lucas_membrane

14 ms·

31.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
There are some regulations in bond pricing or international banking or stuff like that that require over 25 decimal places. IIRC, the best COBOL or whatever could do on the IBM 360's was 15 digits. The smaller, cheaper, and older 140
32.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
The durability and uniformity of carbon fiber makes it an attractive alternative material for mass-production of high-quality musical instruments. The difficulty is getting it to vibrate enough to sound like wood. Meanwhile, the prices of
33.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
J. K. Galbraith identified a solution to this problem utilized in the USA. A theory of countervailing power that relied on strong and stable institutions each doing a decent job of nonviolently representing the various interest groups at wo
34.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
Fear? I suppose that any negative evaluation can be stereotyped as fear or lack of intrepidity, but perhaps that repeated use of that label is projection -- that the article was written by an AI believer who fears that AI might have to r
35.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
> from business ethics class, not law Well, there was one case in the law over 100 years ago in the USA. A company had decided to sell itself for cash and go out of business. The Court ruled, that in that situation, it should sell to
36.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
Back when I learned guitar, guitar players came in only two flavors -- Spanish and Hawaiian. One was a Spanish guitarist if one played the guitar with the face of the guitar vertical (strings forming roughly a vertical plane), and a Hawa
37.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
Those days were after the rich had commenced urbanization by driving the agrarian workers off the land and encouraging them to find work at dismal wages in the city, made it a crime to be a vagrant, and funded charities that collaborated
38.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
This may be good news. Some people will want to consume more real natural music. The best way to make this happen with minimal incidence of fakery will be very small-scale cottage-industry performance venues, 10 to 50 people in a room, i
39.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
The questions should be: If the Apollo 13 accident had happened instead during Apollo 8 while the astronauts were behind the moon, so that the mission was lost and the cause was not known, would Apollo 9, 10, and 11 been delayed past the en
40.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
When will AI be able to tell us which gods exist and what they really want us to do?
41.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
One story said the members were appointed for 4-year terms. That would work out that Biden would have appointed them all if there was no confirmation process.
42.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
I was surprised that an article on the problems of decision making under uncertainty reached a very narrow-minded conclusion without much consideration of other ways that we might not get that which we each respectively hope for from AI. Fo
43.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
That is an essential concept. Consider the Salk polio vaccine: before the results of the conclusive trials were announced, it was speculated that if the vaccine was 25% effective, everyone would want to have their kids vaccinated. The r
44.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
You must be talking about the long-gone Supreme Court of 120 years ago, conservative as hell itself, that ruled in favor of vaccine mandates over whimsically inspired avoidable tragic waves of death. The 7-2 majority decision ruled that v
45.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
One of the things that may have caused Earhart to underestimate the risk was the high reliability of AM medium wave radio broadcasting in the US over long distances, with over a dozen 50,000 watts and higher clear-channel stations, each s
46.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
Earhart had a practice run at navigating over the ocean to a radio source on land prior to the start of her trip. She flew from somewhere around San Francisco out over the ocean, then turned around and tried to fly toward the source of a ra
47.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
That's kind of like the story of Annie Londonderry, who made a bizarre round-the-world bicycle trip.
48.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
Do you think that those medical treatments disqualify anyone from living, or that many people receiving those treatments have not lived meaningful lives and done plenty of good work? The ideas that lead to thinking that we have too much h
49.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
MBA Analyst won a very early spreadsheet comparison vs visicalc and lotus123. NTSH.
50.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
I think that you are right about not depending on one open source OS to provide the proper depencencies, customizaion, and training wheels for every app. I have been running linux on my desktop for about 20 years, about one decade of Mint
51.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
I've been using Fedora 41 about half a year, and flatpak has not made it better. Fedora 41 started with a bunch of apps distributed as rpm, but some of them have since been updated as flatpaks when I run 'sudo dnf update'. S
52.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
I'm 75 years old, male, declining after being somewhat chronically ill for a long time, and I am still active socially and attending some organization meetings, exercising 10 hours/week, etc. AFAIK none of my male direct ancestors
53.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
So improvements in healthcare and the rapid surge in lifespans resulting from spending on medical care improvements so that more people could enjoy what they looked forward to for many years, a long, happy and healthy retirement, ruined Am
54.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
I just tried pyrefly on a project that really needed it. It complained about an assignment of a new value to a global int variable within a function, even though the function contained the 'global' statement that should have made
55.
by lucas_membrane 1y ago
A CGM is not easy to use reproducibly. The quality control of the manufacturers is not that good, the placement of the sensor (particularly if it is near a place where insulin injections have caused lumps under the skin, or if it is on the
56.
by lucas_membrane 2y ago
IIRC, there were chimps at one of the places that people drove through with the car windows closed to observe them who learned to break off the side-view mirrors and use them as hammers to break the car windows.
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by lucas_membrane 2y ago
Volkswagen expected the plant to be unionized when they were planning it, and it was OK about that. However, the local political leaders in power let it be known that they would not offer VW various incentives for locating the plant in TN
58.
by lucas_membrane 3y ago
I'll admit that it might be a little more complicated than that. Does life require that we make default assumptions? Is the default assumption that when we are seeing and playing a game for the first time, we should assume that the o
59.
by lucas_membrane 3y ago
My desktop machine did not time out overnight last night and require me to enter my password to resume wasting time this morning.
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by lucas_membrane 3y ago
>> The game would be reduced to "does Monty feel like gifting you a car or a goat today". But, in fact, that is the way the real show worked. He was more likely to give you a car when he hadn't given away any cars for

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