m-i-l

25 ms·

331.
by m-i-l 7y ago
Anecdote time. Short summary: I received in my Google news feed a story about something I would never expect to see in my news feed. The only rational explanations I could think of were that (i) Google had eavesdropped on an earlier convers
332.
by m-i-l 7y ago
It seems the drones are simply spraying insecticide, rather than anything more sophisticated such as plucking the caterpillars off the plants or shooting them with high pressure water jets. The advantage of drones over human pilots spraying
333.
by m-i-l 7y ago
There was a 40 year waiting list for allotments in some parts of London 10 years ago[0], and 6 years ago the number of allotments had remained the same but the waiting list more than doubled from 800 to 1,765[1] so it could be longer than 4
334.
by m-i-l 7y ago
At the time I did my AI post-grad, there were broadly speaking 3 schools of thought on how general AI would be achieved: via (i) symbolic AI (or "classic AI"), (ii) connectionist AI (i.e. neural networks, now "deep learning&
335.
by m-i-l 7y ago
Anecdotal I know, but when my first was born and I was outside with them for the first time, I got a weird sense of extreme overprotectiveness - exaggerating somewhat to make the point, but it almost felt like I would punch anyone if they l
336.
by m-i-l 7y ago
Vacuum airships have a long history: "First proposed by Italian Jesuit priest Francesco Lana de Terzi in 1670"[0]. The O-Boot project referenced in some replies aims to fly its first prototype on 13 December 2019 because that is t
337.
by m-i-l 7y ago
One of the "selling points" of the Sinclair C5 was that its electric motor was built by Hoover and would be serviced at the existing network of vacuum cleaner service centres[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki&#
338.
by m-i-l 7y ago
Some elderly people who live alone like the TV on for company - in many cases they aren't even watching it properly, they just have it on in the background to feel less lonely, like there are other people in the house with them. The ar
339.
by m-i-l 7y ago
The idea of a supranational currency goes back to at least 1940 and Keynes - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor .
340.
by m-i-l 7y ago
"Given an 'experience machine' capable of providing whatever experiences we desire, in a way indistinguishable from 'real' ones, should we stubbornly prefer the truth of reality?" If real and virtual are "
341.
by m-i-l 7y ago
Bats eat mosquitoes: https://www.mosquito.org/page/faq#Do%20bats%20serve%20as%20a... ?
342.
by m-i-l 7y ago
Within my current organisation, two main search options are Solr and Elasticsearch, both based on Lucene. Generalising a bit, Solr is more targetted at enterprise search and unstructured content search (e.g. bundled with most content manage
343.
by m-i-l 7y ago
Children will only say they want to be things they are exposed to and understand. Looking at the list for nowadays, it still includes teachers, athletes and musicians, which they see in the media and might be able to imagine themselves doin
344.
by m-i-l 7y ago
My favourite quote from the article: "no one needs a billion dollars". Wonder if that's a reference to "A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars."
345.
by m-i-l 7y ago
I propose a simple "smell test" for "new internet" projects. A project would need at least one of the following two (not necessarily both given the maturity lifecycle): 1. Would the core platform developers work on it fo
346.
by m-i-l 7y ago
Yes, only ever seen phonics taught in the UK - wasn't aware there were alternative approaches, let alone any controversy on the topic. It might not be clear from the original article, but it isn't just single letters, there are al
347.
by m-i-l 7y ago
Yes, by "band asking the bar to play for free (i.e. the producer going to the advertiser)" I mean the band are the producers of the product, and the band are initiating a transaction with the bar who are the advertiser for that pr
348.
by m-i-l 7y ago
The difference is in who tries to initiate the transaction - the producer or the advertiser. In the case of the band in the bar it would be the band asking the bar to play for free (i.e. the producer going to the advertiser), but in the cas
349.
by m-i-l 7y ago
> where does it all come from? The UK doesn't have a lot of sunshine, nor do I see a lot of wind farms compared to other EU countries For Scotland at least the stats are: - Onshore wind 7.8GW - Hydro 1.655GW - Offshore wind 0.623G
350.
by m-i-l 7y ago
Would you be happy to give a bunch of pre-school children some weapons of mass destruction and "let them launch and see what happens"? I admit that we can't be sure what would happen, but personally I can't see how the o
351.
by m-i-l 7y ago
In the very early days, you didn't need a search engine because there weren't that many web sites and you knew most of the main ones anyway (or later on had them in your own hotlists in Mosaic). Nowadays you need a search because
352.
by m-i-l 7y ago
Unless there's a significant change in human behaviour, convenience is always going to trump everything else including privacy - we have seen over and over again that people will happily hand over their personal data in return for a fr
353.
by m-i-l 7y ago
That's Occam's Razor. There are all these complex theories that people in positions of power who come across as idiots must in actual fact be master manipulative geniuses given they can so convincingly fake blithering idiocy and t
354.
by m-i-l 7y ago
I think this may be conflating individuals with corporate entities. Certainly from a corporate entity perspective both have significant capital requirements. But from an individual perspective, to be an influential figure at a central bank
355.
by m-i-l 7y ago
Yes, they would be doing something they would be doing anyway, e.g. exercising at a gym, with the electricity generation just a useful byproduct. Wasn't thinking along the lines of something like a Matrix-style human power plant.
356.
by m-i-l 7y ago
> If Libra is an oligarchy, closed financial systems are dictatorships Given the global financial system is not controlled by one individual, it isn't a Dictatorship (power of one) but is more like a form of Oligarchy (power of th
357.
by m-i-l 7y ago
I love the concept of this. Not so much to capture energy from individuals who are using the devices purely to produce energy, but to capture the energy produced from large groups doing something that they would be doing anyway, e.g. people
358.
by m-i-l 7y ago
Including the British pound - until decimalisation in 1971, the abbreviations for pounds, shillings and pence were Lsd (with the L often having a single or double cross bar) from the Latin libra, solidus and denarius respectively.
359.
by m-i-l 7y ago
This aligns to the timings of the switch to ICE, which appears to be between 1914 and 1917 - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20181692 .
360.
by m-i-l 7y ago
"In 1914: 38% of all the cars on the road were electric; 22% gasoline, 40% steam powered."[0] "by 1917, only 50,000 electrics were registered compared to 3.5 million IC cars. Steamers were all but gone"[1] Assuming both

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