pyuser583

Oh wow - I did not suspect there were BBS’s still running!

Wikipedia is reporting him as deceased, but there’s a bit of an editing war going on. No source is cited for his death, and and it’s going back and forth.

What really makes me mad is one of the plaintiffs was accessing the service - but only to make sure she wasn’t using the service (any other way).

They then said: “you are accessing the service, so you consent to the TOS!”

That should not count. Nor should a accessing a service to delete your account, file a complaint, ensure you aren’t being stalked, etc.

The distinction between author and their estates is fascinating: the stereotype is estates mismanaging the art, but that usually happens because the estates want to be “artistic” themselves.

Most artists are terrible at business. They do dumb things for no reason.

JRR Tolkein and his estate is prime example. JRR signed away all movie rights for a nominal sum. His estate fought tooth and nail for their rights, while still allowing grey zone stuff to develop (Dungeons and Dragons).

I’m not seeing any ambitious people trying to get into Chinese undergrad universities.

I know a handful of folks who worked at them, and then found a more permanent position in the US.

I usually do ask the llm what parameters to use. But that’s why I know so little about parameters!

I read the Oppenheimer biography, so maybe that’s distorting things.

Oppenheimer was Jewish, but very Americanized.

Bohr was working on radar for the Nazis. Einstein had surprisingly little knowledge of nuclear physics, and famously rejected key parts of quantum physics.

The Germans had great nuclear scientists. They simply weren’t willing to spend the money it took to cold the bomb.

Do you have source on this? I’d love to learn more beyond our contradicting assumptions.

I’m reassured by the fact that grads of non-Ivy Leagues do extremely well.

The focus on Harvard is really overblown.

I don’t feel the same. My own alma mater is a niche school. It officially gives admissions pref to legacies, but unofficially depends on parents sending their kids as the school is not well known.

Harvard on the other hand - people go to Harvard to become elite. That only works because they get to hobnob with princes and the like. Thats the point.

The Ivy’s do a good job of admitting non-elite students. I’m glad that pathway to eliteness is there.

I’m proud of my small liberal arts Alma mater. I have no desire to network with billionaires and princes (as opposed to say, brilliant engineers and researchers).

But I’m glad the legacies at Harvard are sharing a classroom with kids from Appalachia. And that only happens if you get in the legacies.

That was not my takeaway from the Oppenheimer movie.

Or from … history.

The Germans chose to extremely underinvest in their nuclear program to maintain financial and political support for their rocket program.

The rocket program was so fundamentally different from the Manhattan Project it’s hard to see the Germans doing anything like it.

Cornell guys are assholes. I know this from experience. I hope it’s changed, but doubt it has.

Are American universities really turning out engineers with high GPAs and relevant coursework that are unqualified? Or even create a disadvantage for their employer?

I mean realistically you don’t know how good an engineer is until they get on projects and you see their work. But that’s true for Harvard too,

How much do you use?

I have lots of trouble figuring out what the limits are of a system with x amount of vram and y amounts of ram. How do you determine this?

I’m thinking more paper and scrolls.

Not to mention things like tombstones or the occasional name carved into buildings - usually related to donors.

The media matters: an email list, a scroll, a name carved into stone, and a tattoo are quite different things.

I feel uncomfortable drawing clear lines, but I feel equally uncomfortable with other people drawing clear lines.

I’ve read the GDPR has zero impacts on national security/law enforcement. It applies weakly to other state functions.

I’ve also seen cases where GDPR is used against religious groups that have a strong religious justification for keeping lists of believers. Think Orthodox Jews and the Catholic Church, which regard family trees and baptismal certificates as semi-sacred. And kept on paper or scrolls.

Not sure what to think about that. Regulating a sacred scroll like a database table seems wrong.

European countries aren’t known for strong privacy against the state. There are exceptions, but the EU’s “privacy rights” are almost exclusively against corporations.

American privacy, by contrast, is almost exclusively focused on state surveillance.

There are holes, the biggest being that foreigners on foreign soil have no privacy rights. Nor do the dead.

But I’m not impressed with the “rights” Europeans have against state surveillance.

Europeans aren’t willing to spend the money to do massive spy programs. Ok, fine. But that’s not the same as having civil liberties opposition.

Switzerland has a reputation, good and bad, for strong privacy. But that’s not the norm.

Is it 128 gb ram or vram?

Was that written by AI? It sounds like AI, spends lots of time summarizing other posts, and has no listed author. My AI alarm is going off.

Wasn’t London a hot bed of plague?

I was hoping AMD would keep making gaming cards, now that NVIDIA is an AI company. Somebody has to, right?

Made me think of the ETF.

This is the sort of thing employers are failing on. They sign contracts that assume employees are going to be logging in and asking questions directly.

But if I don’t have a url for my IDE (or whatever) to call, it isn’t useful.

So I use Ollama. It’s less helpful, but ensure confidentiality and compliance.

When you are C-suite, every comment you make is a legal statement. The big concern (usually) is misleading shareholders.

That sort of "ABC" simplicity is just good rhetoric.

You’ve correctly hit the atonement v redemption distinction! That’s something few English speakers could do!

“The Shawshank Redemption” is a nonsense phrase in English.

“Shawshank” sounds like a place name, but why a specific place would be the source of redemption is mysterious.

The name of the source text, “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” is even more mysterious and unclear.

Why?

Scripture is pretty clear the name of Christ matters. The genealogies refer to a specific individual, not a message. The Epistles even single out Christ’s name as worthy of praise.

The messages of the gospel aren’t obvious, or obviously good. Without an actual man-god preaching them, I don’t see why we should love our enemies as we love ourselves.

It’s a legit religion. People go every Sunday for prayer, worship, etc.

Political movements tend to be ecumenical - across religious boundaries. The Civil Rights movement was a political movement, as was the labor movement, etc.