fwlr

57 ms·

571.
by fwlr 4y ago
My initial thought that sparked this comment was indeed “it should be ‘crime per hacker news commenter’ not ‘crime per square mile’”, and then I tried to make it more useful.
572.
by fwlr 4y ago
Crime isn’t equally distributed; criminality isn’t equally distributed; sensitivity to crime isn’t equally distributed; tolerance of criminality isn’t equally distributed. A quick informal sketch of why the “SF is hell / no it isn’t,
573.
by fwlr 4y ago
I think it was foolish for us to have been making and believing each others’ predictions about where automation will happen. In retrospect, the core question was “how automatable is this activity”, and we were instead answering the question
574.
by fwlr 4y ago
This sentiment reminds me of Burdens. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/ “[on the topic of a patient with moderate brain damage] back in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, in a nice
575.
by fwlr 4y ago
There isn’t really a reverse EnChroma. The mechanism of color perception is you have three different chemicals in your eye and each of those chemicals reacts most strongly with different wavelengths of light. This is a chart of those three
576.
by fwlr 4y ago
Super rough rule of thumb: 98% of colorblindness issues are “red and green do not contrast”, 2% are “green and blue do not contrast”. Orange and blue will contrast for pretty much everyone, that’s the safe and easy to remember bet. For cr
577.
by fwlr 4y ago
We’ve had, what, over two years of “basically free” image generation? (Dall-E 1 was Jan 21.) All the major players (OpenAI, Microsoft, Stability, Midjourney) offer free image generation and you only pay for large amounts. There is a ton of
578.
by fwlr 4y ago
Yeah, like I said it’s really hard to find representative data on grid stability. Local power outages will definitely overestimate grid instability by a lot, but it’s not entirely unrelated, it should capture ~most of grid stability issues
579.
by fwlr 4y ago
tl;dr Connecting new power generation to the electricity grid is a queue-based permit system that is stupid and slow, but simple and supremely stable. There is a decent chunk of renewable power “in the queue” but speeding up the connection
580.
by fwlr 4y ago
0Hz is definitionally the lower limit of information-carrying frequencies (presumably this is not actually capable of detecting anything between zero and 1Hz - not that there’s much of interest in being broadcast in the micro-, nano-, or
581.
by fwlr 4y ago
First principle analysis strongly suggests Tesla is definitely working on minivan/peoplemovers and cargo vans. In terms of broad clusters of vehicle types, you have: Personal vehicles: sports cars, small sedans, large sedans, and SUVs.
582.
by fwlr 4y ago
No Uber or taxi driver is so optimized that “2 minutes vs 1 hour“ every 40 trips is a reasonable concern.
583.
by fwlr 4y ago
It is certainly a departure from the previous master plans, which were informal blog posts by Elon describing Tesla’s future plans. Maybe this is the formal groundwork for another such informal blog post, and it just happens to share the sa
584.
by fwlr 4y ago
Overkill for the specific project at hand, as others have mentioned, but it does serve as a proof of execution for what is essentially “over the air retrofits to remotely upgrade pre-existing readouts to be digitally consumable”. A well-pla
585.
by fwlr 4y ago
Prompts constrain the possible output space. This is true in trivial ways: ask it to reply only in json. This is also true in slightly less trivial ways: ask for a “description of X”, a “short description of X”, and a “one-sentence descript
586.
by fwlr 4y ago
That $465M number is how much government grant money goes to the group “stations who are paying NPR member fees”. The two obvious questions are 1. how much is that as a fraction of the total income of the group “stations who are paying NPR
587.
by fwlr 4y ago
65,535 is a more interesting number than 69,420 as it is the maximum value of an unsigned 16-bit integer. It’s quite common for computer systems to display very odd behavior when a slowly-incrementing number eventually reaches the maximum v
588.
by fwlr 4y ago
NPR makes a good case that the “funded by the state” clause isn’t applicable to them. Directly is knockdown, they have that “less than 1%” statistic. Indirect funding clause seems like a wash - they are supported by member fees, which some
589.
by fwlr 4y ago
The PCG family is somewhat harder to predict than Mersenne Twisters, but not nearly as hard to predict as cryptographic PRNGs. PCG’s author goes into some detail about it here https://www.pcg-random.org/predictability.html
590.
by fwlr 4y ago
As I understand it, it was the source for most of the reporting on “Russian bots” in 2017-18.
591.
by fwlr 4y ago
The article is indeed disappointingly sensationalist, but it was at least nice to see someone else who’s infuriated by “misinformation” push.
592.
by fwlr 4y ago
There’s two different things and we refer to both of them with the word “search”. Sometimes search means “I can sort of describe what I’m looking for, can you tell me what it’s called?”. LLMs excel here. I told GPT4 I’m doing computer anima
593.
by fwlr 4y ago
Being around colleges, I have heard MacBooks derisively referred to as “$2000 Facebook machines” - the hardware is there to render videos, edit photos, compose music, build software, etc., but all the user wants to do with it is browse Face
594.
by fwlr 4y ago
When it comes to colorblindness, it doesn’t make much sense to ask if a single color is recognizable. Color blindness is a difficulty in distinguishing between different colors - some pairs of colors that are visibly contrasting to normal s
595.
by fwlr 4y ago
Yeah, the cited depth limit of ~8.5km appears to be based on “fish use an osmolyte called TMAO to protect their proteins from pressure, and below 8.5km the concentration of TMAO required is so high that it inhibits cell function”. Apparentl
596.
by fwlr 4y ago
We drilled down to 12km of true vertical depth in 1989 ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole ) as a scientific project, and since then there’s been a handful of commercial oil drilling projects that h
597.
by fwlr 4y ago
On a more fundamental level it seems like the reason that movies are dark [or long, or shaky-cammed, or mixed with near-inaudible dialogue, or…] is the same reason movies are such strong and specific cultural touchpoints: they are largely t
598.
by fwlr 4y ago
A classic case of “facial recognition technology inherits the morality of its users”. I expect if you investigate the police department that issued the arrest warrant you’d find an awful litany of arrests based on flimsy evidence. Face rec
599.
by fwlr 4y ago
Initially I assumed this was going to be about gender . The tagline changed my mind on that really quick. Imagine my surprise as I kept reading and found it circling back around to something prosaic after all.
600.
by fwlr 4y ago
“ If then we speak up for some better job that’s open, let’s not till our talk with such words as hoping, thanking, eagerly, favor. If we are really worthy of the job, the Company will benefit by giving it to us every bit as much as we will

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