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lvoudouron "I'm on a war footing": Terry Tao and the crisis in math

Math is more like a treasure hunt than a chess game. Once the treasure is found, it's over. You can try chasing other treasures of course, but now you deal with superhuman competition (which will only become better with time). I can understand this is devastating and depressing

lvoudouron Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

I have never been a wikipedia contributor (let alone a mod), but their points seem fair. Maybe not fair for the particular case, but fair for the general case. People who ridicule wikipedia policies should at least acknowledge that the modern internet is a very low trust society with millions of bad actors trying to push their agenda at the expense of others. And now with AI bots running amok the headache increases tenfold. What can an open contribution encyclopedia do in this low trust environment other than enforcing strict, rigid rules?

People seem to focus in the particular case but miss the general case. An example tweet from the article by Casey Muratori: I tell Jimmy Wales that JangaFX was written in Odin. He asks for a source. A JangaFX founder replies to him and confirms that it was. Jimmy ignores his (and my) response, while replying to later posts in the thread:

Maybe the JangaFX founder is a very trustworthy fellow, sure, but does this reasoning work for EVERY founder and CEO of a company? Can it become a general policy? Another tweet talks about github stars...

lvoudouron New Modern Greek

A fun excercise but lots of corner cases not covered. For example the words ακριβός (expensive) and ακριβώς (exactly) would have exactly the same spelling

lvoudouron Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

I don't like a$$holes but they do exist and they are part of our species, ergo intelligent. My opinion of them doesn't change the fact

lvoudouron Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

You don't have to be empathetic and nice, just good at navigating society.

lvoudouron Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

How well you interact with other members of a society increases your chances of procreation, survival, knowledge acquisition, ie. it makes sense as a measure of intelligence

lvoudouron Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

Social cognition: processing and interpreting social information and responding appropriately in social situations

Is social cognition really a measure of intelligence for non-social entities?

lvoudouron FPGAs Need a New Future

You forget network infrastructure, high frequency trading, ASIC prototyping and emulation. These are not hobbyist or government markets

lvoudouron Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity

What would be the evolutionary pressure to grow wheels? They are useless without roads

lvoudouron Another World

A truly unique game that after decades it still evokes feelings only a piece of art can. Thank you Eric Chahi

lvoudouron Poland fumes over US block on AI chips

It seems it's more complex than that. Greece and Portugal are also getting the Polish treatment (Tier2), so are Iceland, Switzerland and Israel

lvoudouron Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

On a tangent, what is astonishing to me as an outsider is the cultural stagnation. Even in times of economic decline Britain was a cultural powerhouse. Modern music, theater, cinema, tv, literature, sports, etc. were permanently shaped by post-war Britain (especially in Europe). Whatever the cultural norm dictated by the behemoth that is the USA, Britain always had something new, something fresh to give. There's no point listing specific examples, they are numerous.

What happened in the last 15 years is a mystery to me. I doubt it's economic stagnation (been there before) and I doubt it collapsed under the weight of US culture (which is still enamored with anything British). Maybe the modern internet and social media diluted everything. I don't know, but I miss it. (sorry for the off-topic)

lvoudouron Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

I'm not talking about kids, I'm talking about adolescents (as is the quoted paragraph). I strongly believe that an adolescent's well being is tightly coupled with social interactions. If a restriction is not protecting them from life threatening situations, then alienating them from their peers is probably worse.

lvoudouron Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

An excellent point. Abstention = social isolation, which for young people is far worse than exposure. Restricting your children's access is not an option (lets' be real, they'll find a way to circumvent your efforts anyway) and moving the burden of restriction from society to individuals is not fair.

So as a society do we let unrestrained exposure or do we take collective action? I lean on the second option, but I'm not sure what this action might be.

I'm on the internet ~30 years, I loved the total anarchy of the early web, the unrestrained access to all kinds of information - good, bad and evil. It's very hard for me to get behind heavy-handed regulation. But honestly, I feel oversaturated by the modern cataclysm of information. My bullshit filters are clogged, my defense mechanisms are failing to the point I let information flow through me without an ounce of critical thinking. I can't imagine what the effect is on young untrained minds.

lvoudouron LabVIEW abandons Mac after 4 decades

> Maybe with a focus on Windows they can finally implement zooming in and out of VIs

Can I Zoom In or Out in the LabVIEW Block Diagram? https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z000...

>The zoom in and zoom out feature in LabVIEW is only available starting from LabVIEW 2023 Q3.

We really live in the end of times!

lvoudouron The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit

Yes and the expletive fits

lvoudouron The age of average

One can make parallels to other eras, sure, but the current convergence to an "average" is unprecedented in scale and speed. Various eras had a distinctive style that everything revolved around, but at least there was variety (cultural and corporate).

Nowadays I can't shake off this weird feeling of sameness emanating from every design. I can hardly distinguish brands any more, I can't tell cultures apart and that's a shame because there's never been an era with such abundance of products and expression mediums as the current one

lvoudouron I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

This next era may take 100s of years though, AI taking up physical labor is still science fiction (and I'm not fully sold on the utopia angle). She'll need to support herself much sooner than that, let's be realistic

lvoudouron Show HN: Can you tell if an image is AI-generated?

Text is a very good indication the photo is non-AI. Lots of AI generated images struggle with it, I don't know why.

lvoudouron Block a tweet, its author, and every single person who liked it

We should probably spend more time controlling our outputs than our inputs

lvoudouron The Interactive Fiction Archive (2019)

Back in the day I was really fond of Legend Entertainment [1] and Magnetic Scrolls [2] games that offered a mix of text adventures + graphics. Are there any modern games that follow a similar format?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_Entertainment

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_Scrolls

lvoudouron Why have there been so many own goals at the Euros?

I think you're nitpicking a bit but let's go along with your definition and rephrase the question: why are there so many "defender own-goals from the goal-line" in this tournament? It's still an interesting question

lvoudouron Loopy C Puzzle (2011)

An obvious solution is to change i-- to i++.

Don't know if OP is the author, but the code under the statement is not the correct one

lvoudouron No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

I can't blame the authors for the choice permissive licenses. Maybe they were idealistic and starry-eyed, maybe they never thought their project would catch up, maybe they were naive victims of propaganda or maybe they had ulterior motives, who knows. I don't blame the companies that take advantage of it, they are profit-seeking entities - if they see an opportunity for profit they'll take it, morality be damned.

I blame those that justify and help propagate this behavior, justifying abusers of free labor arguing that we wouldn't have all these nice products that make our lives easier. Yes we would, if there's a market for them we would - only now people would either get paid to create them or the companies would be forced to give back to the community just like they benefited from it.

So, authors, if you are sick and tired of your good Samaritan efforts being abused, switch to GPL and let them rant

lvoudouron AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

This a very interesting take on the subject and I share the sentiment of your last paragraph, it's a pity if it comes to that.

FPGAs are such a useful tool for a variety of engineering (and product) problems that fall in-between general computing and ASICs, unfortunately these problems are usually so disparate in nature that you can't target them as a single market. So the datacenter / HLS game will keep going until either a viable solution for the programming model is found or until everyone gives up on it once and for all and decides that FPGAs should go back to their niche (which is fine by me)

lvoudouron Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

> Consent can be withdrawn at any time, with no further obligations or liability. That’s key in a free society.

I'm sorry but there's plenty of both liabilities and obligations in the event of early termination. Have a look at your telco contract if you don't believe me

lvoudouron Compiling my own SPARC CPU inside a cheap FPGA

You're right they do, just not on the lowest speed grade devices [1]

[1] https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/data_sheets/ds1...

lvoudouron Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

>this is a product targeting a market that normally spends over $40,000 on a monitor without any mounting gear or stand to do the same work. Apple's display a bargain in context.

Sure, the cost of the stand is peanuts to the overall cost, a pro will buy it without a blink - but that doesn't mean it's not overpriced. Same thing happens in every industry where professional tools come with extras and accessories not worth the price, but not worth the time to shop around either when the cost is a tiny fraction of the total

lvoudouron A view to the possible habitability of ancient Venus over three billion years [pdf]

It's itching me the wrong way as well. I prefer academic publications "dry" and austere, keeping distractions at a minimum. Stylish, cutesy graphs are better suited for other forms of dissemination

lvoudouron As Scotland's 'Trainspotting' Generation Ages, the Dead Pile Up

Apparently high numbers of fentanyl users (article from 2012 which more or less coincides with the big spike in the graph)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-17524945