queuebert

Tech L7 who can only program Python but thinks they could be the next Boeing CEO.

I've often thought we should record all surgeries so that the patient can view them later. Wouldn't you want to know what is done to your body while you're under anesthesia? Of course surgeons will fight this, but aren't we entitled to know what happens to our bodies?

As a former astrobiologist, I respectfully disagree. The future and past are intimately related, and our planet's future may be examined through other planets' pasts (e.g. Venus). Other than genetics, we have zero evidence about life 3.5 billion years ago, so everything is speculation, and an engineer can do that as well as a biologist.

If you're interested in the origins and future of humanity, I'd recommend Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel as a complementary source as well.

https://www.youtube.com/@isaacarthurSFIA

The water exists in the rock mostly like water exists in the silica packets in everything you buy these days -- chemically bound in hydrated forms of crystals. That means it must be taken into account in any chemistry models, but not that there's a giant reservoir underground waiting to burst out in a flood.

Too bloated. The ultimate goal will be "planck" with zero lines of code. :-)

Whatever his issues, I think it's clear that humanity absolutely cannot afford people like him to control the emergence of AGI.

No, but he sure stinky feeted quite a few.

He's surrounded by VCs with confirmation bias.

Hopefully it is more like Nethack and less like Kingkiller Chronicles.

> One of the most harmful falsehoods about it is that somehow GOTOs and line numbers would turn you into a bad programmer for life.

In fact GOTOs in BASIC were, I think, a big part of lowering the barrier to programming for the new and the young. It relieves the mental load of structuring the program, allowing you to concentrate on the logic and syntax. Not using GOTOs requires already having a mental picture of what the program should look like before you write it, or at least rewriting it multiple times as you go.

As a Rust programmer, I probably spent 5-10% of my time restructuring branches to deal with Results and Options more elegantly, and it is the least fun part. While not related to program flow, it's an example of a Good Thing that makes coding less fun.

One of my favorite things about the IOCCC is that Larry Wall won it twice and then went on to design Perl, which explains a lot.

Wavelength ranges for astronomical detectors are often tuned to the emissions of particular phenomena and for what gets through interstellar and intergalactic gas and dust the best. Unfortunately blue to green isn't very useful by these metrics.

I have a PhD in astronomy, and I did too.

Government of the people, by the people and for the people.[1]

1. Corporations have been determined to be people.

Banjo is a great instrument for relaxing alone or livening up a party. My favorite banjo content is Clifton Hicks' YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@CliftonHicksbanjo

He's trying to preserve old banjo music and teaches how to play the old standards in two finger and clawhammer style, often with nylon/nylgut strings on vintage instruments, trying to replicate the original sounds.

Yes, and rejected it in favor of DuckDB. But thank you, ClickHouse employee.

Why do the hackers support Sam? He's the least hacker-y of the major players at OpenAI. Seems like more of a fundraiser, marketing type with little technical skills. Hackers traditionally support technically competent people.

I don't think CEOs are selected for their honesty.

That first article cites more behavioral psych research, which has the absolute worst track record of data analysis. After so many retractions and scandals, I find it difficult to know what to believe anymore.

Wow, that website has an extremely irritating background animation. Any time your mouse is inside a circle, the circle lights up, stealing your mental focus from the text.

Reminds me of the really dumb new Glassdoor design, where it flickers in the background as if it's loading something (but it's not) while you're trying to fill out the sign up form.

What is going on with web development these days? Is it some kind of Javascript animation version of the IOCCC?

While I get your point and agree, there apparently is no Dunning-Kruger effect. It was determined to be yet another case of faulty data analysis in behavioral psych.[1]

1. https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-k...

I'd like to add that ICEs need to run hot to minimize cylinder wall heat losses and allow more of the explosion to be converted into work instead of heat, although too hot and they break of course. Ideally the engine block would be at the same temperature as the combustion temperature, but we don't have the materials to achieve that yet.

The Car Care Nut talked in detail about the multi-purpose design of Tesla's heating systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HC72p2gfuQ

Isn't Morse code technically a digital signal, albeit with an extremely low bit rate?

What is an LPB?

Would be funny if the post was written using ChatGPT.

You're right -- I have no idea why fp64 wouldn't be half the speed of fp32, and traditionally it is. I was simply taking them at their word. Maybe they're exaggerating or maybe they did what you suggest and hamstrung fp32.

> almost any news website these days would be blog spam

Yes.

In the old days, depending on architecture, fp64 performance could be atrocious even when fp32 was decent, so bragging about fp64 performance has an authenticity to it. Not all scientific computing requires 64 bits, but knowing that you can drop to high precision when necessary without penalty is nice.

Also, back in the day, integer ops were just called 'ops', grumble grumble. But yeah FLOPS specifically refers to floating point. Calling them TOPS doesn't make sense to me, since tensor cores were meant for matrix operation speedup, and these matrices are rarely integer.