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rdlwon A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material

What is there to resolve? The comment I responded to was saying there's no useful distinction between the two words, I pointed out a distinction that I see between the two in what I think is accepted usage. Of course I see my opinion as more correct, since if I found something more convincing I would change my opinion. As the word becomes more widely used, usage will settle down.

rdlwon I like the RP2040

https://products.espressif.com/#/product-selector?language=e...

This is the official Espressif "ESP Product Selector". I checked everything in the ESP series, and limited to "Mass Production" status, and then it showed me a list of 175 products.

I'm sure some of those are doubled up, or just the same chip with different packaging options or whatever, but as a potential customer I'm still presented with 175 things and told to pick one.

rdlwon A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material

Spam is content that is delivered to people who did not request it. Slop is content which pretends to be what you want, but turns out to be of low quality.

rdlwon Uganda's surveillance state is built on national ID cards

The fact that a system may become perverted in the next several hundred years doesn't make it not worth using. Best of luck to my children's children, I hope they don't fuck it up too bad, but I'm not going to preemptively save them by not giving anyone power to govern in the present day.

rdlwon Chickens in Trees

Cathedrals everywhere, for those with the eyes to see

rdlwon Number 16 (spider)

Sure, the "yet" seemed to imply that one governor has taken over. There's no further information regarding the number of governors, and I refrained from speculation. All I could deduce was that the 1882 governor is dead, the current one is alive, and there is a nonnegative whole number of intervening governors (zero or more).

rdlwon Number 16 (spider)

> There's a tortoise living on the Seychelle's governor garden since 1882 and has outlived every single governor yet.

Is this just a fancy way to say that the tortoise is alive, and whoever was governor in 1882 is dead?

rdlwon Show HN: Wonkypedia - Wikipedia from an Alternate Timeline

Cool idea, but disappointed that the first article I clicked on breaks kayfabe:

"While the Arctic in our timeline has experienced extensive exploration, development and environmental damage over the past few centuries, in this alternate history it has remained relatively pristine and untouched."

https://www.wonkypedia.org/article/Arctic

Although, it would be entertaining if Wikipedia were written in this style. "While the Arctic in other timelines remains pristine, in this alternate history it has been ravaged by human exploitation."

rdlwon Letting go of the idea of keeping up

Application?

I think adding something to my mental model of the world is a benefit, yes, but I'm not sure that's what you mean. I find that reading books enriches my life in a way that YouTube doesn't (with many, many exceptions).

Maybe let's try a concrete example: The Republic. It taught me about ancient Greek society, made me feel a connection to people that lived 2400 years before me, made me interested in the ancient Greek language, gave me lots of ethical questions to discuss with my friends, caused me to slow down and deliberately think through many important problems, and allowed me to take part in the intellectual tradition that people have been participating in for over two millennia.

It did not make me overthrow the government, so it goes under "roundly useless in application", but at least I "had fun", so I wasn't just "wasting time"?

What do you do with all your time?

rdlwon Letting go of the idea of keeping up

I create fake tasks to stress myself out and compel myself to do things that make me feel better in the long run. I don't use Goodreads but I've been trying to read 20-24 books this year (I'm on track for 20). Obviously word count can drastically change the difficulty of this, but I'm not worrying about it since I know what I'm reading—if I only end up with 15 in December, but one of them is War and Peace, I'll still feel like I accomplished my goal.

Knowing that I'm a week behind or whatever tells me that I've been focusing on things that don't make me as happy as reading books does, and I should make an effort to spend less of my day watching YouTube and more of it reading books (that's what I spent that time on, not reading Proust).

I don't think I'd call it stress, I think anxiety is a more accurate term, but it's a helpful form of anxiety. I've also been reading with friends on a schedule, and the anxiety of having to be ready for our next meeting makes me read more too. Again, I find it really useful and it's made me generally happier day-to-day.

rdlwon New seafloor map only 25% done, with 6 years to go

I think the comment you replied to is just talking about the government of China.

Try looking at China on Google Maps in satellite view.

rdlwon Los Alamos Chess

An example from a real GM game: https://youtu.be/CBoS9hSM6oM

rdlwon The window for great-grandmothers is closing

Many things were historical norms, with current practices being the exception.

rdlwon Heinlein's Fan Mail Solution

Of course personal responses are not 'required', like you say they receive a mountain of emails. What you're saying is that rather than respond with a completely acceptable boilerplate email explaining that they get too much correspondence to write a personalized response, or allow an assistant to explain that and respond in their stead, they should deceive their biggest fans--the people who care enough to actually reach out to them, pretending that they did read and personally respond, which is an outright lie.

rdlwon Heinlein's Fan Mail Solution

Luckily I'm pretty sure no one I admire would use this service, because it would be devastating to find out they are a user and instantly lose all respect for them, probably also irrevocably casting a shadow on their work.

rdlwon On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV

Poland was occupied by Germany during WWII. The people still considered themselves Poles during this time, and the only reason there wasn't a 'Poland' was because of military strength, so it seems silly to say that early 1939 Poland and late 1944 Poland are different countries because of lack of continuity. Certainly, almost all Poles will tell you the country 'began' (it kind of had a soft start) in 966, and not in 1944.

(Note: there was technically the government-in-exile in London, which you could argue maintained continuity, but I don't think it's necessary so I'm leaving that out of this.)

rdlwon How photos were transmitted by wire in the 1930s

Not sure what you mean by that but Steve Mould (physics/chemistry/engineering), Matt Parker (math), Primer (economics), AlphaPhoenix (electricity, lately), 3Blue1Brown (math), Fraser Builds (history of chemistry, alchemy), Ben Eater (computers), Gneiss Name (geology) and The Thought Emporium (genetics/miscellaneous) are some youtube channels I really enjoy that teach concepts by either making elaborate models, making elaborate animations, or just actually making the thing they're talking about from scratch.

rdlwon How to Get Out of Vi (2015)

Nano is very supportive, any time I find myself using it it knows that what I need most is to "Exit" and "Get Help"

rdlwon 'Your pay is still – not – going up too fast'

In a thread about wages and inflation, I'd say the relevant metric is the one that lets you compare the two. Using percentages makes it clear that the son is actually, really making more money now, whereas the parent has less purchasing power now than a year ago (assuming this occurred over one year)

rdlwon An Unbelievable Demo (2021)

That's kind of long-winded. Maybe the title should just sum up what happens in the article, in a way that sort of gets your interest and makes you want to read the story.

How about "An Unbelievable Demo"

rdlwon Why isn't Bluesky a peer-to-peer network?

I think the main selling point is that it's a slower version of Twitter. I'm not sure what you mean by "less efficient" but I definitely know I don't want Twitter to do whatever it does more efficiently.

rdlwon He spent his life building a $1M stereo

To be fair, with most of those, you're paying for a piece of art to some extent. I don't think anyone buying $500 cables thinks the cables themselves are worth that, they're buying them because they expect some tiny increase in sound quality which measurably and provably doesn't exist. Someone buying a $10k sweater isn't buying it for the engineering in the material, but for the perceived artistic value. Of course, there's also a grift involved here, where fashion brands can pass things off as having great artistic value just because they're associated with the brand. But at least the perceived value is subjective and not coming from something that can be measured not to exist.

rdlwon I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy

Whisper does audio to text with translation, so you'd have to extract the audio channel first.

rdlwon The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance

The US government: https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2023/11/firefox-brink/

rdlwon Coastline paradox

Do this with Gabriel's horn and you'll observe that it has an area of pi, which does not reflect the fact that its perimeter is infinite.

rdlwon Coastline paradox

Especially if you're selling the whole island except for the place where a two-meter-wide footbridge connects to it. The sea-opening would be two meters no matter the size of the island

rdlwon Text-to-CAD

It's like the joke about the group of engineering professors who were invited to fly in a plane.

After they get comfortably seated, they are informed that the plane was built by their students.

All but one jump out of their seats and immediately run for the exits.

Later, the lone professor who remained calm was interviewed, as he clearly had more confidence in the ability of his students than any of the others.

“It's true, I know my students' ability very well, and I can tell you for a fact this plane won't move an inch.”

rdlwon The teenager who lives like it's the 1940s

That's good. Hopefully soon we institutionalize people who wear funny hats OR drive old cars, and not just the people who do both.

rdlwon What This Country Needs is an 18¢ Piece (2002) [pdf]

re: arbitrage games with metered things like gasoline, we got rid of pennies in Canada a decade ago so I can tell you how it affected getting gas. Initially, some people switched games from the classic "try to get a whole number of dollars exactly" to "try to get two cents above a whole number of dollars", as that gets rounded down when you pay cash. However, that was also around the time that paying with cards for everything became the norm, so it stopped mattering because credit/debit card transactions don't get rounded. Worth noting, in response to the sibling comment, that if you buy $20.02 of gas for $20, you get a 0.1% discount, which I doubt throws off the owners' books. This would be 0.2% max if the nickel was also eliminated.

There were also jokes about buying one grape at a time so the whole bag got rounded to 0, but I worked at a grocery store for two years and never saw anyone try to exploit the rounding, even to a lesser extent :)

rdlwon OpenCola

There's a great recent Thought Emporium video where he synthesizes chicken noodle soup from pure chemicals:

https://youtu.be/sR8M4zARBXY?si=CFFmCb26yBY1YUlB