bloak

14 ms·

151.
by bloak 2y ago
I rather get the impression that the market doesn't always work like economists would like it to work. But do we really need competing banks just for the basic stuff like processing payments? It seems plausible that it's a good id
152.
by bloak 2y ago
Of course, another way of making this a more efficient encoding would be to take account of the fact that primes tend to be odd: if p is an odd prime then the next prime is one of the (p - 1)/2 values p + 2, p + 4, ..., 2p - 1.
153.
by bloak 2y ago
In case anyone else was wondering, the name Null seems to come from Ulster; the "ul" in "Null" seems to come from the "Ul" in "Ulster": https://www.houseofnames.com/uk/null-family
154.
by bloak 2y ago
The Python code seems to be a kind of arithmetic decoder with the assumption that each prime is less than twice the previous prime. That seems to be a special case of Bertrand's Postulate, but probably there's a lower bound one co
155.
by bloak 2y ago
In an article like this I would have liked to see some mention of TAI ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time ) as one of the alternatives to UTC. Unfortunately there are several different universal tim
156.
by bloak 2y ago
> She'd say weird country sayings I learned from my own Dad, like 'kneehigh to a cricket.' It's also fun when it happens in the other direction: child invents a totally new word, parents think it's funny and copy
157.
by bloak 2y ago
Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvine_UFO ) has a better overview, of course, but this article in The Guardian has a better picture at least.
158.
by bloak 2y ago
Yes, but the LLM is roughly equivalent to lossy compression of the corpus it is trained on so why wouldn't you preserve that actual corpus so that it can be used to train some better LLM, or something better than an LLM, in the future?
159.
by bloak 2y ago
It was normal in Britain and the USA in the early 20th century, and perhaps it still is normal for academics. For example, J. R. R. Tolkien.
160.
by bloak 2y ago
I believe so: To comply with the regulations governing cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive you must: [...] Allow users to access your service even if they refuse to allow the use of certain cookies https://gdpr.eu&#
161.
by bloak 2y ago
Illegal cookie notice!
162.
by bloak 2y ago
U+0020 is perhaps the weirdest character in Unicode. Most of the time it's used to separate words, which is arguably a kind of mark-up. But sometimes it's used for other kinds of formatting. Also, if you were to use explicit mark-
163.
by bloak 2y ago
Indeed, the terms "biologically male" and "biologically female" have been described by activists who are not at all aligned with Trump as "trans-phobic" and a "TERF dogwhistle" so it's strange to
164.
by bloak 2y ago
I found some books which are available from dozens of online bookshops but which are not in this visualisation. Perhaps they're not yet in any library that feeds into worldcat.org, though some of them were about five years old.
165.
by bloak 2y ago
In the Soviet Union most doctors were women. Random citation: "In 1917, 17 percent of doctors were women, yet by 1940 61 percent were women. From the 1950s the figure fluctuated at around 65–70 percent (Ryan, 1989: 38)."
166.
by bloak 2y ago
That doesn't really make sense to me. Just because international law allows something doesn't mean it's not illegal according to German or other national laws. In this case infrastructure located in international waters and o
167.
by bloak 2y ago
In England, I thought it was only the "crossed out" intersections that you shouldn't enter unless the exit is clear. Rule 174 here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/using-the-road-...
168.
by bloak 2y ago
I've sometimes wondered what the exact rule is with red lights. Presumably you're allowed to continue moving forwards if the front of your vehicle passed the stop line before the light turned red. But if you stopped with the stop
169.
by bloak 2y ago
> "a personal accident" on the track, which is a euphemism for somebody jumping in front of a train Removing a body from the track shouldn't take long, of course. The problem is if you need to do detailed forensics because
170.
by bloak 2y ago
A translation into modern French might be an interesting addition.
171.
by bloak 2y ago
No. The "largest prime" announcements generally refer to a Mersenne prime, which is one that is one less than a power of two. There is a faster primality test for such numbers.
172.
by bloak 2y ago
Yes. And some Quakers were offended by all this unnecessary politeness and continued to use "thou" for a couple of centuries. So English and French used plural "you" for politeness, and so did German at one point, but mo
173.
Kate Bush joins campaign against AI using artists' work without permission(theguardian.com)
1 points by bloak 2y ago|0 comments
174.
by bloak 2y ago
And then you don't need to invent a new version of JSON: you just preprocess the file/string with the C preprocessor? (I don't like the C preprocessor but in some situations it's the easiest solution.)
175.
by bloak 2y ago
I was amused to see "The Outsider" and "The Stranger" as two books by Albert Camus, though "The Outsider" seems to link to novels by Colin Wilson and Stephen King. "L'Étranger" is a good book and
176.
by bloak 2y ago
The Online Safety Act 2021 ( https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2021A00076/latest/text ) says: (1) For the purposes of this Act, social media service means: (a) an electronic service that satisfies the following cond
177.
by bloak 2y ago
My experience of ancient CRT devices is that the display gets gradually dimmer. I once had a TV that was only really usable after dark -- but that's the only time I wanted to use it anyway -- and a huge Sun monitor that was only just a
178.
by bloak 2y ago
Yes, though O’Brien is Ó Briain in Irish, according to Wikipedia. I think the apostrophe in Irish names was added by English speakers, perhaps by analogy with "o'clock", perhaps to avoid writing something that would look like
179.
by bloak 2y ago
In order to avoid the problem, Germany would probably not allow Netanyahu to visit the country in the first place. If I remember correctly, a former president of the USA cancelled a visit to Switzerland because they were wanted for war crim
180.
by bloak 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access (I assume)

More ›