chimprich

7 ms·

31.
by chimprich 9mo ago
The empirical evidence from the US does not bear that out. Compare murder rates between the US and any peer country with more gun control.
32.
by chimprich 9mo ago
I think we can fairly easily dismiss Cummings' views on anything. He was of the opinion that the best thing for the UK economy was Brexit, and that the the best team to carry out that out was to be headed by Boris Johnson. He changed h
33.
by chimprich 9mo ago
A lot of these attacks on the UK regarding free speech are coming from the American Right, an obsession which I can't quite understand the motive for. Notably, stories on HN about the very severe repression on civil liberties in the US
34.
by chimprich 9mo ago
That's a stupid perspective. That's presumably Russia's self-reported numbers, not the actual numbers of people who were detained for speech Putin's regime didn't like. For example, in 2023, Alexei Navalny was sente
35.
by chimprich 10mo ago
> You effortlessly wield clever programming techniques today that would've baffled your younger self. (If not, then I'm afraid you stopped evolving as a programmer long ago.) I think a better assessment of how well you've
36.
by chimprich 10mo ago
John McCarthy coined the term "Artificial Intelligence" in the 1950s. I doubt he was trying to be cool. The whole field of research involved in getting computers to do intelligent things has been referred to as AI for many decades
37.
by chimprich 10mo ago
StackOverflow is moribund pile of junk. They've never managed to understand that software development is a highly fluid, constantly evolving space. Instead of embracing this, they've been trying to build a static encyclopaedia. Vo
38.
by chimprich 10mo ago
I felt like that when I started using Emacs, about 25 years ago. It turned out to be worth it, though. Emacs has its own tutorial (Help -> tutorial from the menus), which is a pretty good introduction. Learning to get help from Emacs its
39.
by chimprich 11mo ago
I don't agree that LLMs can't reason reliably. If you give them a simple reasoning question, they can generally make a decent attempt at coming up with a solution. Complete howlers are rare from cutting-edge models. (If you disagr
40.
by chimprich 1y ago
> Our lives also tend to be short Our lives in the developed world tend to be limited by biology; an average of about 80 years in many countries. Pigs get slaughtered at about 6 months, well before the lifespan they could potentially liv
41.
by chimprich 1y ago
Like the US's bad habit of banning British musicians for the content of their songs? https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/30/uk/bob-vylan-uk-band-glas...
42.
by chimprich 1y ago
> Compare that with protection from predators, medical care, vaccination, shelter, reliable food and clean water, and stress free lives until a quick and fast death. Comparing farmed animals to wild animals is not really the point. A bet
43.
by chimprich 1y ago
RFK is a crackpot, and just because he's got someone to write it to sound plausible, it doesn't mean it is plausible. It's incredibly irresponsible to promote his pet theories over scientific orthodoxy. Here's a commenta
44.
by chimprich 1y ago
I tend to use some of these "modern" tools if they are a drop-in replacement for existing tools. E.g. I have ls set up aliased to eza as part of my custom set of configuration scripts. eza pretty much works as ls in most scenarios
45.
by chimprich 1y ago
> To turn that around and get a deal that Biden couldn't get done, Biden had different pressures. E.g. I suspect that he judged that the knife-edge election he was facing didn't allow him enough leeway to put more pressure on I
46.
by chimprich 1y ago
> I congratulate you on an accurate diagnosis, I think all three are true. Hah, fair enough. Thanks for getting the Culture back on the front page of HN :) > I don't remember the details of Excession very well as I didn't ac
47.
by chimprich 1y ago
> The drudgery and boredom of living in a "perfect" world is a constant theme throughout the stories. You can of course interpret the novels however you like, but that absolutely wasn't Banks' intention when he wrote
48.
by chimprich 1y ago
I'm a big Culture fan, and I don't know what to make of this article. Many of the points seem to be hallucinated. Either the author has a poor memory and an active imagination or there has been some poor-quality LLM input. Example
49.
by chimprich 1y ago
There's plenty of evidence that vaccines reduced transmission, especially in the earlier variants. The idea that vaccines didn't reduce severe illness is laughable. Multiple robust tudies across many nations and institutions have
50.
by chimprich 1y ago
What do you mean "prevent"? If you mean vaccines didn't completely prevent transmission, then yes. If you mean vaccines didn't prevent a proportion of transmission, then no. The vaccines did significantly reduce transmis
51.
by chimprich 1y ago
> Is Omicron equally as deadly as Delta? No. It depends how you look at it. Omicron had a lower CFR, but higher transmissibility, so arguably worse. There is no inherent selection pressure on viruses to mutate towards being less aggressi
52.
by chimprich 1y ago
> Not really, the virus mutating into less aggressive strains did. This didn't happen. There was no selection pressure on the virus to mutate to a "less aggressive" form. To think there was is to fundamentally misunderstan
53.
by chimprich 1y ago
Like an inner conversation? That seems a lot like how I think when I consider a challenging problem.
54.
by chimprich 1y ago
Thank you! Currently it is just a bit of pattern matching and polymorphism that pulls in various libraries according to entity type. If it picks up any interest I'll put some thought into how could be a bit more elegant / modular.
55.
by chimprich 1y ago
From the article: "70% of the soft plastic that reached a known destination was burnt, not recycled". That doesn't seem too bad. That means 30% got recycled, which is more than I expected given the general cynicism around pla
56.
by chimprich 1y ago
A small, cute CLI app that gives overviews about files and other entities. I've called it `what`. It's inspired by being able to right-click on stuff in a GUI file manager to get an overview about what it is. https://gi
57.
by chimprich 1y ago
> This could probably slip up a human at first too [...] > breaks the illusion that there's real human-like logical reasoning happening This does seem like the sort of error a human might make. Isn't the problem here that th
58.
by chimprich 2y ago
Ukraine hasn't postponed elections indefinitely. They have postponed them until they are no longer at war. Other countries have effectively gone from moderately democratic elections to sham elections. Turkey is one major country that i
59.
by chimprich 2y ago
> They will now build another factory in the us to be able to avoid tariffs and keep selling their goods at competitive prices They won't be competitive prices though; they'll have to charge more because of the capital costs in
60.
by chimprich 2y ago
I agree that sometimes organisations conspire against people. My point was, in case it wasn't apparent, the irony that somenameforme was talking about how LLMs were of little use because they hallucinate, whilst apparently hallucinatin

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