noncovalence

...I think this may be what it takes for me to finally admit that LLMs must have their own, alien form of consciousness. I am struggling to properly articulate my exact thoughts on this, so I may have to come back later with some barely comprehensible ramblings about what-it's-like-ness and how an LLM being able to read weights _surely_ means it's conscious to anyone who isn't a solipsist.

Exactly, just like the free operating system known as Linux is famously full of ads, if you don't like ads you have to use Windows

No, in this case neither isomer is inherently preferred, i.e. if you repeat the reaction you could end up with the opposite isomer, but in each run the symmetry is broken leading to an excess of just one.

(Though what you're saying is not impossible per se, I think I read an experimental proposal a while ago which suggested achieving just that, iirc by using parity violation to generate chiral photons which then initiate some kind of reaction!)

Not quite an abstract, but most memorable: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/meta.12599

There's also the infamous opening paragraph to the "States of Matter" textbook by David L. Goodstein:

Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

Hm, I wonder why my laptop is suddenly pulling about 5 fps while I'm just browsing HN?

The nefarious "2.2 GB RAM usage within 10 seconds" tab open in the background:

_We_ are still traveling forwards in time. If you followed a cloud of antiparticles backwards in time along its direction of travel, then you would see entropy decrease yes, though regular particles would do the same if we followed them back in time.

Nitpick, but that font really needs a slashed zero.

Always love seeing a link to wikipedia.org on the front page. Pretty much guaranteed to make me go "oh, neat" :)

> My problem with having many different choices that will actually have consequences for the game play is that I’m always worried I didn’t choose the best path through the game. But my main issue with having a lot of options, is that I won’t get to experience the whole story without playing through the game multiple times.

As someone who's often annoyed by games that make you choose between dialogue options that all lead to the exact same result, this criticism alone was enough to convince me to buy the game.

It's been a while since I've had to do this so I'd be very happy to hear if the process has become smoother since - does it no longer give you a big warning that you've got a dangerous unpacked extension installed every time you start chrome then?

In addition to the advantage of explicitly specified capabilities mentioned by others, I'd say a userscript is also much more durable and low-maintenance than a Chrome extension. This is coming from someone who's written an extension for personal use before, and had to jump through a million hoops with Chrome Dev just to give the browser permission to run my own code that I wrote myself, and that's to say nothing of the whole mess with manifest v3 as well. Throughout the entire time I've been able to happily keep using userscripts written by myself or others with 0 maintenance required.

Very cool, I'll definitely be playing around with this some more! Two questions:

- How difficult would it be to add many-valued functions to this? It would be really nice to be able to get the full set of [pi/2, pi/2] + n[2pi, 2pi] from asin(1) without needing to break out Mathematica.

- And:

> Numbers input by the user are interpreted as the smallest interval that contains the IEEE 754 value closest to the input decimal representation but where neither bounds are equal to it

Am I missing something obvious, or should this be the other way round, i.e. the output bounds are the closest two IEEE 754 numbers that contain the input number?

The way it's written I'd interpret the smallest interval to be IEEE754(input)+[-epsilon, epsilon] for infinitesimally small epsilon.

There's a story by a guy who did something similar when he was in 2nd grade, and successfully pitched an aardvark plush to a toy company! It always makes me smile whenever it pops up again.

https://twitter-thread.com/t/1214607304106098689

This problem is usually known as regression dilution, discussed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_dilution

If I understood the OP correctly, then the broadcasting would only be illegal in the US.

As others have pointed out, tkinter is just a wrapper around Tk, so the best way to learn more about it is to learn about Tk. The documentation for Tk [1] is fairly comprehensive: for example, the algorithm used by the `pack` command that you asked about is explained here: [2].

It's definitely worth learning at least some very basic Tcl if you want to get as much as possible out of tkinter - sometimes you end up having to use `widget.tk.eval()` to use a Tk feature that tkinter doesn't provide a good wrapper for.

[1] https://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl/TkCmd/contents.html [2] https://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl/TkCmd/pack.htm#M27

A better way to organise and find papers I've looked at before. For example, being able to ask an LLM "what was that paper again that tried using X to solve Y but ran into some issue" which I vaguely remember skimming a month ago but only just realised that it might actually be useful to me, and it will find the right one from my reference manager and/or subset of my browser history.

There's a few projects that can package a python environment into a single executable (the main tradeoff is you end up including a copy of python with every single executable if you have lots of tools) - when I wanted it to create an installer (.msi/.dmg), I've found cx_Freeze came the closest to "it just works".

Missing my favourite zero-word paper:

"Can a good philosophical contribution be made just by asking a question?" https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12599

Of all things, rowing. It's a way to force myself to keep a consistent exercise routine because others depend on me to show up for each session, and given that my club has active members who are decades older than myself, I expect to continue doing it for as long as I can. It's especially great in a coxed boat with an experienced cox, it feels like the microphone wire is plugged directly into your brainstem so you completely outsource your executive functioning for two hours and respond to every call without even consciously parsing it.

And if you're after an adrenaline rush, a close race can teach you a whole new meaning of maximum heart rate.

I only gained an appreciation for ruler and compass constructions early in secondary school, at age 7 I'm not sure I could fully understand the beauty of deriving a huge system from axioms.

For making Euclid interesting to children, I remember really enjoying a game called Euclidea: https://www.euclidea.xyz/

To my surprise I've been unable to find an email client that meets three requirements:

- Works on Windows and Android

- Unified inbox for multiple addresses

- Does not take multiple seconds to load an email

So I would happily welcome a new client in 2023

Something about the way the text got more and more glitched while keeping the rhythm of the sentences intact made me want to keep reading. I think it managed to create the perfect amount of entropy that makes it feel like there could be a meaning in there, just barely out of reach, rather than feeling completely random.

For anyone who enjoyed that one, I can also recommend Public Service Broadcasting's The Race for Space [1] which does something similar.

[1] https://publicservicebroadcasting.bandcamp.com/album/the-rac...

I've found writing a temporary comment can be particularly useful when working with Unicode. For example, something similar to

//insert a unicode dot between each character in the string, and convert the numbers to subscript

saved me a lot of copy-pasting.

In the context of the difference between D# and Eb, 19-TET is very interesting to play around with. It adds an extra black key between every pair of white keys, and most songs intended for 12-TET still work fine, as long as you play sharps and flats as written. If you play a D# instead of an Eb, you suddenly get a very different sounding interval.