mcswell

23 ms·

301.
by mcswell 1y ago
And Microsoft said it would be too hard to maintain both the Ribbon and the traditional menus. Somehow LibreOffice does what Microsoft said was too hard.
302.
by mcswell 1y ago
> Small models used to mean tiny. Now they mean "runs without drama." Does this mean without a dedicated electric power plant? I wanted to say "Right, big-sized. Do you want fries with that?", but I couldn't fig
303.
by mcswell 1y ago
I've reviewed computational linguistics papers in the past (I'm retired now, and the field is changing out from under me, so I don't do it any more). But all the reviews I did were double blind.
304.
by mcswell 1y ago
Aren't Adobe products even worse today? Although I confess I've only ever used Adobe Acrobat, but I recall that the controls became exceedingly hard to figure out, and took up excessive screen space, somewhere around 2010. I now
305.
by mcswell 1y ago
One other gripe that I have with modern UIs, which I didn't see mentioned (but which I might just have read past) is the scattering of controls in different places. Many are, of course, across the top in either a real menu or (yuck) a
306.
by mcswell 1y ago
Given that individual photons of infrared carry less energy than photons of visible light, how does this work? IR goggles convert IR photons into electrons, amplify the electrons, and convert those amplified electrons back into visible pho
307.
by mcswell 1y ago
My (mis?)understanding was that two receivers acting as an interferometer can only resolve things that are on a line parallel with the line between the receivers--so if the receivers are on a horizontal, then they can resolve left and right
308.
by mcswell 1y ago
There was a time when there were no automobiles in New York City, but there was lots of public transportation. (Ok, there were horses and the consequent manure, and the population was way smaller then. But still...)
309.
by mcswell 1y ago
What is the closest?
310.
by mcswell 1y ago
I wonder whether a way to get around this problem would be to show the student buggy Prolog programs, maybe even buggy solutions to textbook problems--whether the "solutions" are produced by AI or by humans might not matter. The s
311.
by mcswell 1y ago
Hieroglyphics are the opposite of "discoverable". That's why they became uninterpretable for almost two thousand years, until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. And even then it took considerable work to figure out how the
312.
by mcswell 1y ago
And 100% of what you don't need--the Ribbon--was not in Word 97.
313.
by mcswell 1y ago
Maybe we should assign them a practical task, like making paperclips.
314.
by mcswell 1y ago
I assume everyone knows this, but the idea of generating answers and testing them, dates back decades, and has been widely used for problems where generating _the_ correct answer(s) is difficult, but where generating a bunch of potential an
315.
by mcswell 1y ago
"It's an older code, sir, but it checks out. I was going to let them through." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HJ-Y8YTo8Q
316.
by mcswell 1y ago
I think so.
317.
by mcswell 1y ago
The 21cm wavelength is also the wavelength that was proposed for potential SETI radio communication, I guess because of its distinctiveness. Of course modern SETI searches look at a wide range of frequencies.
318.
by mcswell 1y ago
There's a scene in the recent movie Oppenheimer about that.
319.
by mcswell 1y ago
As I got right up against the wall, I noticed the little white square sign. It said, "Obviously you are not convinced that this is the end of the universe. if you will place a quarter in the slot below, the peep-hole will open, and you
320.
by mcswell 1y ago
Decades ago, I read a book (written, I think, around 1890) about Atlantis. 99% of the evidence it gave was, of course, bogus. But the one piece that seemed reasonable was an account of depth soundings by the SS Great Eastern when it laid
321.
by mcswell 2y ago
I can't really speak for why it is disagreed with--I personally find the claim that language is innate completely convincing. But one reason I've heard for disagreeing is the notion that some animals have language (not true unles
322.
by mcswell 2y ago
Thanks for these replies, I may "buy" a subscription!
323.
by mcswell 2y ago
Sheep? If it were cows, I'd be over the moon, but sheep?
324.
by mcswell 2y ago
Does The Guardian do any investigative reporting? Like the Washington Post at least used to do, and I think the New York Times still does.
325.
by mcswell 2y ago
Not true about flying. My family was definitely middle class, and we made several trips on jet airplanes, along with many other non-upper class people, in the mid-60s. Although perhaps I misunderstand your point--if your point is about som
326.
by mcswell 2y ago
I can't speak for the OP, but I think what he means is the ability to map sounds into a structured analysis of a sequence of words, and the ability to map thoughts into the same kind of structure.
327.
by mcswell 2y ago
We of course don't know. But I think the claimed evidence is that bacterial life arrived quite early in Earth's history, perhaps a few hundred million years or less after there were permanent basins of water. So the assumption i
328.
by mcswell 2y ago
We do not know whether Neanderthals could speak.
329.
by mcswell 2y ago
Chomsky had a stroke awhile back, which apparently left him unable to speak. But I guarantee that there are many linguists who would not agree that his model is dead. As for LLMs, at present they require orders of magnitude more training d
330.
by mcswell 2y ago
Yes, although there are other theories. Some of those other theories actually retain some of Chomsky's ideas, such as our innate capability to learn language (which seems to be the idea most commonly disagreed with). Two examples are

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