mcswell

15 ms·

271.
by mcswell 1y ago
The edges are labeled by transitive verbs, where the arrow points from the subject of that verb to the direct object. (I'm counting particle verbs, like "leads to", as verbs.) The nodes are labeled by nouns. If you can cha
272.
by mcswell 1y ago
The sphericity of the Earth was not what Galileo and the Church were arguing about--they were arguing about whether the Sun revolved around the Earth, or the Earth around the Sun.
273.
by mcswell 1y ago
Sans serifs...except when the serifs help distinguish 1 from l and from I, etc. Why not use a monospaced serif font in the first place? I get that they don't seem to be common, but maybe they should be.
274.
by mcswell 1y ago
Religions (I happen to be a Christian) have answers to this. For most of them, physical or economic progress is not the answer, at least not the main answer. That said, all but the most religious people have a mix in their head (and I incl
275.
by mcswell 1y ago
BTW, I decided I'd see if there was an XPath library for Prolog (once my favorite programming language, and with some conceptual/ algorithmic similarity to XSLT, I think, although XSLT has nothing like Prolog's backtracking).
276.
by mcswell 1y ago
I did know XPath, although I found out the other day that I'd forgotten a lot about it. I was programming in Python using the xml.dom library, which afaict doesn't use XPath at all--I wish it did, I had a very deeply nested set o
277.
by mcswell 1y ago
I was wondering whether I was the only person to think XSLT was a poor tool, although for different reasons. I had to work with XSLT for several years, and it felt like the worst programming language I had ever seen. For me, the use of co
278.
by mcswell 1y ago
I guess this is not directly related, but I worked on a modified DocBook XML schema for some years. We were writing grammars of natural languages, so we had no use for some of the DocBook constructs, and needed to add others. That wasn&#x
279.
by mcswell 1y ago
I wonder whether the reason carriage making was viable on the small scale is that there weren't any (many? Studebaker was an exception) large carriage makers. Had Henry Ford's assembly line technology been applied earlier to maki
280.
by mcswell 1y ago
(OP here) I kid you not, the person whose phone went off inside the SCIF was holding his phone next to a window, complaining about the poor signal. He was some kind of scientist or engineer who had been given a clearance as an "exper
281.
by mcswell 1y ago
I might be a wealthy person if "my" company had survived the Depression. Which company is that, you ask? My last name is Maxwell. (But afaik, none of my ancestors owned or even worked for that car company.)
282.
by mcswell 1y ago
It may be that LLM-AI is a dead end on the path to General AI (although I suspect it will instead turn out to be one component). But that doesn't mean that LLMs aren't good for some things. From what I've seen, they represe
283.
by mcswell 1y ago
"With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence." I'm missing something here. First, I thought Steve's point
284.
by mcswell 1y ago
We knew that Hegseth didn't understand (or didn't believe in) security. It's not surprising that Trump, who had highly classified documents laying around in Mar a Lago, doesn't either. Years ago, I was in a classified m
285.
by mcswell 1y ago
I guess they should have SuperSized™ it.
286.
by mcswell 1y ago
What do you care if a program takes one second or half a second, or even 1/10 of a second?
287.
Nano-engineered thermoelectrics enable scalable, compressor-free cooling(jhuapl.edu)
122 points by mcswell 1y ago|62 comments
288.
by mcswell 1y ago
> 1. Terrible performance Performance only matters if you're doing something compute- or disk-intensive, and then only if the libraries you're using are Python all the way down. (AI programming, at least the kind that most of
289.
by mcswell 1y ago
Certain words, yeah. Most words, no.
290.
by mcswell 1y ago
For better or for worse, English is a lingua franca in the EU. (Sorry, France.)
291.
by mcswell 1y ago
No it isn't. That's why hieroglyphics became indecipherable for nearly 2000 years, while all the various alphabetic systems invented during that time--and many of those invented long before--remained readable.
292.
by mcswell 1y ago
I don't care about "gorgeous", and I don't know what "delightful" means. But I do know what "useable" means, and that's what I want. And translucent does not enhance useability, on the contrary
293.
by mcswell 1y ago
One reason I use a plain black background for my iPhone--I can actually read the labels under each icon. (I could use plain text rather than icons, but that's a different gripe.) Also, I can actually read the battery level indicator i
294.
by mcswell 1y ago
And the Big Bang was created by the priest's God.
295.
by mcswell 1y ago
>> The black hole in the parent universe must be much much bigger than >> anything we see in ours >> Yes and no. You're not thinking about contraction. With relativity >> we can fit a 100ft ladder inside a 10f
296.
by mcswell 1y ago
b800h, meet jameslk (see post a few lines above yours)
297.
by mcswell 1y ago
Punch cards. We need to go back to punch cards.
298.
by mcswell 1y ago
I've wondered whether the marquee idea could be behind the UFOs/ UAPs that appear to move extremely fast. Specifically, you line up a bunch of drones that can communicate with each other via directional (or just weak) radio or la
299.
by mcswell 1y ago
Discussion of this article by Gary Marcus: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/a-knockout-blow-for-llms
300.
by mcswell 1y ago
"The whole point of the Office ribbon was to consolidate controls..." And now the controls have become un-consolidated, having been scattered to all margins of the Office window.

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