jononomo

I like this idea, but I think it would be even better if under every paper title there was a 100-word AI-generated abstract that states the bottom line.

Why does the UI make it difficult to read the text?

What if China actually started trying? They have 3x the population that the US has.

It wasn't a mistake. It was a pretend mistake.

I watched the demo video, and, IMHO, even the muffled version of the leaf blower is way too loud.

I have to sign in with Google just to get a mere 3-day free trial without any idea what it is?

I wonder if GPT-4o is a Christian?

I am a white guy who was outside for 4-5 hours per day for my entire childhood in India, and I think I only got a sunburn once when I fell asleep on the beach in Goa without my shirt on when I was about 8.

You can always clearly define your way to anything you want to think

There are 171 million acres in Texas.

There are 8 billion people on Earth.

So if you gave each family of four a 50x100 foot plot of land (i.e., 5,000 square feet of space), then you could fit eight such plots per acre (with 3,500 square feet to spare for communal space) -- because an acre has 43,560 square feet.

So you would be able to fit 32 people per acre, and since Texas has 171 million acres, you would be able to fit 5.4 billion people in Texas. Since the world has more than 5.4 billion people, we will have to conquer Mexico or Oklahoma.

Long story short, there will be plenty of space left over in Asia.

In the future, we will live in a garden city and commune with nature and look back on this error of fat people living in skyscrapers as a dark age.

His point is that when it's only halfway working you're not sure how much more effort to put in because you're not sure how it's going to pay off.

I think you're confusing the dot com boom with Java.

So what? If we want to make it illegal to render our population infertile through microplastics, then the argument that allowing microplastics is less expensive doesn't seem like it should win the day.

As far as I am aware, Java is the only major programming language (other than JavaScript, which is also the only worse major language) that was not organically adopted by programmers.

JavaScript was forced on the world by being the language of the browser, but Java was foisted on the world by Sun Microsystems in a massive marketing campaign.

And then Java was bought by the kind of person who isn't a programmer but needs to make some kind of sensible choice at some company, along with the kind of person who needs to teach freshman programming according to the latest fad.

Don't forget the millions Sun spent literally ADVERTISING Java.

For 2-3 years (2003-4?) every other tech-related book that was published had something to do with Java. I remember going into a Barnes and Noble once, back in that era, and walking down an aisle that felt like it was 30 feet long and four shelves high of just Java books. It was all marketing.

After a decade people suddenly woke up and realized "oh, Java sucks".

Then the smart kids moved on, but the rest of the world is now stuck with Java, and there will always be those kinds of people around who aren't programmers but who need to make what they think is some kind of sensible choice.

Of course, the Java community has also realized what a pile of ** Java was, so now they've added all sorts of lambdas and better syntax and whatnot, but it's band-aids on top of a fundamental misconception, which is that object-oriented programming is the best way to model software engineering problems.

My problem with Java is that it is excessively object-oriented. I understand they've toned that aspect of it way down, but when I worked in Java between 2003-2009 it was gospel and it was preachy. But wow did I grow to hate it over time. I entirely quit programming for a couple of years, in fact. Then I discovered Python and I couldn't believe how easy it made everything, so I came back.

It has to be grounded in statistical reality. What do you think the sum total is of all the organisms that have ever lived on Earth?

Science also requires a plausible mechanism and an understanding of statistics. "It must have randomly happened even though the chance was less than 1 in ten to the five hundred and twelfth" is about as far as these speculative theories have gotten so far.

I'm sure that if we put the word out we could get another two dozen theories.

But "science" needs to mean more than "speculative theories that adhere to my philosophical presuppositions".

I'm sorry but "life spontaneously formed" is just a mystical philosophy that you hold without any basis in reason or evidence.

Just so we're all clear, no one has any idea how life could have emerged on Earth without external help.

It's a long way from amino acids to life -- like the distance between the squiggles that make up the letters of the alphabet and Milton's Paradise Lost.

I mean, why not just declare Carbon, Hydrogen, and Oxygen to be "precursors for life" and then declare "the ingredients were already there!"

For those who are genuinely interested, check out the book The Stairway to Life: An Origin-of-Life Reality Check by Tan & Stadler.

From my understanding, no one has any idea how life could possibly have emerged on Earth without external help.

The only evidence they have that it did is that all other alternatives seem even less plausible to them.

The corrective to this is for them to question their assumptions.

I recommend the book The Stairway to Life: An Origin-of-Life Reality Check by Tan & Stadler.

I thought the ad was arrogant and dystopian.

I want the US government to pass a law requiring all taxes to be included in the listed price at any retail outlet in the United States. It is ridiculous to see an item you're interested in buying, check the price tag, and get only an approximation of how much money you will have to spend to acquire it at the register.

Often with small-dollar items, the exact amount of money is relevant. I might have a $5 bill, but not have $5.39. So if that item that says "$4.99" on the price sticker costs $5.39 when I get to the register, that is just a nuisance and a waste of everyone's time.

And for what purpose? I can't believe that retail outlets don't already just price tax into the stated price.

Are they concerned that people are going want to shop elsewhere and pay the same amount of money but also go through more nuisance and do more math in their head along the way because they prefer to initially see a lower price?

Why wasn't this device invented 100 years ago? It's like a bicycle for people who need to swim to get around.

yeah, I just have no idea what shadcn is, so I figured I'd ask for the sake of others who also have no idea.

I actually learned a lot from watching that video.

I'm also curious to know what the tragedy is.

I was just using ChatGPT 4 to write a bash script for me, and it was taking so long that I began to think "I could type this out faster myself".

Oh yes -- 100%.

Why would anyone use JavaScript when there are web stacks that JavaScript-free? You can use Flutter on the front end (people rave about how nice it is to program in Dart and Flutter) and there are also options like Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView and HTMX, which allow you to build modern web apps without messing with JavaScript.

I can't stand the fact that every other tech startup is using Node on the backend.

Everything can be so much simpler and better and nicer, but it is not.