gjm11

12 ms·

61.
by gjm11 3mo ago
That's pretty much the default Amazon experience, no?
62.
by gjm11 3mo ago
The institutions, projects and individuals named in the article are, in order of appearance: --1-- Charlotte Mason (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simons Foundation) of the Cosmic Dawn Center (not, so far as I c
63.
by gjm11 3mo ago
A convolutional neural network is really somewhat like a visual cortex. Obviously AlphaZero doesn't literally have a visual cortex -- actual literal visual cortices are features of actual literal brains made out of meat -- but it defin
64.
by gjm11 4mo ago
"Yahoo" and "Lilliputian" come from the same 1726 novel by Swift as "Brobdingnagian".
65.
by gjm11 4mo ago
Also, a Scrabble board is 15 squares across and ZENZIZENZIZENZIC is 16 letters, so even with a Scrabble set with extra Zs or blanks you couldn't ever play it.
66.
by gjm11 5mo ago
Also, the letter is allegedly (1) dated 1812 and (2) signed "Wellington". In 1812 he was still plain old Arthur Wellesley; he wasn't duked[1] until 1814. [1] I am sure this is not actually the right term. I do not care.
67.
by gjm11 5mo ago
The demand is that there shouldn't be anywhere on that ladder where you are expected to pay taxes and aren't given the right to vote. Is it a sensible demand? I dunno. Some people have thought so. Some other people have though
68.
by gjm11 5mo ago
Kagi gets flak from time to time for getting some of its search results from Yandex[1]. Whether that means it is compromised or isn't compromised (or doesn't mean either) is a question I think different people will decide diff
69.
by gjm11 5mo ago
When someone says "No taxation without representation!" they don't mean "As a matter of fact, no one ever gets taxed by a government they don't have the power to vote for or against". (If that were true, there&
70.
by gjm11 5mo ago
And your coffee-maker apparently still had all its coffee when it finally got back from from Russia! (But the temperatures should have been recorded on the Réaumur scale.)
71.
by gjm11 5mo ago
Or perhaps they mean the same thing as was meant by the slogan when it was first coined, around the time of the American Revolution, and the same thing as was meant by the women's suffragists who used it in the late 19th century. Maybe
72.
by gjm11 5mo ago
We tried this experiment with humans, back in the 17th century, and only a few[1] out of millions managed it given a whole human lifetime each. [1] Obviously Newton counts as one. Leibniz like Newton figured out calculus. Other people did i
73.
by gjm11 5mo ago
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the video, but it looks to me as if the situation is: You are root inside a sandbox . As root-in-the-sandbox, you create a symlink and this gives you the ability to escape the sandbox. (Whether this is inter
74.
by gjm11 5mo ago
This seems like an odd take. Don't existing self-driving cars already have rather a lot of world-model? It's not like they're just hooking the driving apparatus to the output of an LLM or something. (Of course there is also s
75.
by gjm11 5mo ago
In case anyone is taking this subthread too seriously: C.S.'s Wikipedia page does not in fact claim that he is dead, and its most recent update was in December 2025. Whatever rumours of his death may be circulating, they do not appear
76.
by gjm11 5mo ago
Donne was a poet (a very good poet, at that) but this particular passage is from a bit of devotional prose, not a poem, and I think it's misleading to format it as if it were poetry. Especially as it's quite unlike the style of Do
77.
by gjm11 6mo ago
The idea of a "vibe" was around long before the term "vibe coding". It's not that much more surprising to see "vibe" used before "vibe coding" than it would be to see "coding" used be
78.
by gjm11 6mo ago
It also, unsurprisingly, tells a slightly different and less startling story: it's not that glycerine crystallized in one lab and suddenly others around the world had the same problem, it's that glycerine hadn't been crystall
79.
by gjm11 6mo ago
What plot? All the plots in the article either (1) show the change for the worse happening in 2020 or later or (2) are explicitly comparing "before 2020" with "after 2020". (I do agree that Mr Trump is a shockingly bad p
80.
by gjm11 6mo ago
If Thunderbird required users to sign up for an annual subscription, then that specific problem -- not being able to tell what good one's payment would do -- would go away. There would be a very specific reason to pay the money. (I
81.
by gjm11 6mo ago
The reason "nobody questions how corporations use their money" is that in 99.9% of cases when I pay a corporation money for a product, I'm doing it not for the sake of what they can do with the money, but because otherwise I
82.
by gjm11 7mo ago
For the avoidance of doubt, I wasn't meaning to imply that you downvoted me. (Nor do I mind if you did.) I don't think it's true that people who downvote things are never able to have a constructive discussion, but there&#x27
83.
by gjm11 7mo ago
Clearly a bunch of other people also disagree profoundly with everything I said, since my comment is currently sitting at 0 having at one point been higher. I vigorously encourage anyone who thinks something I wrote is bad to downvote it as
84.
by gjm11 7mo ago
Right. The LLMs' quirks aren't bad in themselves , they're bad when they're in every damn paragraph . They're mostly things that in moderation actually improve writing, and that if you see them once (without the k
85.
by gjm11 7mo ago
First off, "not adequately described as a mere token-predictor" and "not sentient" are entirely separate things. I can't speak for anyone else, but what I feel when I read yet another glib "it's just a s
86.
by gjm11 7mo ago
I think these calculations are a bit bogus. If you spend $35k on a nice computer, and then earn $35k from doing some work using it, that doesn't mean that buying the computer has paid for itself unless the computer is solely responsib
87.
by gjm11 7mo ago
I'm pretty sure it means something like this: "Because jemalloc is used all over the place in our systems that run at tremendous scale, some hack that improves its performance a little bit while degrading the longer-term maintaina
88.
by gjm11 7mo ago
I like the fact that the experiments people have tried with this almost all seem to fall into two quite different categories. Category 1: "Fuck you", "I just took a shit", "ass ass ass ass ass ass ass". Categ
89.
by gjm11 7mo ago
Note that "police police police police" is a grammatically valid sentence, with multiple different parsings, one of which we could rephrase as "the people who keep a watchful eye on what the police are doing, keep a watchful
90.
by gjm11 7mo ago
I think the joke is that Microsoft did do something very like this -- they call it Windows Recall -- and it got a lot of angry pushback. (Partly, IIRC, because the specific way they did it initially was very bad in terms of security and

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