vanderZwan

The fact that a lot of the old fonts also used an ſ with a partial crossbar on the left side probably makes it a lot worse, no?

> The Dutch health care system is under pressure and GPs (and their parent organizations, and the government) are reaching towards IT automation and self-help / pre-screening / etc to reduce the load

I'm aware, both of my parents are retired GPs.

Back when they retired, about a decade ago, they already had spent a decade complaining that the a constant increase in excessive administrative work got in the way of the actual work of being a doctor that helps their patients. So much that they had joined the strike (remember when that was a big deal because it happened for the first time in Dutch history?)

Anyway, the situation got more complex since then but a lot of pressure is also still administration. Yes, now we have assistants taking on more complex tasks leaving the "important" things to the real doctors, but I think that the need for that is also is in large part due to doctors not getting enough time to be doctors.

And I feel like automation will help fight back at that about as much as IBM's 1967 prediction came true that their office machines would fight back at the "paperwork explosion". Which is to say: Jevons paradox said no.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IZw2CoYztk

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Consider that I am not talking about people who use LLMs to learn about keywords to search for in other websites, but only regurgitate what the chat told them uncritically.

Corsicans, channeling their inner Gollum: "give it to me raw and wriggling!

Maybe it's a dog treat over there as well?

Would be nice if people just did that instead.

It's kind of infuriating to hear Dutch people cite these chatbots without bothering to check https://www.thuisarts.nl/.

Yes, your intuition was right about that! But even back then they were aware that the mineral ones lasted longer. I imagine a high-quality book about color like this would go for the "big budget" paints that lasted.

The fact that only one copy was made suggests it wasn't really intended as a mass-produced book, but as an individual item, perhaps to show to visitors or clients.

Well, old paintings from that period are usually fine too, right? Pigments were usually made from mineral sources that last very well. It's usually the varnish on top that changes color over time.

A book's illustrations don't have that problem, and the pages aren't exposed to the air or sun as much either, if kept on a shelf in a dry place most of the time.

Does make me wonder how expensive the blue pages were to make though:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarine

Tangent: always fun to read these old books that still have a long s and having to remind myself not to misread it as an f all the time. It gets so silly, like the authors have a bad lisp (or "bad lifp", I gueff).

(also funny that our forward slash is a descendant of it, meaning it's a "cousin" to the integral symbol)

The Super Press Space To Win Adventure RPG parody was uploaded to NewGrounds in 2009 already (and later gave us the "dot dot dot" video).

It's been a growing problem for two decades now.

[0] https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/495903

[1] https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/558516, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2Z23SAFVA

Because they probably are.

> The clock entrains to the environment, though. The more the daylight brightness to night time darkness shift in intensity, the higher amplitude their rhythms are, generally.

Well, this is also interesting, because I was born in Ghana and spent the first four years of my life there, and since then have always had insomnia issues, first in the Netherlands and now Sweden. However, the one time I visited Ghana as an adult for a month I slept like a baby.

I actually had a gut feeling that the much quicker shift from day to nighttime darkness and back played a big part in it, but wasn't sure why that might be the case. I assumed it was psychological somehow, that on some subconscious level I felt more "at home" in Ghana's natural environment because it's what my brain was "calibrated" on in the first years of its life. Would be interesting if that actually is the case in a circadian rhythm sense.

> That’s the endogenous period, that really only comes out as is in total darkness over many days.

And speaking of Sweden, I wouldn't be surprised if the short winter days probably do give enough "leeway" to approximate that effect.

Well, there is one similar joke where Tigger quickly lays down train tracks in front of a running toy train before it runs off of the tracks. That might have been an inspiration, who knows, but it's executed very differently either way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5l_fGY-EfA&list=PL65tAzyNzM...

... and then the episode becomes a parody of Westerns as it switches to the "imagination vision" of the characters, and the story and gags are not really comparable to The Wrong Trousers at all after that.

I mean, I watched taped episodes of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh religiously as a small child and has strong nostalgia goggles for it, and even I don't think that it is on the same level. Even childhood me would have agreed: I remember loving and enjoying this episode (just like all the others), but the first time I watched The Wrong Trousers as a child I was genuinely laughing so much I had sore core muscles the day after, because I had never seen a film that funny and amazing before in my life.

To prove your point: here's the Hollywood Reporter's "Directors Roundtable" video where Danny Boyle mentions it's one of the greatest action sequences of all time and everyone else (Quentin Tarantino, Ridley Scott, Alejandro Inarrito, Tom Hooper, David O. Russel) immediately agree. David O. Russel even says it was an inspiration for him for the final action sequence in Three Kings:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ7qKKQrSBY&t=581s

"The Wrong Trousers" also has one of the best heist scenes in cinema imo, up there with Rififi. It gets overshadowed by the action sequence though.

Ok, that is your situation, and you have my sympathies, but that doesn't change the fact that I didn't have those issues, and grew up in an very calm environment without noisy distractions. And that's not just memory, if visit my family it's still a very quiet and calm space, including during the daytime, and it still doesn't fix my insomnia.

I'm not saying that these can't be factors, but the original question was asked in a way that suggests it might be a general explanation, and it clearly cannot explain everything.

I agree that that worsens the problems, but I grew up in a quiet, boring village before internet distractions or mobile phones, where this could not have been a factor, and I still had/have insomnia issues (and ADHD).

> It varies between 23.8 hours and 24.6 hours, and everyone far from the 24 hour ideal pays a tax.

As a person with ADHD and who noticed that whenever I have a few weeks off (so no schedule restrictions, so to speak) my sleep schedule seems to advance by almost an hour a day, this sounds like it might explain a few things.

> Frankly, had he not confessed, they'd likely still be Vermeer's today.

Speaking as a Dutch guy with an arts degree, I more or less agree with everything else in your comment if with "art" you mean "prestige and fame in the art world" (you forgot to mention the gallery art and tax evasion angle though), but I'm not so certain about this one. I've seen his paintings side-by-side with actual Vermeer paintings and you can tell they're not the real deal. The faked aging is pretty noticeable. Aesthetically too, the paintings are still "Vermeer as interpreted by someone else", and you can see the "Van Meegeren" touches. Sure, that is with the benefit of hindsight, but I think a side-by-side view would have raised questions regardless.

On top of that, you have to consider how they tricked the art world: they found a vain professor who also had a selfish incentive to be the person to find one of the presumed "missing" Vermeer paintings. They knew exactly who to manipulate.

Being an art critic who discovers a forgery also comes with some prestige, so surely later critics would have been more eager to be skeptical about these "new" Vermeer paintings.

Also, if "F for Fake" has shown me anything it's that forgers kind of want to be caught, because they ultimately want to brag about fooling everyone. So he probably would have announced to the world that he made the forgeries at some point. But that kind of breaks with your "if he hadn't confessed" condition so it doesn't really count.

At the molecular level biology is chemistry, and I think GP is implying that it's often the kind of chemistry that needs quantum mechanics to be explained properly. Now, I don't know how enzymes work, so I don't know if that's true. But I do know that they can do chemical conversions at room temperature where "naive" human chemistry would require temperatures incompatible with life (or pH levels, or pressure, or…).

So in biology the bag, lock and keys are shaped in such a way that you only have to shake for a short time to have multiple keys come out in locks, and in a particular order or pattern too. That's what makes the whole thing kinda magical. And I would not be surprised if quantum mechanics were involved in the chemistry in ways that classical mechanics cannot explain adequately.

EDIT: I started typing this yesterday evening and hadn't hit "send" before going to bed, I hadn't seen the rest of the discussion that had taken place since.

I think we're talking about different interpretations of the word "latency", both valid. You are thinking more about UI freezes and missing input, right? EDIT: or do you mean that bad latency numbers are less crucial as long as input isn't dropped or out of order? In that case I think it depends on the task.

I meant "time between input and visible change on screen", or lag between writing on a tablet and the screen or eink showing the drawn line. It's not really as crucial when typing, but especially for writing or drawing on a tablet low input latency is the difference between getting in a real flow state or not.

In terms of throughput, absolutely.

In terms of latency... well... we also could do a lot better there, but as I understand it, even if you do your best to cut away as much software bloat as possible, the latency "floor" seems to be higher than in the old days[0]. And the many layers of abstraction that is the average software stack don't help. Like, I'm doing my best to keep a web-app snappy, but there's only so much you can squeeze out of a browser.

[0] https://danluu.com/input-lag/

Another reminder of how easy it is to forget how ridiculously fast computers are these days (especially when you're like me and not writing stuff close to the metal for your day job).

> Are you feeling through memory or through logic?

This feels (feeels, before you ask again) like begging the question. We're talking about a natural language here, not a programming language. It has rules but they evolved through natural usage, and those rules are flexible ("because internet"), and there's plenty of technically correct but wrong feeling constructions ("bad big wolf").

Like, "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" will sound like the raving of a madman regardless of the fact that it's technically valid.

> Commander, General, Loyal Servant, Father to a murdered son.

I mostly think that that's a weird collection of things to all be at once to a murdered son.

I'm not sure why, but sentence feels forced and unnatural, and as a result a bit unconvincing. My intuition is to insert an "and" at the end of those three options and then it feels like you can't drop the "a", i.e. "married, tall, and a doctor in medicine". I mean, maybe you can but the sentence feels odd to me.

And the weird part is that you can put those three properties in any order, and you would not place an "a" in front of the other two.

Eh… I'm fairly sure that most of the people here are old enough to have played Star Craft and Brood War when it first came out, and are fully aware of e-sports becoming huge in South Korea. And I have a hard time imagining younger generations that grew up with e-sports being an established thing instead of a novelty to not be aware of how South Korea looks at Brood War differently.

Also, doing high-effort endurance exercise for long enough suppresses grelin production (the hunger hormone). I've seen 30+ minutes of running or 60+ minutes of cycling as the most common rules of thumb.

So in order to stack all these effects to maximum effect: plan exercise before meal, plan mean before doing groceries.

I think that adipose tissue is the biggest criminal when it comes to unwanted hunger, since it produces hormones to make you hungry the moment you actually risk losing weight.

Not sure how much the digestive neurons are involved with hunger actually, I thought its role was more about telling you which foods make you nauseous so you won't eat them, or subconsciously register which nutrients various foods have so you'ld crave the ones compensating for shortages more.

Just like how not everything is a zero-sum game, not everything is a debate where one side tries to "win" where every exchange is an aggressive retort trying to disprove the other's point. I was trying to clarify what I suspected the intent was.

If even the suggestion of considering different points of view feels like an attempt to disprove your own position, then that mainly says something about how you are approaching this exchange.

I think they're saying America ended up positioning itself as the loser because they framed things as a zero-sum game. Which of course is a generalization, neither America nor China is a monolith, but I can certainly see some presidencies of the last decades leaning more into this attitude than others.

“If you assume everyone only has hammers, you'll end up getting screwed”, or something like that.

It kind of reminds me of Clay Shirky's predictions about the influence of the internet on society from a few decades ago. To paraphrase what he said: when the printing press was invented, everyone predicted it would lead to world peace, and we got the Thirty Years War instead. When modern mass media was invented people predicted world peace, and instead the Nazis rose to power and we got World War 2.

And yet as a society we typically consider these technologies a net positive these days, because alongside all the political instability and violence that followed them at first, some people were figuring out how to do beneficial things with them along the way that did more good than bad. Because the issue really was that the influx of more voices and ideas shifted the power dynamic, required relearning how to communicate, and in the end be better as a society.

The issue was figuring out how to "domesticate" these wild new communication channels. One successful example of which was the invention of scientific journals and papers.

Shirky predicted the internet would probably lead to a few decades of political instability too (about fifty years was his guess), and we definitely seem to be in the middle of that process.

Now, I haven't checked his stance on LLMs. I also don't know if I would quite call them a medium for mass communication like the others (as used today, they take humans out of the loop rather than let more voices join the public discourse), but I feel like they are similar enough to otherwise fit the pattern.

Tao's stance similarly feels about wanting to domesticate this wild animal before we get mauled by it. And to stick with the metaphor, I feel that most of the time the AI industry is trying to bamboozle us with spectacular rodeo displays instead.