marsten

7 ms·

61.
by marsten 2y ago
When I was at Google during the IPO I saw people with similar challenges. I can empathize with what he's going through, it can be hard to find a sense of purpose when "the need to provide" is suddenly gone and you realize tha
62.
by marsten 2y ago
That manual is a great find! Dr. Kurtz was surely way ahead of his time in aiming to bring computing to the masses, well before the microcomputer revolution. BASIC was an easy onramp to programming that hooked a ton of people on computing,
63.
by marsten 2y ago
Based on the bounds discussed at https://old.reddit.com/r/Cubers/comments/8chfuu/i_found_a_ge... it appears that a 34x34x34 cube can be algorithmically solved in under 100,000 moves. Maximum number of mo
64.
by marsten 2y ago
There are many jobs where people prefer other people to fill those roles, irrespective of the ability of machines. Most people don't want to watch computers play chess, or spend money on computer-generated art, or go to a robot therapi
65.
by marsten 2y ago
The most interesting thing to me by far was the lack of a steering wheel on the Robocab. Without manual controls, vague promises ("puffery"?) about autonomy won't drive vehicle sales as they do today across all Tesla's m
66.
by marsten 2y ago
My favorite pizza place in Sunnyvale became employee-owned, and shortly after decided they only wanted to stay open 3 days a week. I'm happy for those employees but man, I also wish I could get pizza on Monday.
67.
by marsten 2y ago
Note there is an error in the paper going from equation (60) to (63): inequality (63) should read 10^-8 Hz < mu < 10^2 Hz. This is fairly important from an observational standpoint!
68.
by marsten 2y ago
This shouldn't be an either-or situation; you do all of the above. A simple validating parser in the client would be easy to write and would have easily caught a null payload. What looks especially bad for Crowdstrike is how many thing
69.
by marsten 2y ago
That's exactly the kind of content I love on the internet, when someone smart dives deep on an obscure topic and then shares it with the rest of us.
70.
by marsten 2y ago
There's a strong geopolitical angle as well. If you force American companies to license all training data for LLMs, that is such a gargantuan undertaking it would effectively set US companies back by years relative to Chinese competito
71.
by marsten 2y ago
It's an interesting idea, that scarcity and inconvenience could make one a more thoughtful practitioner. A similar situation applies to writing. When people wrote with quills on parchment under candlelight, they did the structuring and
72.
by marsten 3y ago
The upper bound given in the paper is on emitters of one terawatt EIRP (10^12 Watts) and above. EIRP means an isotropic emitter would need to be this powerful to be detected. A beamed transmitter that happened to be pointing in our directio
73.
by marsten 3y ago
From the accounts I've read of other scientists in the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer had a connector style of personality that made him very well-suited to the role. For this type of job you don't want an Einstein who is prone to
74.
by marsten 3y ago
To be clear, gravitational waves follow the same inverse square law as EM radiation, in terms of power. This is after all just a statement of conservation of energy. The linear drop-off you're referring to is when we look at it in term
75.
by marsten 3y ago
Urs was the last of the Google old guard left. I wish him the best! He's tried to extricate himself from leadership before and that never worked out; hopefully it sticks this time.
76.
by marsten 3y ago
In principle yes, gravitational waves dissipate energy into ordinary matter they pass through. However the coupling is extremely weak (that gravitational waves are so hard to detect is testament to this). In fact this weak coupling is wha
77.
by marsten 3y ago
On the other hand, insurance companies may have no interest underwriting unusual risks when the business opportunity is small. "Deep-sea submarine tourism" is a tiny market.
78.
by marsten 3y ago
Interestingly there are no photos or video of Egan publicly available. All we have over the last 30 years is his/her/its textual output. I'm 50/50 on whether "Greg Egan" is in fact a LLM.
79.
by marsten 3y ago
Spot on, this is my experience as well. A lot of the once-sketchy parts of Berkeley, Oakland, East Palo Alto, etc. have gentrified and become safer since the 70s and 80s. Part of that has been big shifts in racial makeup and socioeconomics.
80.
by marsten 3y ago
If you're a new California homeowner, I recommend you never look up what others on your street pay in property tax.
81.
by marsten 4y ago
This is the Faustian bargain of technology: We advance collectively but each of us becomes a tiny cell in some giant organism we can't even perceive. Living entirely apart from that will someday be as impossible as a skin cell in your
82.
by marsten 4y ago
Another useful distinction when talking about long timeframes is the amount of ongoing attention needed to maintain the data. A true archival medium is one that, if stored in a reasonable environment, can be ignored and still be read at the
83.
by marsten 4y ago
Nickel is chemically and mechanically durable and doesn't easily oxidize like iron does.
84.
by marsten 4y ago
In raw form your journals may be more than anyone would care to read, but AI tools could make them interesting to future people. (a) Tools that synthesize down your life story and most interesting thoughts into N pages, (b) AIs that train o
85.
by marsten 4y ago
Cloud storage is useful for personal backup, but it's tricky on the millennium timescale of the article since no company will survive very long. If you kept duplicate copies at the top N cloud providers at any given time, then you coul
86.
by marsten 4y ago
You only realize how uninformed the media is when it covers something you know very well. I experienced this in grad school when Newsweek magazine profiled some work my lab was doing (physics), and they made a lot of simple mistakes we coul
87.
by marsten 4y ago
> there will likely be a higher than average representation from people who would sit in the 10% And also an under-representation of "average users". Python the language has always benefitted from its relative simplicity, which