Earw0rm

18 ms·

271.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
It's weird edge cases all the way down. Just look at names. Firstname, lastname? Jejeje, no. Treating them as constants? laughs in married woman . If you can absolutely, 100% cast iron guarantee that one identity field exactly identif
272.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Even "computer" was originally a job title. For a person.
273.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Would it look like such a good search engine if the actual search engines hadn't progressively broken themselves over the last 15 years? I swear half the time when I use it to look up the nuances of system API stuff, it's replayin
274.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Right, but these jobs are inefficient mostly because of checks and balances. So unless you have a bunch of AIs checking one another's work (and I'm not sure I can see that getting signed off) doesn't it just move the problem
275.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Whales are unusual in that they use complex sound for beyond visual range communication, and they may (emphasis may) be intelligent enough to treat our proxy sounds as an attempt to recreate their own and respond in kind. I doubt we'd
276.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Possible, but in terms of the galaxy vs evolutionary time, we're not looking very far into the past. The Milky Way is of the order of 100K light years, which for evolution is the blink of an eye.
277.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
I wonder what the likelihood is of big leaps forward there, in terms of communicating with other intelligent Earth life. As in, will our ability to wrangle vast amounts of data and characterise it gives us enough insight into what whales ar
278.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Extremophiles don't tend towards complexity, though. And if each common variable has, say, a 10% range in which complex life can occur, you don't need that many to start reducing probability a lot. - Orbital stability? - Tidal and
279.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Not an original thought, but I wonder if the answer - or part of it - to the Fermi paradox is that we don't know all the ways it's possible for a planet in the Goldilocks Zone to be otherwise hostile to life. Liquid water and.. ch
280.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
This is the case in France & some other EU countries (light quadricycles - Renault, Citroen and so on) and Japan (Kei Cars). The problem seems to be that for most people who can legally drive a full-scale car (i.e. they're not too
281.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Then they presumably understand climate change in terms of occasional weather disasters and hot summers and not, say, twenty years of chronic and persistent inflation followed by actual food shortages.
282.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Plumbers and firefighters have stuff to haul and long distances to cover. They need to do 40/50/60mph on the freeway, and 15/20mph on local surface access roads where they're mixed in with light vehicles. The whole light
283.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
That's right, but then you have to capture it from atmospheric concentrations (430ppm) rather than directly from a waste gas stream at a much higher concentration. It can be done but the economics don't look good right now. Possib
284.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
How much does diffuse DAC cost? Add the price of that on a flight ticket (which we ultimately have to anyway) and we'd be helping address the problem already, before the tech is even deployed. And the next 35 years - to 2060 - have to
285.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
A narrow idea of what constitutes freedom ("an F-650 with a full gun rack", but not "guaranteed healthcare for everyone that needs it", or "freedom from having to deal with braindead morons with F-650s and rifles&qu
286.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
The first two examples are feasible, the last not so much. You need extra energy to power the CCS, and to store the captured CO2. That's not practical on any airliner. One kilo of jet fuel produces about 3.5x its weight in CO2. The sol
287.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
> Think about it - if these formations were not leakproof on geological scale, there wouldn't be any oil and gas for us to extract in the first place. Leakproof to one substance doesn't necessarily mean leakproof to another. He
288.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Most Brits aren't wealthy, BYD are aggressively priced - as are other Chinese brands like Omoda. New prices for full EV compare pretty favourably to ICE cars from the traditional mid-market brands, the Fords / Volkswagens / V
289.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
It doesn't help that full EVs are still at a kind of progressive-status-symbol stage of the adoption curve - the people who buy them are exactly the same people who'll see all the Nazi crap and be put off by it.
290.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Optimization, people! If you actually want to make flying faster for lots of people, the best thing most cities/countries can do is build very fast mass transit between the airport and the nearest big city centre. So many cities are bo
291.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Not sure if that's sarcasm, given the existence (or, not) of practical fusion technology. We do of course know how to power large ships with nuclear fission. The US Navy has been doing so - for generations(!). Only issue with that is
292.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
'-let' is pretty common as well. (Applet, hamlet and so on)
293.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Not much, but it's an anglicisation of the German -chen, which very much is.
294.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Jack o' lanterns are large, but plenty of the older varieties are softball sized.
295.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Yes and no. They extract information in much the same way that an educated but naive reader can extract information from a book. (Thousands of times quicker of course). But there's a lot more than that going on, both when a book is wri
296.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
What they capture is not knowledge, it's word relationships. And that can indeed be powerful, useful and valuable. They're a tool I'm grateful to have in my armoury. I can use it as a torch to shine light into areas of human
297.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Perhaps we're confusing intelligence with awareness. What LLMs seem to emulate surprisingly well is something like a person's internal monologue, which is part of but not the whole of our mind. It's as if it has the ability t
298.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
I'm not arguing that the new products are better, just that they were evolutionarily successful. I think the issue was less one of legacy codebases, and more that getting consensus on protocols and so on is _always_ slow and difficult,
299.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Sure, I was just talking about a step in a feedback loop or degenerative spiral rather than whatever initiates the feedback loop in the first place.
300.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Front-end dev is optimising for a different set of constraints than HIG-era UIs. Primarily that constraint is "looks good in a presentation for an MBA with a 30-second attention span". Secondarily "new and hook-y enough to pu

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