mannykannot

Indeed. On the other hand, the right to show that you are an asshole is available to anyone, and it has become quite popular!

It seems disproportionate to fuss about "a leap to assume..." when we are talking about a small plaque affixed to a probe on the highly speculative basis that something intelligent might one day retrieve it, as opposed to something that is mission-critical. Would we be better off for not making these "leaps"?

It was always a very long shot, regardless of who might be the recipients. Would we have been better off if it had not been done?

"Arbitrary" ("existing or coming about seemingly at random or by chance or as a capricious and unreasonable act of will", "based on or determined by individual preference or convenience rather than by necessity or the intrinsic nature of something" [1]) is a very poor term. Not only is physics highly constrained by what can be observed in the universe, it is also capable of demonstrating (when it is actually the case) equivalences between apparently dissimilar modes of presentation. It is not perfect, but can you present anything that does better?

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/arbitrary

Here’s a regex crossword:

https://jimbly.github.io/regex-crossword/

See also: Are Regex Crosswords NP-hard?

https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/30143/are-regex-cross...

In practice, the first unpaired ] is treated as an ordinary character (at least according to https://regex101.com/) - which does nothing to make this regex fit for its intended purpose. I'm not sure whether this is according to spec. (I think it is, though that does not really matter compared to what the implementations actually do.)

Characters which are sometimes special, depending on context, are one more thing making regexes harder than they appear at first sight.

The author's willingness to publish code without even minimal testing does not inspire confidence.

'Flustrated' looked to me like a potentially useful portmanteau word, and at least Merriam-Webster seems to agree, which would give some legitimacy to 'flustrating'. Whether the person you hear saying the latter had this in mind is, of course, another matter.

To give an idea of how I see it as potentially useful, there are some frustrating events which leave a person in no doubt that there's nothing they can do to remedy the situation (or that they have no choice but to put a lot of work into fixing a situation which never should have arisen), while others might leave a person in a tizzy over what to do now.

Are there no cases where well-formed JSON could be subject to the problems covered in the article, when parsed by a compliant YAML parser? I'm asking because I know nothing about YAML and not much more about JSON.

While the title slightly over-promises - a more accurate one might be "why LLMs may come to understand the world" - it seems to me that this video gives a very clear introduction to a hypothesis about why double-descent works despite the threat of overfitting, and a thought-provoking extrapolation to the claim of its title. I came to post it myself, and am disappointed to see that it is languishing.

If you are not already aware of Verity Stob, you might enjoy checking out some of her columns:

https://www.theregister.com/Author/Verity-Stob/

While I thoroughly dislike self-serving bullshit, this is at least about as blatant a case of self-serving bullshit as it gets.

You don't keep your job under this administration by sticking your head out.

I doubt that seeing the Fox spin on US events would persuade many people that the US is currently a place of rationality and the rule of law.

In the vast majority of cases, being a bad driver is a lifestyle choice, not an incurable condition. No-one should be granted a right to present a significant danger to other people as a consequence of making bad and avoidable lifestyle choices.

In the US, the Smithsonian Institution claimed that Samuel Langley, not the Wrights, was the inventor of the airplane. His Aerodrome #6 flew nearly a mile in 1896, but this machine was not really controllable, and Langley's subsequent prototypes regressed, ending with an ignominious flop into the Potomac river on December 8, 1903, nine days before The Wrights' successful tests at Kitty Hawk.

Not coincidentally, Langley was the secretary of the Smithsonian, and in addition, his claims were promoted by Glenn Curtiss in his attempts to overthrow the Wright patents. As the dispute heated up, the Wrights loaned the flyer to the London Science Museum, where it remained until after Orville's death.

When Wilbur Wright first demonstrated his airplane (a Model A somewhat modified while repairing the damage caused in shipping) in Le Mans, it was immediately apparent to the mostly enthusiastic crowd that this was the first fully controlled flight any of them had seen - a tight two-mile circuit with a controlled landing near the launch point. Many of those present would have been well acquainted with what Santos-Dumont and other pioneers had previously achieved.

You only get partial credit unless you figured out what, precisely, needed to be done, but had someone else do it for you.

From Wikipedia: "After the war, Shockley decided to attempt the building of a triode-like semiconductor device." If attempting (and succeeding) in using one's knowledge to produce a specific thing that does not currently exist is not invention, what is?

More generally, if there's no common truth then that itself cannot be a common truth...

So one must choose between seeing every issue as a stark dichotomy, or never doing so?

I appreciate where you are coming from, but I'm not willing to say that there is no objective truth to it. Take the triode, for example, or the transistor. I include the latter because while it did something that functionally the triode could also do, it did it by exploiting different physics, and the difference was significant.

I agree - and some animals even have semantics, as evidenced by those which have some intuitive understanding of alarm calls, and even more so when they do so for the calls of other species. On the other hand, I doubt they know they have syntax and semantics.

I suspect the actual issue is that the publisher is not a party to whatever contract there exists between the author and Meta.

Unfortunately for free speech, it is no longer the case (if it ever was) that publishers have strong financial resources compared to an increasing number of those who want to hide things.

I agree that commenting appropriately is desirable (I do more that I used to.) I also like the idea of const being the default, and for syntax highlighting that clearly distinguishes mutables.

The utility of consulting weather forecasts prior to events like weddings lies in the non-trivial possibility that it will give you a clear indication of what will happen.

In the case of an election, a 50:50 forecast is a clear reminder to the wise of the importance of voting, no matter how certain the outcome might seem from the necessarily limited perspective of your acquaintances and your consumption of possibly (or likely) biased news media.

You are right, using comments is even more effective in going from the generic to the specific - but then, there's a vocal minority who insist that comments are not only unnecessary, but a clear indication that you are doing it wrong. I must admit that I doubt many of them would endorse the use of auxiliary consts in the manner of the original example, either.

I would like to add something to the point made here:

"For long function chains or callbacks that stack up, breaking up the chain into smaller groups and using a well-named variable or helper function can go a long way in reducing the cognitive load for readers. [my emphasis]

  // which is easier and faster to read?
  function funcA(graph) {
    return graph.nodes(`node[name = ${name}]`)
      .connected()
      .nodes()
      .not('.hidden')
      .data('name');
  }

  // or:
  function funcB(graph) {
    const targetNode = graph.nodes(`node[name = ${name}]`)
    const neighborNodes = targetNode.connected().nodes();
    const visibleNames = neighborNodes.not('.hidden').data('name')

    return visibleNames;
  }

The names of the functions being called are rather generic, which is appropriate and unavoidable, given that the functions they compute are themselves rather generic. By assigning their returned values to consts, we are giving ourselves the opportunity to label these computations with a hint to their specific purpose in this particular code.

In general, I'm not a fan of the notion that code can always be self-documenting, but here is a case where one version is capable of being more self-documenting than the other.

It is from a dialect called C-INTERCAL and is written with a space: 'COME FROM'

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~asb/teaching/cs415-fall05/docs/...

Neither the commitment nor the losses (and, for the sake of this issue, I'll take the US numbers as realistic) imply that Russia will lose Kursk indefinitely. Even if Ukraine could somehow hold on to it, I don't think it is realistic to think that any party would hold up a resolution of this conflict in an almost-certainly futile attempt to force Russia to cede any territory that it legitimately held prior to its incursions into Ukraine.

I share your feelings about the entirely avoidable horror of it all.

I don't think we can say that the nuclear umbrella is illusory until there is direct conflict and invasion across the frontier between what's left of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Ukraine's incursion into Kursk does not realistically threaten the long-term integrity and security of Russia, while Ukraine's self-defense has demonstrated that the cold-war fear of Russia blitzkrieging its way to the Atlantic is not realistic.

Maybe Putin's non-invocation (up to now) of the nuclear umbrella shows he is as eager as anyone to maintain it as the ultimate protection against existential threats. The US's sharp turn away from globalism is a gift to Putin, and, given that the US population is strongly divided over the changes the current administration is making, that might be threatened if Russia were to act more belligerently than it already is.

Personally, I'm more concerned over what will happen if and when the situation becomes one in which Trump realizes he's going to be seen as the president who 'lost' Taiwan.