marsten

My own thought process is that it's like Usenet or arXiv: The collective value of Github is so high that even if Microsoft loses interest, someone else will buy it from them or clone the content elsewhere. That said, I do wish there was an alternative that didn't involve a for-profit corporation.

This underscores the difficulty companies have trying to navigate through this. Even if Trump doesn't change his mind tomorrow, as he's liable to, he's only around for another four years and for most companies that's not enough time to justify a supply chain overhaul.

It's a poem about self-deception, and Frost has cleverly extended that theme to encompass the reader.

He clearly wrote it the way he did to invite an easy, comfortable interpretation, one that is blatantly contradicted by the very evidence he presents. He's rubbing our noses in our own gullibility and tendency to deceive ourselves with comfortable lies, just as the narrator has done.

All in simple, direct language. Frost sure was a sneaky one.

For an LLM conscious thought is the tokens in its context window, and subconscious thought is the training embedded in its parameters. A person thinks in a similar manner, with subconscious gut instincts modulated (more or less) by a thin veneer of consciousness.

My shocking 23andMe story:

I reached out to a guy on 23andMe that was a DNA relative (2nd cousin) and said hi. Curious how we were related, I gave him some family names going several generations back, and asked if any of them rang a bell in his family history.

He responded quickly and said no, they did not.

Then a few weeks later I get another response. He said that one of the names had faintly rung a bell, and when he dug into it, it turned out that was the name of his mother's boss for much of her career as a secretary. His heart sank when he realized it. He and his siblings did genetic tests and confirmed that he, the youngest, was only a half-sibling. Both of the parents were deceased so there's no way to know what really happened.

After dropping that bomb in the poor guy's lap I stopped using the DNA Relatives feature.

I got my start climbing at City Rock in the mid 90s when I was in grad school at Berkeley. It was a great place and really defined the model that other climbing gyms copied and built upon.

Peter would also show up at Indian Rock sometimes, a popular outdoor climbing spot in Berkeley. He was an incredibly good climber and a friendly guy to boot. It took me a fair number of years to realize that the outgoing guy at Indian Rock was actually the founder of City Rock!

He's one of those who seems to get a lot of satisfaction from building something cool and inspiring people, without much regard for money and traditional status. We could use more people like that.

> But it shifts the need to memorize undefined behavior with the need to memorize the borrow checker rules.

You have a choice: Fight the borrow checker on the front end until your code compiles, or chase down bugs on the back end from undefined behavior and other safety problems. No single answer there, it depends on what you're doing.

Cognitive load is a big issue. In Rust I find this comes in a couple of phases, the first being figuring out what the borrow checker does and how to appease it. The second is figuring out how to structure your data to avoid overusing clone() and unsafe blocks. It's a bit like learning a functional language, where there's a short-term adaptation to the language, then a longer-term adaptation to how you think about solving problems.

You mention doubly-linked lists, which are a good example of a "non-star" data structure that doesn't nicely fit Rust's model. But: for how many problems is this the ideal data structure, really? They're horrible for memory locality. Those of us who learned from K&R cut our teeth on linked lists but for the last 20 years almost every problem I've seen has a better option.

No court in the land will agree with your interpretation. The first amendment protects speech, but it doesn't grant you the right to publish that speech wherever you want. If it did then Facebook couldn't ban people from its platform, for example.

For the harder Euler problems you usually need a combination of mathematical insight and good coding technique. Each problem typically provides sample values for smaller instances of the problem, which you can confirm with a straightforward solution approach. Then the actual problem will be to calculate f(10^500) or some absurd value that requires insight to make tractable. They are extremely good challenges overall.

When I was at Google during the IPO I saw people with similar challenges. I can empathize with what he's going through, it can be hard to find a sense of purpose when "the need to provide" is suddenly gone and you realize that many of your life choices were made based on that goal.

I can also empathize with those who consider him a whiny brat. It's hard to get someone to care about your plight when in their eyes you've achieved success. It's just different levels on Maslow's hierarchy.

That manual is a great find! Dr. Kurtz was surely way ahead of his time in aiming to bring computing to the masses, well before the microcomputer revolution. BASIC was an easy onramp to programming that hooked a ton of people on computing, especially kids of the 70s/80s like me. He shaped the future as much as anyone.

Based on the bounds discussed at https://old.reddit.com/r/Cubers/comments/8chfuu/i_found_a_ge... it appears that a 34x34x34 cube can be algorithmically solved in under 100,000 moves.

Maximum number of moves scales as n^2.

There are many jobs where people prefer other people to fill those roles, irrespective of the ability of machines. Most people don't want to watch computers play chess, or spend money on computer-generated art, or go to a robot therapist.

Ah, you say: But such jobs don't employ many people! Most people do things that nobody cares if they're automated away. Surely we can't all be chess players or artists?

To which I say: The job market will adapt, and people will move into those jobs where customers prefer to have a human. We have no real idea what those jobs are today, but some of them might be the things you wish you had more of, but are too expensive for most of us to hire someone for. (Interior decorator? Personal chef? ...)

The most interesting thing to me by far was the lack of a steering wheel on the Robocab.

Without manual controls, vague promises ("puffery"?) about autonomy won't drive vehicle sales as they do today across all Tesla's models. The Robocab as shown literally cannot function (or make a dime of revenue) until they've fully solved autonomy and have convinced regulators of the same.

My favorite pizza place in Sunnyvale became employee-owned, and shortly after decided they only wanted to stay open 3 days a week.

I'm happy for those employees but man, I also wish I could get pizza on Monday.

Note there is an error in the paper going from equation (60) to (63): inequality (63) should read 10^-8 Hz < mu < 10^2 Hz. This is fairly important from an observational standpoint!

This shouldn't be an either-or situation; you do all of the above. A simple validating parser in the client would be easy to write and would have easily caught a null payload.

What looks especially bad for Crowdstrike is how many things (relatively simple things) had to fail in order for this to slip through. It's like walking into Fort Knox, grabbing a gold bar, and walking out unimpeded. A complete systemic failure.

That's exactly the kind of content I love on the internet, when someone smart dives deep on an obscure topic and then shares it with the rest of us.

There's a strong geopolitical angle as well. If you force American companies to license all training data for LLMs, that is such a gargantuan undertaking it would effectively set US companies back by years relative to Chinese competitors, who are under no such restrictions.

Bottom line, if you're doing something considered relevant to the national interest then that buys you a lot of leeway.

It's an interesting idea, that scarcity and inconvenience could make one a more thoughtful practitioner.

A similar situation applies to writing. When people wrote with quills on parchment under candlelight, they did the structuring and editing in their minds beforehand. Now, word processors encourage us to vomit words onto the page and rarely do we edit them down to a similar level of quality.

The upper bound given in the paper is on emitters of one terawatt EIRP (10^12 Watts) and above. EIRP means an isotropic emitter would need to be this powerful to be detected. A beamed transmitter that happened to be pointing in our direction could be somewhat weaker in total power, and still be detectable.

It's important to realize that this is at least 100,000 times more powerful than our most powerful Earth-based narrowband emitters. So we would not detect ourselves in this search - not even close.

Moreover, we have no good reason to believe that an advanced species would have cause to radiate 1 TW into space. Our own terrestrial emissions are becoming weaker over time, not stronger, as we optimize for total system bandwidth in our communications.

So I wouldn't draw too many strong conclusions here about alien life. We are still very much searching for our lost keys directly under the lampposts.

From the accounts I've read of other scientists in the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer had a connector style of personality that made him very well-suited to the role. For this type of job you don't want an Einstein who is prone to thinking deeply on one problem for weeks at a time. Oppenheimer seemed to be the one person who understand broadly what everyone was doing.

To be clear, gravitational waves follow the same inverse square law as EM radiation, in terms of power. This is after all just a statement of conservation of energy.

The linear drop-off you're referring to is when we look at it in terms of field strength (in this case the spacetime strain). Since power is proportional to field squared, this implies a linear drop-off in the field. It just so happens that for GWs it's easier to detect the field, whereas for (most) EM radiation it's easier to detect power.

There are field-detection methods for EM radiation as well, which are useful for weak signals. Homodyne and heterodyne detection are good examples.

Urs was the last of the Google old guard left. I wish him the best! He's tried to extricate himself from leadership before and that never worked out; hopefully it sticks this time.

In principle yes, gravitational waves dissipate energy into ordinary matter they pass through. However the coupling is extremely weak (that gravitational waves are so hard to detect is testament to this).

In fact this weak coupling is what makes GWs so interesting for observational astronomy: They propagate from the source to our detectors virtually unchanged. (This is in contrast to EM radiation, which is very easy to scatter.) For example the farthest we can see back with EM radiation is about 200k years after the Big Bang, when the plasma of the early universe recombined into neutral hydrogen. By contrast gravitational waves can see back to the Big Bang itself, so it is a truly unique source of information as compared with light.

On the other hand, insurance companies may have no interest underwriting unusual risks when the business opportunity is small. "Deep-sea submarine tourism" is a tiny market.

Interestingly there are no photos or video of Egan publicly available. All we have over the last 30 years is his/her/its textual output. I'm 50/50 on whether "Greg Egan" is in fact a LLM.

Spot on, this is my experience as well. A lot of the once-sketchy parts of Berkeley, Oakland, East Palo Alto, etc. have gentrified and become safer since the 70s and 80s. Part of that has been big shifts in racial makeup and socioeconomics. Starting in the mid-late 90s tech began to really dominate Bay Area employment, bringing in a lot of new (well-paid) people and forcing out many others.

If you're a new California homeowner, I recommend you never look up what others on your street pay in property tax.

This is the Faustian bargain of technology: We advance collectively but each of us becomes a tiny cell in some giant organism we can't even perceive. Living entirely apart from that will someday be as impossible as a skin cell in your arm trying to strike out on its own.