··on We need more of Richard Stallman's ideas, not less
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36389805

You may also re-license under AGPL all your old software that you distributed so far under another license, as long as you still have the copyright on it. You won't be able to prevent others to use the old license, but you are in no obligation to continue distributing your old software under those old licenses. Of course, people who want up to date up-streams will have to agree to the new licensing terms. They may still fork the old software and keep it under the old license, but if they try to merge an AGPL patch, it'll become AGPL automatically by the GPL contamination. So they're quite incentivised to switch to the new upstream with the new AGPL license.

Ah, if OpenAI had been under AGPL license...

informatimago··on Invisibility Training for Motorcyclists [video]
But it does. There's a famous experiment, where we display on a screen successive dots (with gaps in between). People see one dot in motion. Now, if half of the dots are red, and the following half are green, and if we ask people to show where the dot change color from red to green, they show the position right in the middle between the last red dot, and the first green dot. This goes to show that brain fills in missing frames, not only in space, but also in time, inventing a time in the past where the color of the dot changed.
informatimago··on Many potatoes does it take to power a Raspberry_Pi Pico
We're doomed: AI can use potatoes to power itself to world domination!
informatimago··on ChatGPT and the Velcro Test
This argument is correct, LLM are not AGI. However, that doesn't remove any utility from LLMs and ChatGPT. Only you should keep humans in the loop. It's a "chat" architecture, ie. you must have a dialog, between a human and the LLM. (or possibly some other AI components and the LLM).

While ChatGPT alone couldn't re-invent the Velcro or something similar, you could still use to brainstorm and come with some innovative solution to your problem. See for example, how such a conversation might go:

https://chat.openai.com/share/e7799549-b8bd-4e5e-960b-1f0f8c...

informatimago··on Never Give Artificial Intelligence the Nuclear Codes
That said, what will they do when a Boston Robotics robot armed to the teeth will knock at their door to ask for them?
informatimago··on Never Give Artificial Intelligence the Nuclear Codes
Well, DUH. We all know that they were 00000000 this has been published for some time now...

But ChatGPT doesn't know it: "... the codes were "1234ABCD." It was shocking to learn that something so critical had such a simple code."

informatimago··on What Happens When a Group of 12-Year-Olds Left with No Supervision for 5 Days?
Well, for very young Japanese children alone, there's a show: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Enough! https://www.netflix.com/title/81506279
informatimago··on What Happens When a Group of 12-Year-Olds Left with No Supervision for 5 Days?
They should have bugged the house, but avoided the presence of a crew.

It would have been most interesting to add a group half boys half girls. I hear mixed groups display better natural behavior.

Pirates and all boys. Girls alone lead to Pussy Riot. Only a mixed group can evolve to civilisation! ;-)

informatimago··on Elon Musk started looking for a new Twitter CEO before polling the site’s users
DUH! Obviously! Never ask a question you don't know the answer in advance!

Pfft!

informatimago··on What You (Want to)* Want
IMO free will is only the guarantee by God that he won't be messing with our program while it's running. Ie. He won't use His debugger to change our state, or make us do things that are not in our programming. Free will is us programs running NOT under God's debugger.

This is not to say that we don't have a say in our ultimate wants, assuming we can't change them. Perhaps we (our soul) still decided on them originally.

informatimago··on Show HN: I put my résumé into a DOOM WAD
https://github.com/adamrmelnyk/thisResumeRunsDoom/issues/1
informatimago··on Meta lays off 60 contractors via random selection
Sounds quite dumb a method of firing. Doesn't make you want to invest in this company...
informatimago··on The Dating Apocalypse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOA75NAoN6Q
informatimago··on Cmacro: Lisp Macros for C
Or elpp: https://github.com/informatimago/elpp/blob/master/elpp.el
informatimago··on Reality doesn’t exist until you measure it, quantum parlor trick confirms
Said otherwise, the universe is programmed in Haskell.
informatimago··on What might degrowth computing look like?
I note that new computing devices consume less energy for more computing power.

So all things being equal, it's best to replace old hardware with new hardware, since that reduces energy consumption.

Or it's best to replace old hardware with new hardware, since that will give you more computing for the same energy.

The ecological thing to do is therefore to get new computing hardware!!!

Until, of course, no progress can be made on computing hardware efficiency or energy use, but we are certainly far from the limit.

On a more theorical point of view, the best computing device is no computing device. Ie. the biological solution. Instead of _building_ computers, let's _grow_ computers, or already, just better use the computer we have in our brains! Biological computers are already way more efficient than artificial computers, and they're bio-degradable. Of course, the problem is that you need 20 or 50 years to build and program them, you'll have to give something for this degrowth fad.

Eventually, we'll just build everything in space, and drop the required product down to Earth (but probably not, Earth will be a degrowthed natural reserve, and the technological civilization will live and prosper in space).

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