jon_richards

That playground is cool. I wonder if there are any 2-way playgrounds where the right side is also editable using a Word / Google Docs style interface (and the changes are reflected in the code-style interface on the left). I've always wanted something like that for teaching non-technical people the basics of Markdown. Bonus points if it's collaborative.

When global warming hits, the people who benefited from ignoring it will be best off. When quantum computers hit, the people benefiting the most right now will be the worst off as all their communications from this era are decrypted.

I looked into this a while ago and didn't understand why the efficiency claims were so different, but here's a video of a RO system running https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r_T7Bgi3hQ

Not quite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster

I'm picturing something more like this. https://researchnews.cc/imagenes/2021/03/19/Selffolding-2.jp...

Micrometer-scale, not nanometer-scale.

Reminds me of the salmon study https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/scicurious-brain/ign...

> the salmon was shown images of people in social situations, either socially inclusive situations or socially exclusive situations. The salmon was asked to respond, saying how the person in the situation must be feeling. The salmon, as far as I can tell from the paper, did not comply with instructions.

Now I'm chuckling at the image of extremely expensive, perfectly cut, nanometer-scale stones.

Some context, the Beijing–Kunming high-speed train takes 10 hours 43 minutes (including 6 intermediate stops) to travel 1,710 mi.

This just makes me wonder about a purpose-built train that allows airport luggage carts.

One argument I found interesting is that the apparent "massive acceleration" in technological progress can largely be explained by the fact that most "productive human years" have actually been lived quite recently. I think the latest estimate is that "109 billion people have lived and died over the course of 192,000 years" and half of them were in the last 2000 years. It's probably even more extreme if you only count adults (due to improvements in infant mortality).

That simple fact dominates more complex explanations like increased specialization, long-distance communication, organized education, and preservation of knowledge.

Do you want machine spirits? Because that's how you get machine spirits.

Slime volleyball was one of my favorites! Second only to slime cricket, but finding someone willing to learn how to play cricket wasn’t easy…

As someone who has used wolfram alpha for a long time, I wish they'd just put both. They do on queries like 23000/105000, but not on queries like 23000 = x*105000

There’s a very real possibility it’s a tragedy of the commons. Each individual wants to be near public transit, but they also want a car to supplement weekend trips and such. But once everyone gets a car, ridership falls and the public transit disappears.

> Though Texas has no state-level personal income tax, it does levy relatively high consumption and property taxes on residents to make up the difference. Ultimately, it has a higher effective state and local tax rate for a median U.S. household at 12.73% than California's 8.97%, according to a new report from WalletHub.

Obviously there are more than two states, but it’s not so simple.

Plus, someone’s got to pay for everything:

> [California] receives $0.99 in federal expenditures per dollar of taxes paid, which is below the national average return for states of $1.22 per dollar paid, according to its review of a 2015 New York Comptroller study.

> take PI in binary and interprete it as utf-8 - every single book every written (or that will ever be written) is in there somewhere

It isn’t proven that pi is normal. Also, even if you were to find a book in the sequence of pi, the index of where it starts would (generally) be vastly larger than the book itself.

Is that actually true? Aren’t there several examples of relatively small cavalry forces (of knights) winning against much, much larger forces?

Quickly googling: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Lake_of_Antioc...

Reminds me a lot of the Homeworld narrator for some reason.

Soft power.

“European countries are estimated to have spent additional 792 billion euros in the last year just on the status quo system to protect consumers from the effects of the energy crisis introduced by the Russian invasion into Ukraine”

Honestly I think building solar and wind farms in Europe would do more for America’s military power than more tanks.

I was really hesitant to use uuids as primary keys because it’s basically worst case clustering performance. Ended up just using 32 bit Unix time followed by 12 random bytes. Not sure why that isn’t an official version.

One weird realization I had is that lava is over three times as dense as water, so if you tired to “swim” in it, you’d basically just sit on top.

People don’t realize just how stark it is.

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/v870vf/m...

Aren’t they orthogonal concepts? Right to work means you can’t be forced into playing Union dues (you have a “right” to scab) and “at will” means the employer can fire anyone at any time for any reason (other than protected classes).

I’d hardly say this is “precedent” for something that’s been done since the beginning of the language. (The Canterbury Tales are generally considered the threshold between old and modern English and they use singular “they”.)

The most egregious broken window fallacy I’ve heard is a vc claiming that cryptocurrency lets you “virtually” transfer energy from areas with low prices to areas with high prices (without power lines!).

The problem with designing a bear proof trash can is that there’s significant overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.

I think it should be illegal to ask for a variable tip before a service is substantially completed. Go ahead and charge a fixed gratuity, but prepaying tips is silly.

> If someone had explained to them back then that such a future machine would be able to play expert-level chess by mere number crunching of a huge list of moves, and that it wouldn't imply any other thinking facultu, they wouldn't consider that to be AGI.

I'd argue the problem isn't how the machine does it, but the fact that you've explained how the machine does it. If you explained exactly how a brain worked, people would say "that's not intelligence, that's a just ion circuity."

(Copying from another post): there are neurons in your eye that see something and send signals out laterally so when they (after a specific time-delay) meet another neuron that is currently seeing the thing, they combine to trigger a signal that can be directly interpreted as movement in a specific direction at a specific arc-speed.

Explain each process in the brain like that and it loses its magic. It actually becomes very similar to the debate between free will and meat robots.

That's basically the entire history of artificial intelligence. We used to think a robot capable of vacuuming your house would be "AI" and now roombas just bounce around the floor semi-randomly. The task didn't change, our respect for it did.

At this point the definition of AI is practically "Something computers can't do yet", though I'm partial to its corollary "Any sufficiently misunderstood algorithm is AI."

My favorite example was neurons in your eye that see something and send signals out laterally so when they (after a specific time-delay) meet another neuron that is currently seeing the thing, they combine to trigger a signal that can be directly interpreted as movement in a specific direction at a specific arc-speed.

Just one of the ways visual information is heavily processed before traveling along your optic nerve.