snackbroken

Can those actually place/receive phone calls (actual phone calls, not WhatsApp or whatever) and send/receive SMS messages these days? Last I checked, which admittedly was 5+ years ago, the answer ranged from "no" to "sometimes, when the stars align on a Thursday". Merely being phone-shaped does not a phone make.

I'm not claiming that humans are somehow born with way more than a few billion parameters, no. I'm agreeing that we have an existence proof for the possibility of an efficient model encoding that only requires a few thousand calories to run inference. What we don't have is an existence proof that finding such an encoding can be done with similar efficiency because the one example we have took billions of years of the Earth being irradiated with terawatts of power.

Can we do better than evolution? Probably; evolution is a fairly brute force search approach and we are pretty clever monkeys. After all, we have made multiple orders of magnitude improvements in the state of the art of computations per watt in just a few decades. Can we do MUCH better than evolution at finding efficient intelligences? Maybe, maybe not.

> If you don’t promote your work, no one else will.

This has not been my experience. If you do interesting things then there are plenty of people who are willing to bring attention to it. I've been cold-emailed by journalists wanting to interview me without ever doing anything other than a) make my work publicly accessible and b) collaborate with like-minded people.

Perhaps I'm lucky (probably). Perhaps my work would've gotten more attention if I spent more effort promoting it (probably). The things I do because I find them interesting are not things I feel the need to promote, because I'm not doing them for attention.

If your goal is to grab a lot of attention, you will inexorably have to do things that are not interesting because the only way to achieve broad appeal is to not offend anyone's tastes and the only way to do that is to be bland.

Human babies are born significantly premature as a compromise between our upright gait and large head-to-body ratio. A whole lot of neurological development that happens in the first couple of years is innate in humans just like in other mammals, the other mammals just develop them before being born. E.g. a foal can walk within hours of being born.

Babies are born with a fully functioning image recognition stack complete with a segmentation model, facial recognition, gaze estimator, motion tracker and more. Likewise, most of the language model is pre-trained and language acquisition is in large part a pruning process to coalesce unused phonemes, specialize general syntax rules etc. Compare with other animals that lack such a pre-trained model - no matter how much you fine-tune a dog, it's not going to recite Shakespeare. Several other subsystems come online in the first few years with or without training; one example that humans share with other great apes is universal gesture production and recognition models. You can stretch out your arm towards just about any human or chimpanzee on the planet and motion your hand towards your chest and they will understand that you want them to come over. Babies also ship with a highly sophisticated stereophonic audio source segmentation model that can easily isolate speaking voices from background noise. Even when you limit yourself to just I/O related functions, the list goes on from reflexively blinking in response to rapidly approaching objects to complicated balance sensor fusion.

The inference and on-line fine tuning stage can run on a few thousand calories a day. The training stage has taken roughly 100 TW * 1bn years ≈ 10²⁸ calories.

> Anyway I have had a lot of success introducing programming with roblox scripting. It adds a lot of the "missing" lua library features and the script editor is a decent basic IDE that simplifies tooling, another huge pain point for novices.

I've had some success introducing programming in Lua to kids (ages 7-12) by way of the OpenComputers Minecraft mod. They were all already into playing modded Minecraft, and getting in-world feedback from running various commands (turning on/off redstone signals, moving around blocks, attacking monsters, etc.) meant that the "boring" time between "hey, let me show you how to program" and something exciting happening was <5 minutes. Beyond Minecraft-specific libraries, the computers in the mod also come with a HTTP client library, an editor and a shell that directly runs Lua scripts.

A corporation can donate to charities/provide grants/implement policies that help people based on their actual circumstance rather than their membership of some arbitrary group.

For example:

Offer wage negotiation coaching to the bottom x% of earners in any given position in the company (or just straight up give raises to them unprompted). Such initiatives will by definition disproportionately help disproportionately disadvantaged demographics without codifying systemic racism/sexism/etc. The reason corporations don't do things like this is because they are interested in scoring brownie points without undermining the status quo class related power structures.

Similarly when providing scholarships, don't limit them to certain ethnicities. Doing so tends to mostly favor the members of the given ethnic group who are already well off. Instead make the scholarship inversely proportional to household income and select applicants randomly weighted by 1/income without regard to skin color.

Build community centers and libraries in poor communities regardless of who lives there. Give money to the ACLU and other organizations that help victims of abuse rather than tweeting a rainbow flag in June while simultaneously organizing an industry event in Saudi Arabia.

Something I've been wondering for a while is if BitTorrent or other P2P protocols are ever a consideration for pushing game updates? Naively, it seems like an ideal fit since a large swarm of leechers quickly turns into a large swarm of (partial) seeders mostly chattering amongst themselves. I recall Facebook and Twitter used to internally torrent their updates in the 2010s and BT scales just fine to thousands of peers and tens of GB files at least, but I think I've only ever played one game whose updater was a torrent client so I'm guessing it's a nonstarter for one reason or another. Are game publishers just allergic to it due to the piracy association? Are end-user upload speeds too slow to meaningfully make a difference? Are swarms of ~100k just too large to manage?

Edit: Silly me for posting while sleep deprived. It's not the update itself that you're saying is causing thundering herd issues, but the log-ins all being synced up afterwards much like in TFA, duh. My curiosity wrt the apparent lack of P2P game updaters still stands though.

It's certainly more of a thing in SV, but it's not just a SV thing. The US in general is about as far removed from the rest of the world on this axis as SV is from the rest of the US. Experiences vary, of course.

Being of mutual benefit to the transactors is not the same as being of value for your neighbor. A transaction being mutually beneficial to the transactors is neither necessary nor sufficient for the transaction to be generating value.

Consider FooCorp paying an advertiser to convince people to buy its gizmos rather than the market leader Bar Inc.'s widgets. This is then followed by Bar Inc. paying the same advertiser to convince the same people to go back to buying widgets again. Each transaction is to the benefit of both the advertiser and the respective manufacturer, but taken together leaves the world in the same state as it was to begin with. No value was created. In fact, value was destroyed (the opportunity cost of labor by the advertiser).

An example of a transaction that is not to the mutual benefit of the transactors, yet increases value is the levying of fines against behavior which has externalized costs greater than their internalized gains. The fine is not to the benefit of the party it is levied against, but the effect of deterring negative-total-value behavior is equivalent to creating value.

I'm not convinced >99% of people's jobs are of the value-creating kind but it's certainly well above 50%. Several of the largest companies in our industry are arguably of the negative value kind. Insurance companies that accept premiums but deny legitimate claims certainly are.

In Firefox you can disable this behavior under Settings -> Customize -> Gestures. If your browser does not have an equivalent setting, get a better browser.

> if you have several tabs, you need a SharedWorker to share the connection between the tabs.

You don't have to use a SharedWorker, you can also do domain sharding. Since the concurrent connection limit is per domain, you can add a bunch of DNS records like SSE1.example.org -> 2001:db8::f00; SSE2.example.org -> 2001:db8::f00; SSE3.example.org -> 2001:db8::f00; and so on. Then it's just a matter of picking a domain at random on each page load. A couple hundred tabs ought to be enough for anyone ;)

In addition to the usual backup/restore policies, at $previous_workplace we disabled the "normal" prod DB admin accounts from running the usual suspect destructive queries (drop, alter, update, etc.) on the production DB. If you really needed to run something dangerous, we had a script named FuckUpProduction that

1) made you wait one minute before it would do anything to give you time to reflect on your life choices,

2) made sure to begin a transaction so you could roll it back before it was too late,

3) showed you the affected tables & rows,

4) made you type "FUCK MY SHIT UP" to confirm and

5) pinged everyone in our #DBA channel "<username> is about to fuck up production by running <query> affecting <rows> in <tables>. To stop them from doing something stupid, type STOP or NO" and aborted if anyone did so within the waiting period.

Anyone having to use FuckUpProduction was treated as a process failure and we did the whole RCA song and dance to determine why the normal testing/deployment process was insufficient. When FuckUpProduction was designed, some team members expressed discomfort at the use of profanity. This was considered a feature. We had a "swear jar" in the office that you had to put a dollar in if you were ever saved from accidentally running a query in prod either by FuckUpProduction or by the restrictive DBA accounts. The jar had enough money to buy a pizza before I left the company.

> how do you sanely present to a user the fact that there are new messages to read, but they're scattered throughout the history of the message log arbitrarily far back?

Like this[1]. It's how Element does it, and it's perfectly fine. Show the unread messages with a different background color until the user dismisses them if you must distinguish them from previously read messages. Alternatively, add a "jump to last unread message" button (and change the "jump to first" icon into a double up-arrow) that marks said message as read after jumping to it so you can just keep clicking it to hop to each one. If there's anything I'd change about this UI element, it's to display the number of unread messages in the green dot.

[1](https://imgur.com/UMboT1o)

This[1] bookmarklet strips everything that isn't preformatted plain text from a page. It seems to work on both gametabs[2] and ultimate-guitar[3] and probably others that don't try to get fancy with their typography. Hopefully it is of some use.

[1](javascript:(function(){const tabs = document.querySelectorAll('pre'); document.head.remove(); document.body.remove(); document.body = document.createElement('body'); for(const tab of tabs){ document.body.appendChild(tab);};})();)

[2](https://www.gametabs.net/)

[3](https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/explore?type[]=Tabs)