jhbadger

19 ms·

421.
by jhbadger 2y ago
It's like doomscrolling. Originally it meant compulsively reading depressing content about the state of the world, wars, etc., explaining the "doom" part, but eventually it evolved (or perhaps devolved) into just meaning obse
422.
by jhbadger 2y ago
While the point of the articles was to keep it legally qualified as a "magazine" rather than a "catalog" (as postal rates then favored the former over the latter), there were some good things there. Don Lancaster wrote s
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by jhbadger 2y ago
Americans went to Europe for grad school and/or postdoctoral research in science (especially in chemistry and physics) before WWII, though. We saw ourselves as second rate. People like Oppenheimer, Rabi, Pauling, and just about every o
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by jhbadger 2y ago
Not this again. Watson didn't "steal" Franklin's data despite the myth. Raymond Gosling, a grad student co-mentored by Wilkins and Franklin, took the famous Photo 51 as part of his graduate research. Wilkins then shared
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by jhbadger 2y ago
As people have mentioned, people are still against legally-sourced generative AI systems like Adobe's, so concern over IP rights isn't the only, or I suspect, major, objection to generative AI that people have.
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by jhbadger 2y ago
Historically, it took a long time for traditional artists (painters and sculptors) to see photographers as fellow artists rather than mere technicians using technology to replace art. The same thing was true of early digital artists who dar
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by jhbadger 2y ago
This wasn't just a "academia" thing, though. All business executives (even low level ones) had secretaries in the 1980s and earlier too. Typing wasn't something most people could do and it was seen as a waste of time for
428.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Eh, Black Mirror is basically just a 21st century version of The Twilight Zone only with the Cold War fears replaced with modern ones. But still, TZ wasn't all doom and gloom but found the time to be optimistic now and then.
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by jhbadger 2y ago
I'm not sure either of those are particularly progressive -- the current president seems to be a fan of tariffs, a form of planned economy popular in the 19th century (and condemned by most economists since, who favor free trade). And
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by jhbadger 2y ago
That's how society progresses though. Before 1865, slavery was mainstream and abolitionists were weird radical crazies. Before 1965, "Jim Crow" laws that said non-whites had to use different bathrooms and drinking fountains w
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by jhbadger 2y ago
Herb Simon certainly was great, but it is weird that the site uses a picture of what is obviously (despite his face being cut off) Claude Shannon working on his robotic mouse Theseus. https://www.futilitycloset.com/2018&#x2F
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by jhbadger 2y ago
And it depends on the person and their experience of chatbots. People were fooled in the 1960s by ELIZA, the chatbot that mostly just rephrased what the user said as a question (i.e. "I'm afraid of flying." "Why are you
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by jhbadger 2y ago
His hot sauce sales? (as shown in The King of Kong )
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by jhbadger 2y ago
And mine just said ]▩ as it waited for you to type an Applesoft command. It is always weird when people say something is from "your childhood" as opposed to theirs. I remember the 1990s, sure, but I was already an adult.
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by jhbadger 2y ago
To me that makes it more boring though. The interesting part about the Romero movies is that the survivors underestimate both the zombies and their fellow survivors. They think because they can deal with individual zombies that they are saf
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by jhbadger 2y ago
The "original" (in the non-Vodoo sense) zombies shown in George Romero's "living dead" movies made no claims that the undead were scientifically explainable -- it was later movies like 28 Days Later that tried to ra
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by jhbadger 2y ago
Yeah, like I. I. Rabi said in regard to people no longer being amazed by the achievements of physics, "What more do you want, mermaids?" Anyone who remembers further back than a decade or so remembers when the height of AI researc
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by jhbadger 2y ago
Government contracts (ultimately tax money) are the primary way a lot of companies get their money, though. You don't sell fighter aircraft or massive rockets to the public. Even a lot of AI companies like Palantir primarily serve the
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by jhbadger 2y ago
It is. If this had been available in the heyday of the II, I think it would have been quite viable as a commercial product.
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by jhbadger 2y ago
And this is the case for most scholars of ancient languages besides Latin and Ancient Greek. While those two big ones get the occasional translation of a modern work like Harry Potter or The Hobbit, nobody is writing new works in Sumerian o
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by jhbadger 2y ago
In the 1990s chorded keyboards were "popular" in regard to wearable computing. People like Steve Mann would give talks where he demonstrated how he could use his wearable computer (basically a laptop he strapped to himself with a
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by jhbadger 2y ago
But a lot of times the "benefit" is simply that people they know are there. Which is the problem with all these open platforms like Mastodon. People can get the argument that it is better in theory to use an open platform. But nob
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by jhbadger 2y ago
>One reason I haven’t picked up any of these newfangled Rust tools like bat, exa, or fd is that I can barely remember the options for the originals. But that's exactly the reason to use the newer tools -- they just make more sense
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by jhbadger 2y ago
I'm glad you identified the author -- I'm a big fd and bat fan but didn't know they were created by the same person. I'll have to check out his other tools.
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by jhbadger 2y ago
Right, but it still takes place after the Mystics and Skeksis split off from each other. The Gelflings were really just irrelevant bystanders to the real story even if we the audience see the story from their perspective in both the movie a
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by jhbadger 2y ago
Yeah, the whole point of the original is that the Mystics and Skeksis were both flawed societies (even if the Skeksis were closer to the normal meaning of "evil") and the ending unites them rather than having the Skeksis destroyed
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by jhbadger 2y ago
On this site, I was thinking this would be referring to Ogres in the Steve Jackson sense of autonomous AI supertanks featured in the the classic board game (and several computer games since) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki&#x2
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by jhbadger 2y ago
In the 1990s, an awful lot of Linux apps were Tk/Tcl. People complained then about them not being "native", but they were slimmer and better performing than the typical Java or Electron app of today.
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by jhbadger 2y ago
The 50s resurgence actually started in 1969 with the creation of Sha Na Na (who even played at Woodstock, weirdly enough). Grease was more of a result than a cause of the trend (and Sha Na Na actually performed in the movie of the musical a
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by jhbadger 2y ago
And while there was some discord between Salieri and Mozart in real life, it was more like friendly rivals rather than enemies -- they even collaborated on at least one piece https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/A-

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