jtolmar

29 ms·

271.
by jtolmar 7y ago
I think it's entirely possible for a country with such policies to compete globally, but it requires a smaller cut for capital owners, whether via taxes or direct ownership changes. That leaves behind a potential source of new revenue
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by jtolmar 7y ago
Defining then relative to the flex direction makes sense, but the choice of which one is with the flow and which is across it is arbitrary, chosen between two words that normally mean with the flow. It'd make more sense if the properti
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by jtolmar 7y ago
Programming languages have native support for O(n) algorithms in the form of for loops. You can compose as many of those as you want to get a huge polynomial, but you have to go out of your way and do something a bit weird to get an exponen
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by jtolmar 7y ago
For car GPS, which uses the same math, I used the first GPS signal the device receives. This ends up being equivalent to the uniform prior.
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by jtolmar 7y ago
If there are as many examples of people receiving the peace prize then going on to be warmongers as there are the reverse, it suggests that the peace prize isn't really doing anything here and we're just looking at the base rate o
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by jtolmar 7y ago
The typography tools that IDEs use for syntax highlighting are bold, italic, and color, which all reduce legibility. That's fine for keywords - I never need to distinguish between if and lf at a glance - but muddy for the primary conte
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by jtolmar 7y ago
As reductive as "just send self-replicating robots" is, it's still potentially easier than a self-sustaining human civilization like the article is talking about. Both require building the entire set of infrastructure to buil
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by jtolmar 7y ago
I'd like to see what the market decides is worthwhile without capital ownership.
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by jtolmar 7y ago
Yes, Google uses Google Calendar internally. Signing up for email alerts about somebody else's calendar is definitely weird. But the information you'd get is the same as someone would get if they checked your calendar manually, wh
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by jtolmar 7y ago
Thanks! Check and checkmate are normal because it's just way too hard to checkmate the king with dual threats. I can't beat Alpha Beta 3 yet either. If anyone starts beating 4 I'll put some effort into optimizing the search s
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by jtolmar 7y ago
I came up with a great chess variant ages ago, and finally got around to making a computer version of it last week. Implied Chess: Rule 1: Chess Rule 2: You can't capture normally Rule 3: Any piece threatened by two enemy pieces is cap
282.
by jtolmar 7y ago
Canvas rendering isn't that consistent, and when it goes weird it's often OS specific instead of merely browser specific. Some things I've run into: - OSX likes to turn random Unicode symbols into emoji (extends past Canvas)
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by jtolmar 7y ago
3 - A TBM has a bunch of cutters on the front; big blades that cut through rock and whatever else they run into. Since they're cutting through rock, they wear out pretty quickly, so they routinely have to stop the machine and send work
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by jtolmar 7y ago
It's cultural; cut and cover is more popular outside of the US. The Shanghai Metro (world's longest) is constructed using mostly cut and cover, and in the Anglosphere I remember seeing some of the Sydney metro being dug that way.
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by jtolmar 7y ago
You could replace highways with a magical teleporter and you'd still have traffic and congestion. Most traffic happens at the interface between the highway and the rest of the road network, as cars can only join the flow of traffic at
286.
by jtolmar 7y ago
You can arrange the three colors in a triangle, which defines a plane, is treated like a circle in color theory, and looks like a weird stretched out "U" when put in a perceptually uniform space (stretched towards green, which we
287.
by jtolmar 7y ago
Well, then there's car insurance and gas. Despite being a huge fan of public transit, I actually think the efficiency numbers would probably still come out in favor of cars, in America, in the near term. Our country has been car focuse
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by jtolmar 7y ago
What do the numbers look like if you include the cost of cars? Trains are paid for by the transit authority, but cars are not. Regardless, someone still pays.
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by jtolmar 7y ago
Management above the director level was always invisible, but it went from invisible and assumed benevolent to invisible and assumed hostile (spurred by concrete actions). I don't think they were considered part of an "us" at
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by jtolmar 7y ago
TGIF used to have a number of highly technical and informative main presentations. There was a great one by the self-driving cars team where they showed some of their tools and explained some of their challenges (great anecdote about why on
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by jtolmar 7y ago
Having left more recently (mid 2019) - TGIF had been increasingly sporadically scheduled from 2016 onwards, to the point that many of us had thought it was cancelled a few times between then and now. In my local office, snacks got reschedul
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by jtolmar 7y ago
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by jtolmar 7y ago
I think older AI work like POMDPs and statistical work like causal inference are more on line with what's needed to produce true AGI than the current breakthroughs in neural nets are. And I'd certainly prefer our chances to surviv
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by jtolmar 7y ago
Our brain is whatever evolution found that worked, and of course it's a bunch of chemistry. The "why" of why our brain works can easily be "it approximates these statistical algorithms well enough."
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by jtolmar 7y ago
Medieval peasants (and serfs) had a lot of freedom with how to spend their day to day. They had chores, and several weeks a year of grueling sun up to sun down labor. But it's not usually harvest season or planting season, and they had
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by jtolmar 7y ago
This is a very good place to pay attention to the difference between free markets and capitalism though. Compound interest scales exponentially because people can buy stock that gives them a stake in a company's profits in perpetuity,
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by jtolmar 7y ago
At this point, shouldn't a digital camera just be a smartphone with a weird form factor? (Pile of optics and a viewfinder?)
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by jtolmar 7y ago
The major components of Flash are a vector graphics engine, a timeline based video editor, and a scripting language. Leaning on browser SVG support and exec(), you could write an extremely bare-bones version in a couple of weekends. It&#x27
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by jtolmar 7y ago
In my experience, when you ask people to do approval voting, they seem to rank the candidates then try to figure out where to put the cutoff between the approvable candidates and non. The system doesn't give any guidelines on where the
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by jtolmar 7y ago
> The idea that awarding a prize to the most respected scientists in a particular field is solely for the purpose of advancing an ideology is in itself extremely anti-intellectual and biased. The very idea of it is anti-intellectual? Tha

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