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jhbadger

7,964 karma · joined June 4, 2014

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jhbadger··on The Flash C Compiler
Yes, that's my point -- assuming the programmer actually spent some time thinking it through.
jhbadger··on The Flash C Compiler
Or any project of any size -- scientists running a lab rarely do the experiments or data analysis themselves -- they have graduate students and postdocs for that. Their job is to decide what those people work on.
jhbadger··on AI for scientific discovery: How researchers use Claude
And like everything LLM related this is something that people may have had bad experience with in the past but which work well now -- a year or two ago half those papers would be "hallucinated" non-existent papers but this rarely happens these days.
jhbadger··on Ballot Rejections Have Soared in Rural Counties as USPS Reduces Mail Service
Remember, Trump was mentored by Roy Cohn, who had been Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel in the 1950's. And McCarthy was famous for waving around "lists of known Communists" in the government and never actually showing them to anyone who could prove or disprove the claim.
jhbadger··on Surviving "The Graduate"
From a technical perspective it really was considered a great movie for decades, It is, as you mention, extremely racist, and that eventually outweighed any merits of the film itself after the techniques it developed had long become routine.
jhbadger··on A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting
No, because it is a historical novel. You have to blend fact and fiction in that, not because you are trying to deceive people, but you have to recreate conversations that were never recorded, get inside the characters' heads to figure out what they were thinking, etc.
jhbadger··on AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see 'no point' in grading homework
>The irony here is perhaps missed by many. He didn’t grade homework in the first >place. He paid assistants to grade. This is common practice among tenured >professors with grant money to spend and graduate students beholden to them >(I’m not making a moral statement, just noting this is common practice).

Grading is part of what it means to be a TA, and being a TA is not some awful exploitation, it's what gives graduate students living money (I was a TA in the 1990s). It makes no sense (except maybe in a small liberal arts school with no graduate students) to have professors grade.

jhbadger··on How is music possible
If anything, art history defines "modern" later than the real historical meaning ("modern art" starts in the 1860s after the invention of photography). In history modernity starts in the 1500s - in Western culture history is divided into ancient (dawn of civilization to fall of Rome), medieval (fall of Rome to the Renaissance) and modern (Renaissance to now). You'd need a fall of civilization or something to justify a new era.
jhbadger··on Show HN: We had AI write a wiki from 45k Enron emails, every fact cited
I remember when Arthur Andersen Consulting (a software consulting firm that had split off from the accounting firm) renamed itself to "Accenture" in 2001 a few months before the Enron scandal. Although they already had split from Andersen legally, I wonder if somebody in the software firm knew what was going to happen with Enron and realized they needed to dissociate themselves with the name.
jhbadger··on Four Years with Decker
Probably because an LLM couldn't write in his style (which reminds me of Arthur Whitney's (kdb+, etc.)
jhbadger··on Show HN: SimCity, but with Permits
The analogy of a shepherd to his flock gets used a lot in literature and religion, but it doesn't really work in the way it is normally intended because shepherds aren't doing it out of altruism but because they want the wool and flesh of the sheep to use and sell.
jhbadger··on Show HN: SimCity, but with Permits
Except there are always going to be many more sheep than wolves because how predators live. Just like how billionaires need the masses to support their predation.
jhbadger··on Rabbits were a medieval royal luxury in England until the Black Death
There's the traditional German rabbit/hare stew Hasenpfeffer (literally "hare pepper" as hare or rabbit and pepper are the main ingrediants). You may remember it as the dish at least one of Bugs Bunny's foes wanted to make from him.
jhbadger··on SIGSALY: Churchill's top secret hotline to the president
Even the original UK article just says "the President". Things may change as the US may not play the leading role in this century as it did the last, but despite many countries having presidents (although not the UK), it is still understood that "the President" means POTUS.
jhbadger··on The plight of the public potty
It just seems intentionally unpleasant -- as in the insult "Piss off!" You don't say "Urinate off!" or "Pee off!" just like you don't say "Make love off!"
jhbadger··on The plight of the public potty
What's wrong with "urinate" or "pee"?
jhbadger··on Microsoft Teams is a red flag
A lot of places claim things for "security" and violating them is grounds for firing because truthfully or not, they claim circumventing them is exposing data. We used to be able to choose our e-mail client as they had IMAP access. A few years ago they decided to only allow Microsoft's own protocol to enforce Outlook use and disabled IMAP access.
jhbadger··on Microsoft Teams is a red flag
I preferred Skype (which Microsoft bought years ago but only killed last year) -- it also, at least in its final iteration, did the share screen thing well and just seemed snappier than Teams.
jhbadger··on Espresso machine can run Doom
I wonder when we will move onto harder tasks -- I remember around 2007 people were using Crysis (also a first-person shooter) as a test of new computers as when it was released hardly any computer could run it without turning down all the settings. These days I'd expect most (although not all) low end hardware could run that well.
jhbadger··on Butlerian Jihad
Butler also wrote a famous essay "Darwin Among The Machines" (1863) before Erewhon, which treated this concept not as fiction.
jhbadger··on Thinking will become a hobby
If this was the case, all car manufacturers would have done the same, and at least at first, they didn't.
jhbadger··on AI is a tool and using it well takes skill
Does that work? I'd think if it could plan things out itself it wouldn't need a roadmap, but maybe it is like how LLMs "reason" by arguing with themselves.
jhbadger··on China Overtakes U.S. For First Time as Top Spender on R&D in 2024
I'm curious why you ask the question, Do you think the Cultural Revolution (this was the anti-intellectual movement in the 1960s-1970s, not either of the literal revolutions China experienced in the 20th century) somehow helped China?
jhbadger··on I turned my unused Kindle into a photo frame with GPT-6 Astra
So many people think literal computers get slower "due to age" as well, and not mal/bloat ware.
jhbadger··on Thinking will become a hobby
The problem with this dystopia is that there would be no way for the rich to make money if nobody could buy things. Over a hundred years ago Henry Ford (not a nice guy by any measure) paid his workers enough that they could buy the cars they were making for exactly this reason.
jhbadger··on AI is a tool and using it well takes skill
I think most people try the "extreme end" of vibe coding -- "Claude, write me an app to do X" once or twice and realize that doesn't really work -- to get it to work reliably you basically have to write a ROADMAP.md that details each step in a fair amount of detail -- pretty much the same work you'd have to do to hand a project off to a human intern.
jhbadger··on 'AI' Is Not a Tool by Rich Hickey
Which is why it ultimately helped art because it removed the incentive to just make paintings as realistic as possible because there was a tool that did that boring task better.
jhbadger··on 'AI' Is Not a Tool by Rich Hickey
No, they always do. The confusion might be that you think evolution means "get better". But evolution of languages, just like biological beings simply means "changes over time".
jhbadger··on 'AI' Is Not a Tool by Rich Hickey
Dictionaries exist to show what some people currently believe a word means. But it is poor argumentation to argue that a word should only mean what the dictionary says. That's the "old man shaking his fist at the clouds" that the world is constantly changing.
jhbadger··on So, you’d like to sell your print issues of The Onion?
Yes, I was an undergraduate at the time there then too. Madison had a very active free newspaper culture -- unusually we had two (daily!) free student newspapers with different political leanings and The Onion was a free weekly. (These were all paper newspapers in case youngsters were wondering)
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