billiam

10 ms·

61.
by billiam 3y ago
I miss those old magazines, what a medium for transmitting ideas. I love Tesla but he really had some cra-cra ideas, particularly about Earth and oceans as conductors.
62.
by billiam 3y ago
Unfortunately the CZU Fire did a number on the densest parts of the Skyline to Sea Trail. It is still beautiful but won't look like Jurassic Park in our lifetime.
63.
by billiam 3y ago
>And what do you do for families whose homes were destroyed? Of the nearly 1500 structures destroyed, only a handful of building permits have been issued to rebuild. You can't let them rebuild in place. Your points are spot on (a ne
64.
by billiam 3y ago
Not sure why everyone thinks local language processing, generation and voice synthesis has anything to do with privacy. Apple's business model has supported their relatively pro-privacy approach (along with how bad they are at a lot of
65.
by billiam 3y ago
Is the (moderate) improvement in Dx and writing one check worth the increased costs? In the case of blob storage, aren't most Vercel customers paying Cloudflare already?
66.
by billiam 3y ago
Plug for Lapham Quarterly, a great source of short essays and artifacts of culture and history.
67.
by billiam 3y ago
I think the fact that this remains an unwritten story is shameful for those of us that love sports. The Sacklers needed doctors to legitimize their crimes, and the sports betting industry has coopted governments and also the sports journali
68.
by billiam 3y ago
It appears that they used Webpack, which I found interesting given other alternatives.
69.
by billiam 3y ago
Very much so. Sea level has actually been falling on the coast of Greenland, for example, due to the gravitational effect of ice melting along with crustal rebound. But all that water has to go somewhere, and along low lying coastal areas l
70.
by billiam 3y ago
This one is in the tl;dr HN uninformed expert Hall of Fame. Did you click even one level down? NIST is a standards organization whose usually very careful work is to provide frameworks for people to make products, make business decisions, a
71.
by billiam 3y ago
I have felt this train rumbling down the tracks since GPT-3 hit. He compares peak LLM to what has happened with SEO, but that doesn't really capture it. Gaming the Google algorithm has made the discovery of human-generated content more
72.
by billiam 4y ago
Geologist here (by training). I know HN readers are instant experts on everything, except reading the entire article I guess. All the geoengineering suggestions are amusing, but there is nothing we can do about the (hypothetical) stress bui
73.
by billiam 4y ago
A lot of it is about the unique culture of this city, which has been both gleaming boomtown and garbage-strewn opium den since, oh 1848. It's always been a place where you do your own thing on the street and no one bothers you, which i
74.
by billiam 4y ago
This is nice to see, but it worth pointing out that it is years overdue. Mozilla dragged its feet for years about Tracking Protection and cookies in general, coming up with halfway measures while continuing to serve the needs of advertisers
75.
by billiam 4y ago
Amazing project, one that will seemingly go on for the foreseeable future. This is quite a labor of love, and it shows. It is very interesting to see the bifuracted comments: either but why (these are the people, probably mostly younger who
76.
by billiam 4y ago
>our climate would be back to 2010, which is hardy a significant change. Uh, no. It is quite significant, and a mountain of evidence says that the climate changes from concentrations in the last decade are very significant. You appear to
77.
by billiam 4y ago
Sorry, but this is a reductionist argument. There are any number of things that could disappear without mall visitors knowing about it (NOAA, Earth's magnetic field, etc) but that doesn't mean they are not important for researcher
78.
by billiam 4y ago
The blog post(1) from Stephen Wolfram is epic and has a lot of implications for how science and engineering is going to get done in the future. Tl;dr he seems willing to let ChatGPT shape how people will interact with his computational lang
79.
by billiam 4y ago
It almost certainly won't take the form of a text format. Impersonating a chatbot or a search engine GUI is just the fastest way for OpenAI to accumulate a few hundred million users, to leave the competition for user data and metadata
80.
by billiam 4y ago
All in all, a pretty good digital adaptation. The movie was shear joy to watch.
81.
by billiam 4y ago
"And such an exciting, frightening shift is a "double-edged sword," Chen said, envisioning using AGI to tackle climate change, for example, but also warning that it is a tool that we want to be as "steerable as possible.
82.
by billiam 4y ago
In 100 years we will look back on the widespread criminalization of poverty and immigration along with many other crimes like sex crimes and even murder as something that needs to be treated, not simply punished.
83.
by billiam 4y ago
What you say is true, but the point remains that the limits imposed by the government only work if some depositors (large ones) bear some risk of losing their deposits. The limits may simply be moved up to $2 million or $5 million for certa
84.
by billiam 4y ago
I think it shows how calcified standardized tests have become. We will have to revisit all of them, and change many things about how they work, or they will be increasingly useless.
85.
by billiam 4y ago
This is a good salad of truth, but I think it misses the point. VR is not going to happen for a long time, but this high status product is mostly about demonstrating the possibilities of AR, which is happening all around us with existing te
86.
by billiam 4y ago
I don't think you got the point of this article. Maybe read it again?
87.
by billiam 4y ago
I think the real problem is that we have rigged our the nominally democratic but mostly capitalist system to favor wealth accumulation above all else, and have given most people a crappy deal: provide some incentives (in the tax code and lo
88.
by billiam 4y ago
Tl;dr but it seems like this movement says that English was native before the Norman invasions. Whut. There are no native tongues, and the languages of the Picts, Welsh, Irish, Celts, Romans, Saxons and others shaped what was being spoken o
89.
by billiam 4y ago
I regenerated a ChatGPT response with the same prompt and got some totally made up quotes from the (real) FTC Chair. Just remember, it's a talking machine, not an intelligent one. FTC Warns Companies to Be Careful of Promises Using &qu
90.
by billiam 4y ago
The other issue here in SF and near the coast is that for older, poorly insulated homes and those with high ceilings (mine are 12 feet), the real problem with an air heat pump is how slow it is to heat the volume. Unless you want to pay to

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