Sharlin

131 ms·

1. 2431.▲
   by Sharlin 3y ago

   Definitely engineering. It’s not entirely wrong to say that the two reasons it took us until 2022 to make a ChatGPT are 1) the computing power needed and 2) the size of the training corpus needed. The same goes for other generative AI – it
2. 2432.▲
   by Sharlin 3y ago

   As far as I know, our stellar neighborhood is not anomalously rich in heavy elements compared to your standard issue cubic parsec of space. The Sun is a perfectly ordinary Population III star with the expected metallicity.
3. 2433.▲
   by Sharlin 3y ago

   If you really think it leaked someone else’s prompts rather than hallucinating them, it just passed a sort of Turing test on your part.
4. 2434.▲
   by Sharlin 3y ago

   > "Insufficient data for meaningful answer" Nice reference, by the way.
5. 2435.▲
   by Sharlin 3y ago

   You are quite correct otherwise, but just about everything on Earth is an ecosystem. The word does not just refer to forests and meadows and grassland. Cities are surprisingly rich and complex ecosystems in fact. But they could be even
6. 2436.▲
   by Sharlin 3y ago

   This is, however, not an issue in the large majority of the civilized world where the police typically don’t even have helicopters, never mind having the problem of suspects hiding under urban trees!!
7. 2437.▲
   by Sharlin 3y ago

   Our solar system is not made of material created by any particular supernova, but of interstellar medium enriched by any number of events that created and dispersed heavy elements over the eons. But the shockwave of a then-nearby supernova
8. 2438.▲
   by Sharlin 3y ago

   This is not just telling someone there's a winning move. It's telling them that X is a winning move and they just have to verify that X is indeed one. Many, many problems are such that it's difficult to find a solution but ea
9. 2439.▲
   by Sharlin 3y ago

   Magnetic force scales as 1/r^3, not 1/r^2 like gravity. That's why your standard issue fridge magnet measurably attracts stuff only from a very close distance, but when it does, it easily counters the gravitational attraction
10. 2440.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    Well, that's one of the reasons demonstrating the Meissner effect is considered a better evidence of superconductivity. Of course any physical experiment always has a noise floor and a finite error. You can't exactly ever measur
11. 2441.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    Nope. Combinations are subsets: you either include or exclude each element. So 2^ n . With permutations, you have n options for the first element, ( n -1) options for the second, and so on. Thus n ! possibilities total.
12. 2442.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    A permutation is any of the possible ways to turn a set into an ordered list . For example, the set {1,2,3} has the following permutations: [1,2,3], [1,3,2], [2,1,3], [2,3,1], [3,1,2], [3,2,1]. A set of n elements has n ! ( n factorial
13. 2443.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    Combinations, not permutations. This seems to be a somewhat common misuse of terminology – maybe because "permutations" sounds cooler and more mathy?
14. 2444.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    Superconducting semiconductors? I doubt such a thing is possible.
15. 2445.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    Except the energy is stored in the magnetic field. Superconductivity or not, you don't carry tesla-scale electromagnets around without becoming a target for high-velocity metallic projectiles and wreaking havoc with every electronic de
16. 2446.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    Yeah, > Experiments have demonstrated that currents in superconducting coils can persist for years without any measurable degradation. Experimental evidence points to a lifetime of at least 100,000 years. Theoretical estimates for the li
17. 2447.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    Java is, in fact, roughly as functional as Rust is! * Lambdas/closures: Java has had them since day one, albeit with horrible syntax. Nice syntax since Java 8, almost ten years ago (indeed predating Rust 1.0!). Some functional patterns
18. 2448.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    Among all other variables affecting the market share of Windows, the effect of the inscrutability of the Win32 API is almost certainly negligible. Especially given that as far as I know, their APIs designed in the past 20 years haven't
19. 2449.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    But obviously you can't exactly carry multi-Tesla electromagnets around. So no car batteries, much less phone batteries. Large energy storage facilities for grid power regulation, possibly.
20. 2450.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    Except if MS gets a share of the profits… which it did in many cases, being the publisher. They had no competitors, there weren't any concerns about market share or reputation!
21. 2451.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    Would be interesting if the rule were dropped given that in some fields like particle physics a paper may have dozens of authors…
22. 2452.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    It's like NP problems. It's much harder to find a solution than to check if a candidate solution is valid.
23. 2453.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    The left-hand title bar button in Windows 3.x was not a close button, mind, it opened the title bar dropdown menu (which was changed to a right-click context menu in Windows 95).
24. 2454.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    Except that DNA and languages are only loosely coupled, and wrong conclusions have historically been drawn due to assumptions they're more tightly correlated than they actually are.
25. 2455.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    A nice counter-example is Finnish (and other Finno-Ugric languages) – back in the early 1900s it was argued that Finns as an ethnicity must have originated from the Urals because the language seemed to have its roots there. (Notably in the
26. 2456.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    Sure. You can Fourier transform a vector, drop some number of the least contributing terms (frequencies) and store only the remaining coefficients. Which is essentially the basic idea behind MP3 and JPEG compression. You're trading spa
27. 2457.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    I think the assumption is more that us Europeans can afford such decadent , livable cities because we don’t need to spend as much money on defense (?!) So car-oriented hellscapes are somehow the default, "normal" situation, becau
28. 2458.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    You realize there’s an incredibly obvious selection bias in your sample?
29. 2459.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    Games have redrawn everything on every frame for decades, certainly since GPUs became a thing. Memory speed is definitely not a concern. 2D windowing systems used to only redraw "dirty rectangles" but that changed when they moved
30. 2460.▲
    by Sharlin 3y ago

    Uh, typically these days it’s only legal to dump bilge water or toilet waste at a port, into a receptable connected to the normal blackwater system.