jamesgreenleaf

It’s still the “bus problem”:

Either they got hit by the bus, or they hopped on the bus and rode away.

Is there a Bob Ross for websites/apps (or general programming) somewhere out there on Youtube or Twitch?

That's another good problem to solve. Humanity is large enough that we don't have to work on only one thing at a time.

It's critical that intelligent life on Earth learns to adapt and survive in the greater universe. Staying on this one planet is a virtual guarantee of extinction in the long-term.

Short-term wasteful, long-term critical.

Let us consult the Book of Jobs.

Sometimes I'm in wondrous awe at the unfathomable scale of it all, and other times I can understand why the Krikkiters were so upset.

A genuine atheist, or an agnostic? If the former, why deny yourself another fabulous mystery?

Sometimes Occam's Razor reminds me a little of that joke about the two economists who notice money lying on the ground.

Do we assume that our universe will turn out to be elegant because that's what we'd most prefer?

If you liked "Under the Skin", you should watch "Vivarium".

Once was enough for me. I never want to see either of them again.

Let's fix the root of the problem and make Earth's rotation constant. How hard could it be? /s

It's from T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland":

      IV. Death by Water

    Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
    Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
    And the profit and loss.
    
        A current under sea
    Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
    He passed the stages of his age and youth
    Entering the whirlpool.

        Gentile or Jew
    O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
    Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

I get Phlebas mixed up with those lines from Shakespeare's "The Tempest", where we get the idiom "sea change":

    Full fathom five thy father lies,
    Of his bones are coral made,
    Those are pearls that were his eyes,
    Nothing of him that doth fade,
    But doth suffer a sea-change,
    into something rich and strange,
    Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell,
    Ding-dong.
    Hark! now I hear them, ding-dong, bell.

> Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

I'd be worried about the same thing, and wouldn't execute blindly. It seems like a useful way to quickly find out which flags you should be checking the man pages for.

They require an email address and a phone number, probably as a way to mitigate spam accounts. If you're worried about privacy, you could probably use a burner for each.

I'll eagerly await the ASCII-only "You Don't Need Unicode"

If Level 7 is minute to minute, then Level 8 must be something like a combat or survival situation in which every split-second matters.

What's beyond that? Eldritch horrors?

Not just any foreign government, but an authoritarian rival Great Power. In addition to data-capture, the app also employs a closed-source algorithm that can promote or bury certain types of content. It's a window into the minds of the citizens of competing, democratic nations, and those nations do not have reciprocal methods of such access.

> Prompt: Write a joke about how many machine learning engineers it takes to turn on a light bulb.

> Output: How many machine learning engineers does it take to turn on a light bulb? Just one, but it takes a lot of training data.

Richard Branson, in his autobiography, tells a story about his mother asking him one day while she was driving, if he thought he could find his way home from where they were, which was miles away. He got out of the car, his mother drove off, and he walked home. He was four years old.

Here's John Taylor Gatto telling the story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96tEE8XoC0c

> The image generator seems to understand that you can’t see through opaque objects

I thought this isn't the case for Stable Diffusion. Wasn't it the humans making the source images who understood things like that, and their knowledge became encoded in the latent space of the model? I'm not an expert. Please correct me here.

Mostly.

I've been wondering about this for years. Finally got an answer.

> Prompt: wiki article on Moss-covered three-handled family gredunzas

> Result:

    Moss-covered three-handled family gredunzas (Polish: Trochę węglemiarki) are a distinctive type of ceramic tableware produced in Poland between 1880 and 1910. The name comes from the gredunia, the traditional Polish earthenware pot used for the preparation of food.

    The gredunzas were produced in three sizes: the smallest, with a capacity of 120-130 cm³, was used to serve the main dish, the medium-sized one, with a capacity of 230-240 cm³, was used to serve salad, and the largest one, with a capacity of 360-370 cm³, was used to serve dessert. The gredunzas were made of red clay, with the exception of the bottom part, which was made of a lighter, cream-coloured clay. The vessels were shaped by hand, and were decorated with a distinctive, delicate pattern, usually in the form of a floral motif. The gredunzas were fired in a wood-burning kiln.

    The gredunzas were decorated with the use of a characteristic technique, in which the ceramic was covered with a thin layer of moss, then fired, and then painted over. The moss was usually collected from forests in the vicinity of Kraków, and was usually mixed with water, which made it easier to apply. The moss layer was usually covered with a dark brown or black glaze, which was then decorated with white paint. The moss was usually used to cover the whole surface of the vessel, except for the rim, where a white or yellow glaze was used. The use of moss decoration was probably an innovation introduced by the potters of Kraków. The decoration was also occasionally combined with a floral motif.

Well, genius borders madness, and it's been said that talking to oneself is a sign of intelligence, so you may be right.

Human creativity isn't being replaced; new layers of it are being added.

> Elon proposing a $20/month price for Twitter Blue, and then immediately dropping to $8 at the first celebrity pushback, something any pricing expert would know is a terrible idea

Wasn't that a good idea though? Everyone heard the price was going to be $20, so now $8 doesn't seem so bad. Wouldn't a pricing expert refer to that as anchoring?

> ...a full, complete, and unconditional pardon... regardless of whether they have been charged with or prosecuted for this offense...

Millions of people can now truthfully say that they've been granted a presidential pardon.

If you mixed it with Vantablack, would you get the greyest possible paint? /s

I actually check that sometimes. Anecdotally, I remember the ratio being ~4.5 in 2019, then ~3.5 during the pandemic. This month it's at 1.8

I don't know if it really means anything though.

I know it's silly, but I can't help using the ratio of replies in HN "Who is Hiring" to "Who wants to be hired" threads as a finger in the air for the current market. Right now it's the lowest I've ever seen it at 1.8, while a couple years ago I remember it being between 4 and 5.

Edit: I say it's silly, and then refresh the home page and see this is at #2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33083279