alan-crowe

11 ms·

61.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
I bought a microscope from a second hand shop. I guess it was obsolete medical equipment (it didn't have a built in light, you had to fiddle with a mirror, so make that very obsolete). I never got the hang of the higher magnifications,
62.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
Try this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txvezHBHDSw
63.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
One approach is to turn up the demand for intellectual rigor until it hurts. For example, I don't want to become a maths crank, so I am learning about computer proof checkers, Lean, ACL2, Coq, those things. But they are painful to use,
64.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
Perhaps continuing the riff that Steven Strogatz started with his book: The Joy of x. https://www.stevenstrogatz.com/books/the-joy-of-x
65.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
Paul Graham wrote about this in his book ANSI Common Lisp, in the second footnote to page 141, right at the end of Chapter Eight. Turning to the Notes section, page 401 In 1989, a program like Henley was used to simulate netnews postings by
66.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
How can archeology tell you about swimming? Skip the article and go to its source https://phys.org/news/2018-12-surfer-ear-ancient-pearl-diver... There is a kind of bone spur that you get in your ear if you swim a lot
67.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
"In his 1852–3 novel Bleak House, Charles Dickens popularised the term telescopic philanthropy." source: https://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Telescopic_philanthropy Middlemarch started serial publication in 1871.
68.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
To my ears "Courage to tackle the unpleasant" has the ring of bounds known ahead of time. Chore X will be unpleasant. How unpleasant? Between 4 Ughs and 7 Ughs. Maybe 8 Ughs. So I know why I'm procrastinating, I don't wa
69.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
I was curious about "3-lisp". It seems to be this http://www.cofault.com/2022/08/3-lisp-infinite-tower-of-meta... Discussed three months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32614795
70.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
Trying to be exact about "mostly copying", I want to contrast Large Language Models (LLM) with Alpha Go learning to play super human Go through self play. When Alpha Go adds one of its own self-vs-self games to its training data
71.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
I've just watched a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYQbGHgaWbM that talks about "original" Stratego, a game created in 1947 by Jacques Johan Mogendorff. It might be nostalgic for you. Searching to find
72.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
You also need to watch out for the geopolitical issues before the war starts. Imagine that country A and country B are rivals, but each has its own internally divided politics with Fighters versus Peace-niks. In country A the Fighters bully
73.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
I attempted to create a general purpose model for the exact version of the "what comes next problem." It enumerated primitive recursive functions, trying them out as it went. The limitation to primitive recursive functions was con
74.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
The article proposes various ways to mitigate the problem of Learning to Program Getting Harder. One approach is "Interactive tutorials that run code in a browser,..." I've seen this approach implemented for teaching logic an
75.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
Every-one needs to be a hero in their own head. So you are fairly safe. You can only fall victim to heroic terrorist attacks. But not as safe as that sounds. It is about being a hero according to the attackers head cannon, not your head can
76.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
> “If RMS hits on you, just say ‘I’m a vi user’ even if it’s not true.” A normal person probably doesn't see the double-indirection and ambiguity in this. The first indirection lies in using 'I'm a vi user' as a proxy
77.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
The reactive programming idea reminded me of Ken Tilton and "Cells", which exploits the flexibility of CLOS (the Common Lisp Object System) to create a reactive programming language on top of Common Lisp. https://github
78.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
1907? Compare that to Ronald Fisher going to Rothamsted Experimental Station in 1919 and spending the next 14 years pioneering Biostatistics. Notice too that he is working on plants. There are no ethical concerns about doing randomized cont
79.
by alan-crowe 5y ago
We could use the unexpectedly high temperatures as a heat source for geothermal energy. Make money selling the energy for ten, twenty years,... until the temperatures fall and the rock becomes rigid. Then drill another kilometer, funded fro
80.
by alan-crowe 5y ago
There is not just tickling, there is also bruxing and boggling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S8PX5UDrk0
81.
by alan-crowe 5y ago
The Lake Peigneur Drilling Accident is a tale of water getting into a salt mine from the lake above, due to drilling for oil in the wrong place. As the water dissolved the salt, the hole grew bigger and bigger, exponentially. The lake empti
82.
by alan-crowe 5y ago
I find it interesting that saying "a black spin is needed to push the ratio back towards 50/50" feels like a sensible thing to say. What role do context and framing play? Consider the first one hundred spins breaking 60 red,
83.
by alan-crowe 5y ago
I like that. I started playing by twiddling P(A). Since probabilities add to one, there are only three degrees of freedom. I got that the other two degrees, P(B|A) and P(B| not A) didn't move, why would they? By contrast P(A|B) and P(A
84.
by alan-crowe 5y ago
The article makes much of the pairing of antibiotic production genes and antibiotic resistance genes. They often occur on a single plasmid and are passed around together. But there must be different facets to antibiotic resistance genes, be
85.
by alan-crowe 5y ago
Consider the two dimensional curve, parameterised by t x = a * sqrt(t) + r * cos(t^2) y = b * sqrt(t) + r * sin(t^2) If you are monitoring long term progress towards (100a, 100b) you are disappointed to see that progress is slowing. And yet
86.
by alan-crowe 5y ago
We like to think that the goal of AI research is actual intelligence. But humans are in the loop. Us humans judge projects, so success is a matter of the computer persuading humans that it is intelligent. We could end up in the situation th
87.
by alan-crowe 5y ago
I couldn't see the counter-weight. A counter-weight matched to the sole user (able-bodied take the stairs) would make a huge difference to the muscular effort involved in getting up and down. This seems to be about halving the strength
88.
by alan-crowe 5y ago
The article portrays a simple dichotomy: mental versus physical. But there is something interesting going on with psycho-social explanations. Given the epistemological difficulties one rather expects extended fights between the proponents o
89.
by alan-crowe 5y ago
I think that some places will go back to Victorian style shops. They had many shop assistants, who were needed because the goods were behind the counter, instead of being on open shelves. Customers had to ask at the counter; no shop-lifting
90.
by alan-crowe 5y ago
The article fills in a little of the background to the massacres starting in October 1965. A little earlier, in mid-1965, "an attempted coup by leftwing army officers and, secretly, by agents of the PKI, in which seven generals were mu

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