fasterik

27 ms·

361.
by fasterik 3y ago
Our goal should be to have a realistic picture of the world, not one that is negatively or positively biased. Due to the incentives of news and social media, coverage is overwhelmingly negative. If your goal is objectivity, it's ration
362.
by fasterik 3y ago
There are a few reasons. You could say that putting humans on Mars has intrinsic value. In other words, "because it's cool". The other main argument for putting humans on Mars is that the grand projects of humanity push our t
363.
by fasterik 3y ago
You might be thinking of this: https://www.susanrigetti.com/physics
364.
by fasterik 3y ago
I'm a fellow programmer who has been self-learning physics for the past few months. My opinion is that a programming background is largely irrelevant to the "learning physics" part. It might help depending on what you want to
365.
by fasterik 3y ago
If I understand correctly, they're using an LLM to write a series of computer programs exploring a large solution space and feeding the output of those programs into a separate validation program written by a human. To take the calcula
366.
by fasterik 3y ago
Even Nature has clickbait titles now. I agree with the quote. The ability of AI to augment human capabilities has way more potential than the more speculative ideas about artificial general intelligence. This is why I'm not very sympat
367.
by fasterik 3y ago
You can basically go in two directions with this. Invest the resources necessary to use the open source and self hosted tools, or settle for the convenience of proprietary services and be mindful about what you put in them. I use Dropbox, b
368.
by fasterik 3y ago
Too often the claims of unethical behavior are knee-jerk, baseless, and speculative. In the example the author cites, Dropbox only sends data to OpenAI when the user explicitly tells the app to engage an AI-related feature, for example to s
369.
by fasterik 3y ago
For that to be true you'd have to be reading text at 2000 WPM and retaining as much information as you would from watching a video at 200 WPM. That would imply reading the average New Yorker article (~6000 words) in 3 minutes. Count me
370.
by fasterik 3y ago
There are many cases where a user-provided string is passed to the string API. Generally the programmer should handle empty strings as a special case, but when they don't the API needs to return something .
371.
by fasterik 3y ago
Yeah, I think the convention should be to return the smallest valid index such that the predicate is satisfied, or an error value if the predicate isn't satisfied. As you point out, it's the same as when a non-empty string appears
372.
by fasterik 3y ago
The subset relation is defined as "X is a subset of Y if for all x in X, x is in Y". The negation of this is "X is not a subset of Y if there exists some x in X, such that x is not in Y". We can see from this that the em
373.
by fasterik 3y ago
10x faster is a huge exaggeration. Average speaking speed is 150 WPM, while average reading speed is 300 WPM. If you watch/listen at 1.5-2x speed, which many people do these days, we're only talking ~10-20% slower on average. I wo
374.
by fasterik 3y ago
Most claims about whether something is "healthy" or "unhealthy" rely on single studies with small sample/effect sizes. We know that many studies fail to replicate, and in the absence of preregistration there are res
375.
by fasterik 3y ago
Thank you for pointing this out. Unfortunately, there are many problems interacting here. There is an incentive in science journalism to write the most attention-grabbing headline, regardless of how well it summarizes the research. Of the p
376.
by fasterik 3y ago
Hard disagree with your hard disagree. Any skill benefits from dedicating yourself to it full time. Yes, there are talented amateurs, but they're on the tail of the distribution. There is a selection bias because you don't tend to
377.
by fasterik 3y ago
On the one hand, I agree there was a different vibe on the internet 20-30 years ago. It's what I grew up with and I'm nostalgic for that period. On the other hand, I feel like nostalgia blinds us to the fact that tech has always h
378.
by fasterik 3y ago
I can't really imagine 80% error handling for the whole codebase unless literally all of your functions look like this: int foo(Data *data) { int error = do_some_io_request(data); if (error) log_error(error, "Request f
379.
by fasterik 3y ago
I think the wastefulness comes from people imposing a top-down structure on the code before they have a working system. If you first write stupid simple code that solves the problem, then identify areas that need to be faster, you won'
380.
by fasterik 3y ago
Not only that, but often our intuitions about what is "fast" are wrong if we are basing them on theoretical big-O concerns rather than the specifics of modern hardware. One example that's ubiquitous is using a hash table with
381.
by fasterik 3y ago
Explicit error handling is a design choice, not a language defect. If you don't like it, you don't have to use the language. Many people choose to use explicit error handling even in languages that support exceptions. Knowing that
382.
by fasterik 3y ago
EPUB works fine for documents that mostly consist of easily reflowable text. For documents with lots of equations, diagrams, tables/charts, footnotes, etc. I would much rather have a PDF.
383.
by fasterik 3y ago
Capitalism isn't a moral agent with interests. It's an activity that humans participate in. Humans and non-human animals are what we should really care about. Capitalism produces benefits for everybody, and it also produces harmfu
384.
by fasterik 3y ago
Article is behind a paywall, so apologies for commenting on the title alone. Even if self-checkout as it is implemented today doesn't work [1], that's not a reason to declare it a failed experiment. It's a reason to improve t
385.
by fasterik 3y ago
Maybe it will live on with the advent of fantasy consoles/computers. PICO-8 and similar systems provide the same kind of time and space limitations as the old systems, which still encourages a certain amount of creativity and ingenuity
386.
by fasterik 3y ago
Before the 20th century, newspapers were explicitly partisan and were basically free to publish whatever suited their agenda. It is only in the 20th century that we see a more objective journalism emerge with the ideas of journalistic ethic
387.
by fasterik 3y ago
Japan gives an allowance [1] to families with children under a certain age, in addition to other tax incentives, parental leave policies, and subsidized child care. Similar policies exist in many countries in Europe. [1] https://
388.
by fasterik 3y ago
Probably not. Birth rate depends on a lot of variables, including how wealthy a society is. If birth rates dropped to a level that was making us poorer, people would start reproducing more to compensate. Also, wealthy societies can manage t
389.
by fasterik 3y ago
This is bad epistemology. I can't possibly verify all of the facts of physics, chemistry, biology, history, economics, medicine, law, politics, etc. through my own senses and through people that I know personally. It would be impossibl
390.
by fasterik 3y ago
I disagree. First, we need to separate anger and cynicism. Anger is an emotional response which is sometimes useful for motivating action, but I think the vast majority of anger in the world is unjustified and causes unnecessary suffering.

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