jhbadger

25 ms·

541.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Exactly. People forget that we did make systems that were just Markov chains long before LLMs, like the famous Usenet Poster "Mark V. Shaney" (created by Rob Pike of Plan 9 and Golang fame) that was trained on Usenet posts in th
542.
by jhbadger 2y ago
That's true of so many things, including science and programming. We can deal with the fact that some people are geniuses and just orders of magnitude better than us, but often it's people who are just slightly better than us in m
543.
by jhbadger 2y ago
"Young Adult" is a weird term -- think of the book/movie genre called "young adult" or "YA" -- it isn't actually literally for people in their twenties but for children. It's like calling people
544.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Absolutely. Like those terrible filters that are supposed to make video look like it was recorded on VHS. They always make the results far worse than VHS actually was in practice.
545.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Yes, yes, like the Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme song "If you're wondering how he eats & breathes, and other science facts, then repeat to yourself it's just a show, I should really just relax."
546.
by jhbadger 2y ago
But except for the Arab Spring of 2011 none of these events had anything whatsoever to do with social media. It is just absurd to see Facebook try to associate themselves with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It reminds me of the 1990s ad campa
547.
by jhbadger 2y ago
In science fiction you pretty much have to accept either a single source of life or amazing convergent evolution. How can Vulcans mate successfully with humans in Star Trek, if they aren't animals very closely related to Homo sapiens
548.
by jhbadger 2y ago
You may have a point with a cult band like Neutral Milk Hotel, but songs like Take On Me and Running Up That Hill were incredibly popular when they were new -- it's just that both got a second wave of popularity decades later when they
549.
by jhbadger 2y ago
And S, the statistical data language that was the ancestor of S-PLUS and R.
550.
by jhbadger 2y ago
The fact that there are so many alternative languages for the JVM or which transpile to Javascript suggests that (at least to many people) that neither were ideal choices for their current uses.
551.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Even the cheaper schools in the US (public universities) aren't all that cheap anymore. When was an undergrad in the late 1980s, I paid under $2000 a semester. Now it is close to $10000. Yes, there's been inflation since then, but
552.
by jhbadger 2y ago
I think it was interesting that the brochure is apparently available in English, Swedish and something called "Easy Swedish". I'm not sure exactly what this is and a brief Googling didn't help, but I'm imagining som
553.
by jhbadger 2y ago
It also sort of defeats the small educational value for children that Life, Monopoly, and other board games with physical money have -- that is teaching basic math skills involved in making change (even if physical cash is becoming less com
554.
by jhbadger 2y ago
>I have a book from Scientific American from the 1960s that has a whole section removed for the british audience because it contained instructions on how to run experiments on bears. That is a political act. I think you'd need a bit
555.
by jhbadger 2y ago
It's really annoying that Microsoft-owned Github and Microsoft proper both have AI-based systems called "Copilot" which are unrelated.
556.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Not to mention the Chinese board game weiqi (known in English as Go from the Japanese).
557.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Interesting that the article brings up the original 1990s GopherCons (which were conferences for discussing the Gopher protocol). I'm mildly annoyed that the Go programming community (which uses a gopher as a mascot) has reused the nam
558.
by jhbadger 2y ago
But that was a "novelty song" -- you weren't supposed to like it unironically even at the time.
559.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Elise Blackwell wrote "Hunger", a novel about these botanists, which I thought was well done.
560.
by jhbadger 2y ago
A lot of the leaders of the hippies were actually older than that generation, despite the classic "don't trust anyone over 30" and "hope I die before I get old" sentiments of the movement. For example, both Abby Hof
561.
by jhbadger 2y ago
>Pascal. Would Steve had went along with that? I don't see why he couldn't have. It's a far more elegant language and it and other Wirth languages like Oberon have inspired several current programming languages. The standa
562.
by jhbadger 2y ago
With hindsight, mercury (which was a major component of his "cures") was an unfortunate choice, but as you said, the prevailing belief at the time in the "four humors" (where you were thought to have too much or too litt
563.
by jhbadger 2y ago
The science writer Philip Ball wrote an interesting biography of Paracelsus and his world view "The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science" that is worth a read if you are interested.
564.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Not in dollars, no, but a surprisingly large number of tenure decisions boil down to "does this researcher have a lot of citations to their work?" as a measure of the quality of their research.
565.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Does the Coen Brothers 2010 version of True Grit count? I think it was better than the 1969 John Wayne version, but maybe it doesn't count as a "remake" because both were based on Charles Portis' novel.
566.
by jhbadger 2y ago
For those who downvoted this, did you read the wikipedia entry? Seriously, the idea that many languages don't make a blue/green distinction is a fact.
567.
by jhbadger 2y ago
No. There are three types of cone cells (S, M, and L) that are most responsive to various wavelengths of light, but as the picture shows, most "colors" are within the high and low ranges of more than one type of cone. https:&#x2F
568.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Also, the whole idea that "green" and "blue" are different things is culturally determined -- many languages either use one word that contains the shades English speakers call "blue" and "green" or di
569.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Exactly. If they had limited it to cases where "it" is referring to Pennywise, that would be one thing, but not when anyone uses a very common pronoun!
570.
by jhbadger 2y ago
I find even local LLMs like Llama can do a fair bit of retrocomputing, from BASIC to 6502 and Z80 assembly language. I doubt very much that they were specifically trained to do this; I think it just comes for free because the broad training

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