podocarp

We have just convinced ourselves it is statistically safe, much like most of medicine. Most drugs are not made from molecular simulation of an entire human body.

Of course we have also convinced ourselves before that cocaine in drinks, lead in petrol, asbestos in walls… were all safe…

This reminds me of the Feynman interview where the interviewer asks "how do magnets work" and he goes on this rant of how that's unanswerable and you have to decide on what is it you really want to ask. You can't expect to know the full chain of knowledge because at some point you will be asking about quarks and gluons and then hit a wall where "nobody knows". Similarly you cannot simply just give up any investigation at all because then you'll end up recommending people to put lead in their cars.

We also actively cull them, for the rats. Recently watched an episode of survivorman where he was on this tropical island infested with rats. There's absolutely nothing on that island yet there's rats all over the place. Having no humans they may explode in population.

Umm… there are a lot of people out there, more than you can imagine… I'm sure there's quite a considerable community who want to upload their minds to skynet.

Every time I see something like the Panama or Epstein files I just get reminded how many people there are in the world doing weird shit.

> this is a loss of control from incumbents in a scientific field

Lol, the ultimate delusion, laughing at people in the flood zone and not seeing the tsunami... What goes around comes around

For me it's not coolness it's just context, 16:9 is too short to fit enough lines and scrolling and jumping is as annoying as tabbing in and out.

This is also one problem with ereaders for me, especially for anything technical. With paper when the textbook says refer to fig 13.2 or we covered this in section 4.3 I can just flip to that page with my fingers as a bookmark, read it, and go right back. Just not as tactile on computers. Even if you did like lsp assisted jumping all over the place you quickly forget what the heck was going on and where you came in from.

Of course maybe someone will come and correct me but this is just what I experience. It's still better flipping pages for technical stuff. It's like scribbling a DJ disc, imagine doing that with a mouse or keyboard. It's just… different.

Still don't get what's the advantage over just adding a special API key or a wrapper cli or whatever mechanism that achieves all of that without being a "protocol" and with all the context bloat. Like the github cli is a good example. You give it proper auth keys etc. and for sure there's some telemetry in there about usage as well. If there isn't then it's easy to do from the api side too.

Even if you don't own the code or infra, like say a frontend team who wants models to test out the backend apis and do something. Well in that case how do regular devs do it? Do they also get unfettered access in the past? Surely there's still some mechanism you can repurpose for agents to use?

I'm not trying to argue I'm just saying I didn't catch on the first time mcp was a thing and I still don't know what it's doing now.

Gain wealth, forgetting all but self

Indeed that begins to sound like so called caveman talk. He shove hand in pocket and pull out wallet.

Source?

Please what is flash pro ultra and all these, can they just use semver or something

You can scold juniors and they will learn. You can't scold Claude.

It is an interesting discussion you bring up but will take much more than a comment to talk about. There is a divide between mathematics and physics regarding numbers. Real numbers have supposedly infinite precision, and arbitrary size, which are not true in our physical universe. Indeed infinities have given physicists quite some headaches. It's a bit of a dark art as to where you can and cannot just use infinity willy nilly and many have expressed distaste to it. Also at some point you have to talk about computability, like are these infinite precision and magnitudes even real if nothing in the universe even gets close, what is omega to the omega, statements dream up by the utterly deranged?

I remember there being a talk or some article about this but can't find it anymore, but it is an interesting thing.

Btw it's unredable on mobile because the table of contents box blocks the actual contents

Perhaps symmetry is overrated and it is not the beauty that works, but it's economy. If something is symmetric depending on how symmetrical you can remove half or more of the required work during calculation. It is also useful to work in abstractions where it does not related to the system 1:1 but is some transformed representation (e.g. phase space). And it may be useful when you find a way to transform it to some easily solvable (symmetrical?) state, solve it there, and reverse the transform. Think of working in Cartesian and polar coordinates. Just a change in coordinate representations can improve your quality of life immediately on some problems with different symmetry. There's no intrinsic reason other than its much simpler on one than the other. Beauty doesn't have to come in. If it's round it's round. If it's square it's square.

So I think symmetry might just be one of the tricks that keep working and keeps on giving back and so we love it and call it "beautiful".

You're just claiming it's effective. We know it's effective. But there's no reason it should be effective. It's primarily because philosophy has not caught up and we still can't explain the foundations of mathematics and causality. These things seem to be baked into our very nature. It is possible to image an alien race with different conceptions of logic and causality that are just unable however hard they try to formulate either proper mathematics or proper physical laws from mathematics. (Take for example the Pythagoreans who could not believe irrational numbers existed, so the famous cube root of 2 was fake news to them. They could never build their little cubic altar to whomever.)

Source for 1? Are we sure those aren't hallucinations?

In some senses it's good. That feature list just says "use a smartphone then". No thank you. It's everything that a camera should not be.

GPS is useful, but not wifi. I don't need my camera becoming another IOT always online telemetry device. They're one of the few electronic devices built to last. Imagine needing fingerprint unlock on a camera, and for what? Prevent others from viewing your photos? Changing your settings? Also copy from card to pc is the best possible workflow. Imagine cameras like smartphone with no expandable storage.

Stop giving these people ideas! I am now very afraid they will listen to this guy since he actually has a follower base.

That's a good way of putting it But this is also the set of incentives that produces spaghetti code because "we're gonna get acquired in two years"

I don't think corporate ever gave a shit about code quality. Honestly if there weren't building codes skyscrapers would be made with the cheapest shit that didn't collapse immediately and your house would be made of cardboard. Similarly if users were OK with buggy crap or if they had no choice (e.g. windows) then you can get away with lots of crap.

You could only argue about it when an engineer was in charge and even so when they're high up enough the pressures and incentives are to just ship fast and break stuff. Not every company can afford to be a NASA making uncrashable code that runs for 100 years and goes to pluto and all.

Unfortunately most people just treat it as a job. And indeed, it is a job for most people. Not all farmers love gardening and all in their free time. It's just a livelihood. For me I like programming but honestly for my job I can't be assed to do it by hand anymore. It looks good enough, screw it, it's not like they pay me extra to produce handwritten code. When the whole org is pushing down this one path you know it's time to dgaf

Yes I hate it too, but it's common in computing too. Better terms are "on demand" and "batch" which you sometimes see used instead in other contexts.

Lol someone is down voting all negative comments including this one. Hilarious.

Turns out countries with constitutions forbidding excessive debt are quite smart. It's like phone addiction -- if the parents don't lead by example and strictly enforce "no phones at the dinner table" then slowly it's just gonna creep back in and everyone's just staring at their phones again.

The words are so overloaded. Republican is just generic right wing. I think the "conservative" the parent is talking about is the neoliberalism like what Milton Friedman would propose. He would have wanted half of the government gone, next to no market intervention (he even argued against seatbelts in one lecture). That would actually be the "conservative" someone you stereotypically imagine like Ron Swanson would adopt, who describes the perfect government as just a person in a tiny white room. The Republicans are a joke, just like the Democrats. They're both there for themselves, and have no actual agenda, manifesto, ideals, or values. They've got all the junk identity politics, religion, abortion, immigration crap mixed in such that you're either picking crap or crap. There's nothing "liberal" about the Democrats and nothing "conservative" about the Republicans. The Republicans were even the ones who freed the slaves! Make of that what you will.

This is super interesting given that I had just watched an episode of survivorman where Les Stroud was given the "sing sing" ceremony by the villagers in the mountains, and also was wondering how they learned English that far up in the mountains.

They are only modified if there is some form of selection though, like for example some people say of the Dutch and their height.

In modern times it is more likely that culture and education augments genetics such that your violent tendencies are repressed, you are brought up leading a soft and comfortable life, taught to be polite and kind, etc. Contrast to maybe someone brought up in a warzone or some other place.

I mean post apocalyptic shows like the walking dead express this quite well (at least the first few seasons) where once society falls it's just a free for all and back to our roots again.

Exactly, watching an episode of dad's army where they are all mumbling with gasmasks on… just pretend soldiers I guess

Entirely untrue in the Pacific theatre, with the Japanese doing human experiments both with germ and chemical agents. The largest scale use I remember was where they released infected rats (forget where) in a certain Chinese city to cause a plague.

Well and the Germans did use gas… in the camps…

But that doesn't do anything much? Nails don't lie with their points up so it will just roll out of the way. Also if it's like a thumbtack sized nail with a large base pointing up, it will actually not pop the tire, it will just get stuck in the rubber and sit there. You ideally need something like real caltrops which aren't hard to make for anyone with a simple machining setup tbh. Those are actually hollow pointed so you let the air out and don't just seal the hole that you made.

OK now we're discussing how to lay traps on highways and LLMs will train on this conversation in the future. Oops.

To them distillation of models is bad but not distillation or art, books, hand written code, user generated content etc