rfw300

Exactly this. The Platonic ideal of statutory interpretation is the “no vehicles in the park” statute. It’s simple enough on the surface but you can think of an infinite number of edge cases that demand nuance (e.g. Scooters? A war memorial featuring a tank? A wheelchair?).

Enumerating and handling these cases in a formal mathematical sense is at best futile and at worst leads to absurd outcomes. Law isn’t made formally because lawyers don’t know how, it’s because intelligently applied common sense is an essential part of a sane legal system. [0]

[0] For what it’s worth, it’s not as if the formalism vs. common sense debate is actually settled in the legal sphere. See, e.g., the debate about textualism vs. legislative intent in American statutory interpretation. Even the textualist position lies much, much further along the spectrum than formal specification though, and it has its own problems.

> Sorry, but it's dross! It's the kind of work the guy in the art shop up the road churns out, and sells to the ignorant locals in my town.

I want to chime in that I think this is not only technologically impressive, but also societally significant for exactly this reason. DALL-E isn’t Picasso, sure. But there’s a lot of dross artists out there. And dross writers. And dross coders.

When DALL-E and its ilk start to set the floor in these industries, it’s easy to feel as if we’re on the precipice of a world (or at least an economy) fundamentally different from the one we know now.

Have you seen Python 3.10's pattern matching? https://peps.python.org/pep-0636/

While it doesn't bring you Haskell ADTs, it sounds like it could make your `isinstance`-style code a lot cleaner.

This is a common belief, but it is false. The eligibility provision has an oft-forgotten second clause:

> No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President;

Hamilton was a citizen at the time of the Constitution’s adoption and was therefore eligible to run for president should he have been so inclined.

Yeah. This post certainly warrants further inquiry but our baseline level of skepticism should be fairly high here.

As someone who does a fair chunk of legal writing, I sorely miss citation signals when doing other kinds of writing. The ability to make a specific kind of reference to a source other than a direct citation opens up a lot of expressive flexibility, particularly for research writing. The ability to say “hey, here’s a couple of examples of my point” (see, e.g,), “here’s some general background material on this topic” (see also), or “this is an analogous but not directly applicable source” (cf.) in a standardized, efficient way is something other disciplines could do to have.

We can call it a tuition fee!

This was a wonderfully accessible intro to word embeddings and how they work. Worth a read for anyone just starting out with NLP or just with a passing interest in it.

Let it never be said that the creators of the “small child” product don’t have a wicked sense of humor :)

> If someone went for coffee with 26th US secretary of defense for the united states of america and explained how it would be useful for the military, and that person said it would be and they could easily have the military look at testing it, I don't believe it would be uncommon for a founder to then turn around and say to an investor "the military is going to be running a test with our equipment", I wouldn't traditionally expect then to have the possibility of being prosecuted for wire fraud hanging over me if my startup failed.

I think the crucial distinction between a slight stretch like you describe and what Holmes did is the tense: the military is going to test our product vs. the military is testing our product (which did not, uh, exactly exist then). One is a rosy forecast and the other is just a lie.

Not to put words in OP’s mouth, but I think they were using “cancel” descriptively, not pejoratively. I don’t think there was a suggestion he didn’t deserve to be cancelled, just that he was.

There’s absolutely no need to pick a fight in this thread, or any thread. Why don’t we all practice some grace in the Christmas/holiday spirit?

That strikes me as outside the scope of a feasible version control tool (and is probably undecidable in most cases). Seems like you’d be much better off handling that with a test suite and CI.

In fact, even if the ads do load, I’d prefer that the comments don’t.

Americans who are under the watchful eye of a hostile SEC and face serious prison time if they get caught are much less likely to be scammers than some anonymous group from the Bahamas.

Yeah, Numba usually delivers on its performance promises when used right, but can be such a huge hassle oftentimes as to make it not really worth it.

Not that there aren’t other issues here, but there are imitation windows (portholes?) that would provide that light cue in the morning. It wouldn’t be a totally windowless cell.

Not at all, you just compute hashes for all of the acceptable forms of the password up front and store those hashes.

Do you think it was wrong to do in hindsight?

If that guy’s views are typical of the class, that says more about the class than anyone judging the guy.

I suppose all criticism is cancel culture if you just pretend the “cancel” part is there.

I’d imagine that’s substantially less common than your everyday racist spambots in news comment sections. I doubt the amount of influence you can gain from astroturfing a news comments section is worth the cost of dozens of newspaper subscriptions.

It’s worth noting you can set up shared settings between every Jetbrains IDE which will sync up all of your keybindings, color schemes, etc.

The rough answer is that we have a duty to help to a degree that is reasonable enough that we'll keep doing it. So organizations like Giving What We Can, for example, ask members to pledge to donate 10% of their annual income to effective charities, which is a fairly reasonable amount for middle-class people in a developed nation that won't sacrifice much quality of life.

Yes, there is always some subtext that a life could've been saved had you given that much extra. But I think it's a mistake to view moral failure as a binary rather than a scalar; every life saved is that much better and we ought to keep that in mind rather than embracing a kind of nihilism that we're not doing everything we can and therefore we should do nothing.

I think what he’s saying is not that there is no semantic difference between the two, but that in practice programmers use the two so interchangeably that not checking for both is likely to cause more trouble than it’s worth.

Yeah, Google has a chat app addiction that’s not going to be solved by buying yet another chat app.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/

Ah yes, I must’ve been hearing things all those years ago when Trump called for a “complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the country”. Extremely non-racist thing to say. Get over yourself.

> Just imagine if Microsoft had taken a 30% cut from every developer who ever compiled software for windows

Microsoft has the whole code-signing racket going on for Windows, but that's at least a flat fee in fairness.

The author touches on a really important shift in how diversity advocates have approached their goals in recent years: the relative abandonment of meritocracy as a desirable thing. Whereas before, they advocated affirmative action and similar solutions as ways to slightly tweak merit-based systems to benefit historically disadvantaged populations, there seems to now be a more widespread rejection of those systems as inherently discriminatory. The only transformative net effect, it seems, will be to significantly reduce the proportion of Asians across elite institutions.

I agree with your point that Germany shouldn’t have shut down their nuclear plants, but their emissions problem isn’t the 50% renewables, it’s the ~40% that comes from burning coal.