mr_toad

4 ms·

1.
by mr_toad 6d ago
> In other words: only <20% of pur neuron budget goes to higher cognition (thinking, language, seeing, hearing). 80% is spent on motor skills. Probably why robotics is harder than making a language model.
2.
by mr_toad 6d ago
“He is President” works when it’s clear which position you’re referring to. “He is doctor” sounds wrong because there’s rarely just one doctor.
3.
by mr_toad 8d ago
There are dozens of lakes in England, and a few in other english speaking countries with the word mere in their name.
4.
by mr_toad 9d ago
In my experience with databases the answer is never never, and never always, and it’s almost always sometimes and maybe.
5.
by mr_toad 11d ago
That would have been right around the time that airlines were transitioning to jet aircraft. Back before jet travel it could take a whole week to reach the far east.
6.
by mr_toad 13d ago
> They've never said that You know that humans can lie, right?
7.
by mr_toad 13d ago
We also spent a lot of money fixing non-critical systems that would have had next to zero impact if they’d failed. A middle manager not getting their sales report on time is not critical. But at least with Y2K some effort was made in ident
8.
by mr_toad 13d ago
There are many technologies that have killed and hurt a lot more people than nuclear weapons that are not monopolised by governments. Cars and guns are two examples where ‘wanton usage’ can (and has) killed millions of people. Obviously th
9.
by mr_toad 14d ago
Much much bigger. Visiting it now is quite sad.
10.
by mr_toad 14d ago
> The waymo vehicle called the cops Waymo called the cops. It’s not clear if it was the vehicle, or a human in the company. I suspect the latter.
11.
by mr_toad 16d ago
Long tail works well when the marginal cost is near zero and most of the upfront costs are born by someone else.
12.
by mr_toad 17d ago
They must bend and flex, or they will crumple. Soon they will congregate, enclosed within the fold.
13.
by mr_toad 18d ago
> But these perceptions itself stands on top of consciousness. There’s plenty of evidence for unconscious perception.
14.
by mr_toad 21d ago
It was a New Year’s resolution that was broken by the next morning.
15.
by mr_toad 21d ago
Current levels of solar panel coverage on Earth are approximately 0%. If we ran the entire Earth on Solar power we’d need ~ half a million square kilometres, around 0.1 percent of the Earth’s surface.
16.
by mr_toad 21d ago
No graphics output. And so loud you wouldn’t be able to hear your game either. Also they use about 1kw of power, so you’d only want to run it in the winter.
17.
by mr_toad 22d ago
> And with typical main sequence stars lasting under 10 billion years For mid to large size stars, yes. But Red dwarf stars are expected to live for trillions of years.
18.
by mr_toad 22d ago
The biggest costs and sources of delays to building high speed rail in the UK are legal challenges from people who don’t want any construction to take place anywhere near them.
19.
by mr_toad 23d ago
The browser can easily handle millions of calculations and then render a million DOM elements so quickly that you won’t even notice it. The problem is when you try and do this hundreds of times very second. The irony is that obsessing over
20.
by mr_toad 23d ago
“It goes without saying that if any of the turbine fragments had entered the passenger cabin, there would have been injuries, if not fatalities, even if the plane later landed safely.” They got lucky.
21.
by mr_toad 23d ago
> Grammar and sentence structure are but mear suggestions Learning French has been eye opening, in that many grammatical structures that are optional in English are compulsory in French. Abbreviations for example: “it is” or “it’s” are
22.
by mr_toad 23d ago
Linguistic diversity has been used as a casus belli, at least indirectly. It’s something that populations will take up arms for, so it’s probably worth tiptoeing around.
23.
by mr_toad 23d ago
> So we'll need neural methods which can be learned Data is a problem. LLMs had the advantage of the whole internet to train on. Robots don’t have that corpus of information. And real time learning seems to be something that ever
24.
by mr_toad 24d ago
I guess they assume that nobody with a personal domain cares enough to sue them over this.
25.
by mr_toad 24d ago
Somewhat off topic, but Oracle database connection strings seem to be a form of Lisp. It makes me wonder why they would choose that.
26.
by mr_toad 24d ago
> It's also the idiotic thing about gold, a metal that has no more or less inherent monetary value than a fiat currency =) I don’t know why people keep repeating that. Half of gold production is used in industry and for jewellery.
27.
by mr_toad 25d ago
Not classifying things seems like a really good way to get your fingers burnt, or get poisoned, starved, or eaten, drowned, or die in many different interesting ways.
28.
by mr_toad 25d ago
Science doesn’t care about collective consciousness. Nor does the universe.
29.
by mr_toad 25d ago
It’s not vague or unimportant. Clearing their orbits literally made them planets because they absorbed the mass of everything they cleared out.
30.
by mr_toad 25d ago
In science, classification should have some predictive value. You should be able to predict the characteristics or behaviour of a class member based on its classification. For example if you classify something as a fruit you could predict

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