billiam

12 ms·

91.
by billiam 4y ago
His embrace of uniformitarianism was based on traveling across South America, a fantastic place to observe it. The catastrophists that Lyell was fighting made most of their observations in Europe and Scandanavia, where there was lots of evi
92.
by billiam 4y ago
In fact there's a potent new theory(1) that human consciousness (and probably all mammalian "consciousness") is just a memory system involving some form of lossy compression. Your sense of awareness happens ~20-50 ms after th
93.
by billiam 4y ago
Powerful for what? To use Chiang's analogy, do you think that an LLM trained on Web content will actually derive the rules of arithmetic, physics, etc. I think it is more likely that in decade or more a majority of Internet content wil
94.
by billiam 4y ago
Wow, I guess PT Barnum was right about never losing money on underestimating the intelligence of people but this really is a new low. If TikTok is selling a video snippet app like smallpox infected blankets to Native Americans then I guess
95.
by billiam 4y ago
Au contraire, it's the most successful of products, an innovation that comes from a purported flaw. Due to distraction while it was made its handle is so short it can only be wielded by one hand, which is all Thor needs to deliver his
96.
by billiam 4y ago
Wonder how the rabbi feels about the mites and spiders that we all end up swallowing on a regular basis. What an absurd reductive view of life.
97.
by billiam 4y ago
Not from a record shop, a real one anyway. Maybe a flea market, or someone's house. Those crates really tie the room together :)
98.
by billiam 4y ago
Dan, isn't it pretty clear? GPT-3 is not becoming more human. You're becoming more of a robot. The very nature of therapy is that a real, imperfect, unpredictable person is listening. GPT-3 doesn't want to solve your problems
99.
by billiam 4y ago
Not a comparable situation. At all.
100.
by billiam 4y ago
Apple has always had conflicts between its business interests and the "bicycle for your life" ethos. We just used to not notice because they were bringing us such great shiny new things on a regular basis. It's been a long ti
101.
by billiam 4y ago
sounds like somebody wag tweaked the entry to make it come out as the golden ratio.
102.
by billiam 4y ago
Native New Yorker here. Out of towners are obsessed with the BEST slice, but the true measure of NYC's 45 degree greatness is the decent quality following a Poisson distribution. My tip: just travel to any random spot in the five borou
103.
by billiam 4y ago
Have any nerdy Congresspeople wanted to solve this ridiculous inefficiency in recent years. Seems like a natural "the Europeans kick our ass at forecasting" message would go over well and potentially negate the lobbying from Weath
104.
by billiam 4y ago
This really brings back the memories. So many great ideas executed to 90%, all in a wacky brightly colored package. I was one of the leaders at Palm in 2000 and we did a pretty deep dive on partnering with Yang while looking at the device.
105.
by billiam 4y ago
A good introduction but there has been much work since this came out. See these more recent books by an historian that looks at things through the lens of two prominent North American nations: https://www.goodreads.com/book&
106.
by billiam 4y ago
It may be clearer to those of you who are smarter than me, but I guess I've only recently begun to appreciate what these experiments show--that AI graphical art, literature, music and the like will not succeed in lowering the barriers
107.
by billiam 4y ago
This is complete idiocy. Celebrities and billionaires don't get special speech rights. There are very good reasons all aircraft are tracked publicly. If Elmo's plane ever goes down or gets hijacked he might appreciate why. Accordi
108.
by billiam 4y ago
No, not as always. The laser confinement mechanism works, it has been shown, lasers that are more than 20 times as efficient as these NID lasers are now available, so the improvement needed to scale and "commercialize it," whateve
109.
by billiam 4y ago
>From an instution standpoint there are some bad apples but.... He makes it easy to tell where he is coming from by using the straw man for all apologists for system failure, those pesky few bad apples. Fortunately he also states clearly
110.
by billiam 4y ago
It never ceases to amaze me how experts at something can't resist trying to be experts at everything. His examples from political science are just so off, but I have to concentrate on his example of Mearsheimer. Far from being one step
111.
by billiam 4y ago
The best part of his engrossing Twitter thread is that he inserts a multitweet interstitial "ad" for his passion project promoting reforestation right in the middle of his spiel.
112.
by billiam 4y ago
Um, are you aware that this quote was uttered to justify the prosecution of a man for protesting the draft in WWI? And that is legal today to shout it as loudly as you want?
113.
by billiam 4y ago
This is a truly horrible trend. A huge failure of one of few the things almost all agree government is for. Where I live in California I have decided that besides Best Foods mayo and a couple of items like corn syrup for pecan pie once a y
114.
by billiam 4y ago
Appalling tone of conversation. Comparing a multibillion dollar high tech company's workplace safety procedures to street violence in poor parts of the US or in mechanized agriculture is insulting. SpaceX has tried to ignore this trage
115.
by billiam 4y ago
Pass it anyway. Happy to see them refuse to participate.
116.
by billiam 4y ago
Not an expert but I believe the problem with molten salt cooling for reactor designs is that nuclear reactors are supposed to just run for decades without replacing major parts that are really really radioactive. We just can't make par
117.
by billiam 4y ago
The ADPPA seems like a great example of regulatory capture and gridlock of the federal government by rich corporations and individuals and how federalism (state's rights) is a crucial and increasingly fragile element in holding our eco
118.
by billiam 4y ago
I would read literally anything he writes about chemistry.
119.
by billiam 4y ago
The Mormons are fascinating for many reasons and highly skilled at building a certain kind of American community. One of the things they are best at is spinning their clean scrubbed version of history, which as with many groups has as many
120.
by billiam 4y ago
A sand battery prototype in Finland is recently in the news. Has a lot of appealing features for local energy systems. https://interestingengineering.com/worlds-first-sand-battery

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