mr_toad

“He is President” works when it’s clear which position you’re referring to.

“He is doctor” sounds wrong because there’s rarely just one doctor.

There are dozens of lakes in England, and a few in other english speaking countries with the word mere in their name.

In my experience with databases the answer is never never, and never always, and it’s almost always sometimes and maybe.

That would have been right around the time that airlines were transitioning to jet aircraft. Back before jet travel it could take a whole week to reach the far east.

> They've never said that

You know that humans can lie, right?

We also spent a lot of money fixing non-critical systems that would have had next to zero impact if they’d failed. A middle manager not getting their sales report on time is not critical.

But at least with Y2K some effort was made in identifying actual problems. We didn’t just stop using computers because we were too scared of them. This latest round of AI panic is horribly vague and the problems are very poorly articulated.

There are many technologies that have killed and hurt a lot more people than nuclear weapons that are not monopolised by governments.

Cars and guns are two examples where ‘wanton usage’ can (and has) killed millions of people. Obviously they need regulation, but total control, even if it were possible doesn’t strike me as ideal.

Much much bigger. Visiting it now is quite sad.

> The waymo vehicle called the cops

Waymo called the cops. It’s not clear if it was the vehicle, or a human in the company. I suspect the latter.

Long tail works well when the marginal cost is near zero and most of the upfront costs are born by someone else.

They must bend and flex, or they will crumple. Soon they will congregate, enclosed within the fold.

> But these perceptions itself stands on top of consciousness.

There’s plenty of evidence for unconscious perception.

It was a New Year’s resolution that was broken by the next morning.

Current levels of solar panel coverage on Earth are approximately 0%. If we ran the entire Earth on Solar power we’d need ~ half a million square kilometres, around 0.1 percent of the Earth’s surface.

No graphics output. And so loud you wouldn’t be able to hear your game either. Also they use about 1kw of power, so you’d only want to run it in the winter.

> And with typical main sequence stars lasting under 10 billion years

For mid to large size stars, yes. But Red dwarf stars are expected to live for trillions of years.

The biggest costs and sources of delays to building high speed rail in the UK are legal challenges from people who don’t want any construction to take place anywhere near them.

The browser can easily handle millions of calculations and then render a million DOM elements so quickly that you won’t even notice it. The problem is when you try and do this hundreds of times very second.

The irony is that obsessing over smoothness and frames per second is what causes this in the first place.

“It goes without saying that if any of the turbine fragments had entered the passenger cabin, there would have been injuries, if not fatalities, even if the plane later landed safely.”

They got lucky.

> Grammar and sentence structure are but mear suggestions

Learning French has been eye opening, in that many grammatical structures that are optional in English are compulsory in French. Abbreviations for example: “it is” or “it’s” are both valid in English, but in French you’re not supposed to say “ce est”, you have to say “c’est”.

Linguistic diversity has been used as a casus belli, at least indirectly. It’s something that populations will take up arms for, so it’s probably worth tiptoeing around.

> So we'll need neural methods which can be learned

Data is a problem. LLMs had the advantage of the whole internet to train on. Robots don’t have that corpus of information. And real time learning seems to be something that everyone in AI is studiously ignoring.

I guess they assume that nobody with a personal domain cares enough to sue them over this.

Somewhat off topic, but Oracle database connection strings seem to be a form of Lisp. It makes me wonder why they would choose that.

> It's also the idiotic thing about gold, a metal that has no more or less inherent monetary value than a fiat currency =)

I don’t know why people keep repeating that. Half of gold production is used in industry and for jewellery. And gold has never lost its value the way that some paper currencies have. It’s not like anyone can print gold bars.

Not classifying things seems like a really good way to get your fingers burnt, or get poisoned, starved, or eaten, drowned, or die in many different interesting ways.

Science doesn’t care about collective consciousness. Nor does the universe.

It’s not vague or unimportant. Clearing their orbits literally made them planets because they absorbed the mass of everything they cleared out.

In science, classification should have some predictive value. You should be able to predict the characteristics or behaviour of a class member based on its classification. For example if you classify something as a fruit you could predict that its seeds should be on the inside.

Classifying Pluto as a planet is problematic because it lacks the behaviour and characteristics of something that formed according to theories of how planets form. If you tried to describe what a planet should look like based on the nebula hypothesis, you would not be describing Pluto.

Instead it has behaviour and characteristics a lot like the many trans-Neptunian objects, so it makes more sense to classify it that way.

> But I've always distinctly recalled that he was arguing for a 4th, or possibly 5th type, yet whenever I survey the literature I've only found at most such 2 types. But I've probably been looking in the wrong places.

It’s common for surveys to encode various null values. ‘Refused to answer’, ‘Did not know’, ‘Not applicable’, ‘Illegible response’ etc, although there is no standard way to do this.

The SAS language allows you to use multiple custom missing values, but this is not widely known and I’ve never seen anyone do it.