jhbadger

4 ms·

31.
by jhbadger 1mo ago
Yeah. There is a difference between something like Geoffrey's "De gestis Britonum" which was thought by the author to be sort of true, and Malory who knew he was writing literature.
32.
by jhbadger 1mo ago
The part where you gave the word your own private meaning was the unclear part. There are no two sides to "progressive". It means thinking the past was bad and that we can make a better, fairer society in the future. Those who thi
33.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
There's two different goals to AI research - one was to get results - a chess engine thst wins, etc. But the other goal (which seems to have been abandoned in the deep learning era) was to use AI to help understand how human minds work
34.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
Are you talking about frozen pizza? That's always rather disappointing. Even chains like Dominos let alone good local pizzerias make their pizzas to order by people.
35.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
This is measuring on scientific tasks though. I haven't used Fable lately but when I was playing with it when it was new its "safety" features made it practically impossible to use for biomedical science -- it once refused to
36.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
Yes. That's the only sort of "rare book" that makes sense in context to train on. There's no point in destroying an actually valuable rare book like a first edition of the Origin of Species because those are available ch
37.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
Not really. Nobody has the space. Libraries, public, university, and private regularly "weed" their collections for things they view as outdated or just unpopular. If they didn't, they'd have no space for new books.
38.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
But this is an unrealistic view of how AI works. You don't say "make this" and get a finished product. It is very much a back and forth process, very much like a boss to their employee. And I imagine most people have experien
39.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
Under Lenin sure. Not so much under Stalin, though. He had old fashioned tastes and disliked abstract art. He preferred "socialist realism" which featured cheesy pictures of happy peasants and tractor drivers working to build Comm
40.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
>How come we memorized chemical formulas but didn’t talk about that [exciting stuff about developmental biology] You can argue that about any subject. People want to take physics and learn stuff about black holes but instead the intro co
41.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
Also there are things that are just bad translations even for the era -- the KJV mentions unicorns 9 times, often in weird comparisons like "the strength of a unicorn" -- whatever the Hebrew original meant (many scholars think it
42.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
I've tried them all - vim, emacs, vscode, etc. They all fail in this regard not because of themselves but because significant whitespace is a terrible idea which nearly every programming language avoids.
43.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
This sort of thing - selling dubious "medical kits" to consumers is unfortunately getting common in the US - I was recently visiting my elderly parents who still watch live cable tv and there was an ad that played over and over se
44.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
It's also a bit weird how it makes ahistorical meetings for "drama" -- e.g. Russell and Frege never met in real life -- why show that they did (they do mention this never happened in their notes, but why write such a scene a
45.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
Most developed societies. When you live by subsistence agriculture, having lots of kids is a benefit as they are free labor. When a culture urbanizes and industrializes, they are less of a benefit.
46.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
It really isn't. I've never played formalized sports in my life and had no problem getting into multiple universities (yes, a few decades ago but I doubt if society has become more sports driven; on the contrary people often say t
47.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
Interesting that the professor assigned "Homo Ludens" rather than "The Waning of the Middle Ages" (or "Autumn of the Middle Ages" in some translations) which is a more famous work by Huizinga.
48.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
I had no idea who he was before reading an obituary when he died a couple of months ago but I've read "The Cheese and the Worms" and "The Night Battles" after that and I plan to read all his works -- he really prese
49.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
Yes I do live in America - and nothing I've said has anything to do with zero sum economics - only that examples of people succeeding has no bearing on how likely it is in general. The "American Dream" implies that economic m
50.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
Have you never tried to paste python code from the internet into an editor? At least half the time the indentation is screwed up and I have to go in and figure out manually where to put the spaces in. Indentation gets screwed up by pasting
51.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
The fact that some people like the author still succeed in becoming wealthy from humble beginnings is besides the point. It's like those actors who talk about how they waited tables and went to hundreds of auditions before they got th
52.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
It reminds me of the "The Salvation of Doug" and its rebuttal "The Demise of Bill" that are often used to illustrate the differences in philosophy between genetics and biochemistry even when they are used to analyze the
53.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
And Gutenberg still was shooting for the high-end of the market -- he had his printed Bibles touched up by artists (Illuminated capitals, some color added here and there), meaning his Bibles weren't much cheaper than hand-copied becau
54.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
Perhaps. I suspect it may have more to do with the idea that many non-vegans think (whether or not it is true) that vegans believe themselves superior. It isn't unlike how learning that someone is an atheist angers many religious peo
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by jhbadger 2mo ago
>If you don't know the names of your representatives you can't vote for them. Seems pretty straight forward to me. The names are printed on the ballot, along with party affiliation. No memorization needed. In a primary there ma
56.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
>so you seldom slaughter goats. Maybe in Western culture, but a lot of cultures (Middle Eastern and Indian for example) really like goat meat and even raise them specifically for that.
57.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
Maybe not as polarizing as those, but by "animal welfare" he doesn't mean volunteering at the local animal shelter, he's a vegan. That's pretty polarizing to a lot of people who see veganism as an attack on their wh
58.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
You certainly don't need to "denounce your citizenship" to move to another country and work there - I strongly recommend that everybody live at least for a few years in another country for school or a job. Even if you end up
59.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
The Japanese are also into fighting insects, although mostly with beetles. Pokemon is more understandable with this in mind as the idea of people collecting creatures to fight with other people's creatures is an extension of this.
60.
by jhbadger 2mo ago
What we call "globalization" is the really the second version of globalization. In the late Victorian period goods from all around the world were available in the West, and even to a degree the other way around (a trick of coloniz

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