PaulRobinson

8 ms·

91.
by PaulRobinson 4mo ago
It's a criminal act to not pay the license fee if you own a TV capable of receiving BBC channels (i.e. it's plugged into an aerial, satellite or cable box). Prison time is theoretically possible, but most prosecutions result in a
92.
by PaulRobinson 4mo ago
True, I'll take that. I haven't been on a machine without bash in ~25 years though, but I have been on machines without vi. But yeah, from a "what can I expect from a POSIX-like environment bare-bones minimum install" pe
93.
by PaulRobinson 4mo ago
It's not python that's the dependency that needs managing. It's pip and the keystone cops it brings along.
94.
by PaulRobinson 4mo ago
Known system dependency that's (almost) always on the system you're on. I remember somebody once telling me that they had learned vi because "it was always installed". Well, no, technically, the only editor you can be su
95.
by PaulRobinson 4mo ago
By OP's framing, it seems so. But I think there's more nuance here. I can buy a copyrighted book, read it, and then sell it or give it to you for free. The copyright holder's rights have not been violated: I've not copie
96.
by PaulRobinson 4mo ago
Not sure how accessible all this is outside of the UK (you'd need to check the BBC Sounds website & app), but the BBC has perfected a couple of great "gets you to sleep" radio outlets. The oldest is Radio 4, the BBC'
97.
by PaulRobinson 4mo ago
Apologies for the late reply, 10 days on. I think the human mind is more complicated than regurgitation. I think repeating things we've seen is key to learning and reasoning, but there's a ton of other stuff we don't full und
98.
by PaulRobinson 4mo ago
The physical copy will only get used by one reader (at a time). The ebook is going to be, err, "liberated" more often than not around a dorm? In all seriousness, this is likely a nudge to a preference they have for how they want t
99.
by PaulRobinson 4mo ago
I was saying something like this a few years ago when people were getting first excited about ChatGPT. The gap has narrowed, but not by as much as people think. AI produces output that is very convincing to a non-expert, and (dangerously),
100.
by PaulRobinson 4mo ago
Maybe try and get away from the strip malls. :) I bet there is a river somewhere near you. Explored all of it? What about a hill? Is there a road you've never driven down? It might have some stuff down it you've not seen before. H
101.
by PaulRobinson 5mo ago
If you email a CEO or President, you're not emailing them. You're emailing a team of EAs who are filtering for them. Their fame leads to a lot of problems in the inbox: begging letters, death threats, and irrelevant noise more tha
102.
by PaulRobinson 5mo ago
The "If it's on substack, it's not a real blog, it's just sparkling page bloat" take is a little strained for me. The content is great. The tool gives writers a low-friction mechanism to charge for premium content,
103.
by PaulRobinson 5mo ago
Energy efficiency as a "my language is better than yours" point was not on my bingo card for 2026. JIT as an energy saver intuitively makes sense, and is probably the model most languages need to think about for "shipping to
104.
by PaulRobinson 5mo ago
At least a decade. I remember people could smoke on planes. On some airlines seat backs and bathrooms had cigarette ashtrays in them. Smoking was phased out between 1988 and 2000, with most airlines being smoke free in the mid-1990s. But th
105.
by PaulRobinson 5mo ago
By that reasoning, we should all be vibing away C code. It's the most performant and efficient language out there, there's a ton of code out there the LLMs were trained on, and the complex logic of memory management is abstracted
106.
by PaulRobinson 5mo ago
Right place, right time, right level of curiosity. Back then, I didn't really have a choice: there weren't any other books in my school library, I didn't want to spend lunchtimes in the playground (I was being bullied), I kne
107.
by PaulRobinson 5mo ago
The "Practice your BASIC" book was in my school library, and in the spring of 1989, I was able to take said book to the computer room at lunch breaks and for a donation of 40p to charity (Cafod, it was a Catholic school), I could
108.
by PaulRobinson 5mo ago
The judge didn’t ask him if he wanted to adopt there and then in that precise second and that was that. The judge asked if he was interested. Perhaps the judge asked this knowing that the circumstances showed this was a caring man who had t
109.
by PaulRobinson 5mo ago
Had you considered this was not in the mother’s control, was not her choice, and/or that this was a better outcome for the child and she knew that? He was not left in a bin or dumpster. This is not an ideal way to give up a baby for ad
110.
by PaulRobinson 5mo ago
Given that it sits at the heart of the network stack, kernel and device drivers for every major operating system, is in many, many embedded devices in the World around us, and is responsible for making decent chunk of the global economy kee
111.
by PaulRobinson 5mo ago
Probably. "All" a model is doing is predicting the next words, based on the statistical distribution of words it has seen similar to the ones read/produced so far. We push a model towards a particular set of distributions thr
112.
by PaulRobinson 5mo ago
Yes. Some people might interpret this comment as political commentary, but it’s actually just the reality of what people are saying and doing. There’s a lot of data to suggest that America’s recent policy of reducing its soft power around t
113.
by PaulRobinson 5mo ago
I say this as somebody who has worked vendor side in UK public sector for a number of years. It's policy. It's official Whitehall policy. As a department you can't hire programmers at £100k/year, because that pushes them
114.
by PaulRobinson 5mo ago
A few days back, a book on FreeBSD Driver Development was posted here [0], and everyone assumed a) it's LLM slop and b) a terrible introduction to the topics covered. I scanned a couple of chapters and realised it likely wasn't LL
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by PaulRobinson 6mo ago
You're getting very close to wanting to reinvent the Economist's Big Mac index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index
116.
by PaulRobinson 6mo ago
English is claimed as being influenced heavily by every nation that conquered England, because of course it was: Latin via the Romans; Anglo-Saxon/Gemanic; then Viking; and, then the Latin/Romance influence again via France/N
117.
by PaulRobinson 6mo ago
Every shareholder of an arms company (or holder of an index tracker), is betting on war too. This mechanism is stupid, corrupt and driving extreme behaviour. But betting on war is not new, and I find it abhorrent that people will hand wave
118.
by PaulRobinson 7mo ago
This sort of scheme was banned in the UK - the place where bookmaking was invented, and many of the largest global brands are run from (albeit technically trading from Malta or Gibrlatar) - a few years back. Why? Well... suicides. You'
119.
by PaulRobinson 7mo ago
$93 billion over 13 years doesn't feel like a great deal for a program that has started to align around a single person's ego, when most of the US is struggling to make ends meet. I think Artemis will be cancelled by the end of th
120.
by PaulRobinson 7mo ago
To turn around the famous quote: "Amazon's margin is someone else's opportunity". :) The Amazon flywheel is all about reducing costs to consumers. The moment that stops happening, consumers can get caught by offers elsew

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