jerf

145 ms·

2101.
by jerf 2y ago
In 2024, even the fact that the website goes down periodically, assuming it does, is now itself an art performance. Solar and battery tech is perfectly capable of keeping it up all the time without an excessive expenditure of resources. I c
2102.
by jerf 2y ago
Unfortunately you've got a massive term mismatch. You have negative prices today, but a lot of reason to believe that by the time you could bring your storage online the problem will already have resolved itself. Oil briefly went negat
2103.
by jerf 2y ago
That more-or-less cancels; yes, the satellites are traveling through a 4D space and aren't just at one point in one time, but then that's still sparse in the full 4D space. If anything it makes it more sparse, not less. It's
2104.
by jerf 2y ago
On the blockchain, accounts have a certain amount of currency. You can issue a command to transfer currency from your account to somebody else's, as that is a primary use case of a cryptocurrency. There was a code path where you could
2105.
by jerf 2y ago
"I don't think the US military generally uses off-the-shelf consumer products like the Ukraine military does, so does this actually affect them?" Yes, because if you have no drone manufacturing in your country, you can&#x27
2106.
by jerf 2y ago
The meta would say that if people were optimally spending their time on things that matter to them. They don't. If they did bikeshedding wouldn't exist. It obviously does. This is basically the same claim that economics can treat
2107.
by jerf 2y ago
In theory, you could pick up your one language, say, Java, and through the course of a normal career learn everything necessary to program in that language in the best possible way. In practice, it's a pretty well-known phenomenon expe
2108.
by jerf 2y ago
The term "bikeshedding" comes up a lot on HN, when people spend a lot of time spinning wheels in endless debates about the things that are easy to debate while indefinitely deferring the tough conversations, but I think an underap
2109.
by jerf 2y ago
A complete list: https://www.smart-jokes.org/klingon-software.html Though I agree that's the standout quote from the list. I've used it before at work, as appropriate.
2110.
by jerf 2y ago
"What I do know though, is that ChatGPT can finish a leetcode problem before I've even fully parsed the question." You have to watch out for that, that's an AI evaluation trap. Leetcode problems are in the training set.
2111.
by jerf 2y ago
Nobody has ten years of experience with a code base "optimized for AI" to be able to state such a thing so confidently. And nobody ever will, because in 10 years, coding AIs will not look like they do now. Right now they are just
2112.
by jerf 2y ago
If Go is a platform, every language is a platform, and so the term loses all meaning.
2113.
by jerf 2y ago
Have you looked at how Erlang does memory management within its processes? You definitely can "get away" with a lot of things when you have actors you can reasonably expect will be small scale, if you are absolutely sure their dat
2114.
by jerf 2y ago
Yesterday I complained that telepathy is defined solely as a negative, which means that it essentially can't exist because if it is ever found, it will be real, and as such, will have mechanisms and limitations and real characteristics
2115.
by jerf 2y ago
More generally, you should view presentations as stories. Obviously not stories presented solely for their drama as one might watch a movie, but the fundamental "conflict -> tension raising -> resolution" cycle ought to be
2116.
by jerf 2y ago
Part of the Grey Goo memeset is that the goo is an unstoppable apex predator that doesn't just tweak the ecological balance a bit in a conventional ecological relationship, but permanently establishes an ecological balance of 100% Grey
2117.
by jerf 2y ago
You can see a real-world of this in a very common building material, "wood". There's entire sub-ecosystems dedicated to breaking this material down... yet you can safely use it to build structures that can stand for a long ti
2118.
by jerf 2y ago
One of the memes the Enlightenment established is the idea of the "noble savage". If you want to learn more about it, that's the search term for it. For instance, Wikipedia pops something up that is a decent introduction: ht
2119.
by jerf 2y ago
The car industry has an unusual profit curve. They have huge, huge fixed costs. It's not just the factory, it's the testing, compliance, marketing, etc. However, the price you pay for a car is substantially more than the margina
2120.
by jerf 2y ago
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - Site ---, -----, California: The SCP Foundation is proud to announce that in the interests of furthering commerce and humanity in general that it is entering into a partnership with Stability AI. "We have unique
2121.
by jerf 2y ago
If it could be solved with a Math Overflow-post level of effort, even from Terence Tao, it isn't what I was talking about as "high level math". I also am not surprised by "Consider a generation function" coming out
2122.
by jerf 2y ago
I think it would also be interesting for the compiler to modify the source code (with a flag, presumably, or possibly through the local LSP server) with the solved result as needed. This would also feedback to the programmer what the proble
2123.
by jerf 2y ago
I think this sort of negative definition is not very useful, though. As soon as telepathy is demonstrated, it becomes an existing sense. And that's not just word chopping, it's pretty evident that this is going to bother people an
2124.
by jerf 2y ago
There is definitely a difference between "these beings have become so advanced as to do things we would believe impossible like reading state directly out of our brains" and "for vague and in fact aggressively unspecified r
2125.
by jerf 2y ago
GPT != AI. GPT is a subset of AI. GPT is probably absolutely useless for high-level math, if for no other reason that to be useful you'd need training data that basically by definition doesn't exist. Though I am also strongly incl
2126.
by jerf 2y ago
My favorite is when I roll out of bed in the morning absolutely convinced I got no sleep. But then I review my night, yup, tossed, turned, used the bathroom, tossed, turned, opened the window, tossed, turned, rode a unicorn to work in the T
2127.
by jerf 2y ago
https://www.chessvariants.org/difftaking.dir/enpassant.html From: https://www.chessvariants.org/alphabet.html Standard Wiki/TVTropes-esque warning applies.
2128.
by jerf 2y ago
"I was initially hoping to get some insight on e.g. which pairs of squares had the fewest moves for a given piece etc." This may not be quite what you were asking for, but it's close, and has the advantage that I can link it
2129.
by jerf 2y ago
Learn your history before shooting your mouth off. Empire predates Civilization by 14 years. Which you might have realized if you thought about it being PDP-10 software. "According to Meier, his Civilization actually started as a glori
2130.
by jerf 2y ago
One of the problems with being a beginner is an inability to tell which projects are easy and which are hard, especially if you're doing a "real" project, which is to say, one of your choice from some real problem you have in

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