p-e-w

33 ms·

631.
by p-e-w 3y ago
Because academics love to cling to outdated and today factually incorrect terminology, while arrogantly berating the general public when they do the same. "Actually, it's not called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis anymore. The preferr
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by p-e-w 3y ago
If by some sequence of miracles society manages to avoid the seemingly inevitable slide into a techno-totalitarian future, there is no doubt that Free Software will be what makes that possible. I consider it quite likely that Stallman and T
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by p-e-w 3y ago
That is a common misunderstanding. Even if no safeguards are in place, asking an LLM what its "system prompt" is does not guarantee it will accurately reproduce the same. LLMs are not databases. They don't have perfect recall
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by p-e-w 3y ago
Indeed. Ambiguity in legal codes is a feature that allows them to remain relevant for more than a couple of years, and the formal-law "utopia" that some commenters here appear to desire would be a nightmare if put into practice.
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by p-e-w 3y ago
This project seems to implicitly assume that a formally specified code of laws, where statutes can be interpreted largely mechanistically, is a good thing (and by extension, that the existing system of human interpreters with discretion and
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by p-e-w 3y ago
It's pretty amazing how much data this relatively cheap device makes available over BLE, and how easy it is to access that data. Is there a list of health monitoring devices that can be read programmatically without requiring proprieta
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by p-e-w 3y ago
The next US president, who has unlimited access to all classified information, is going to be either 78 or 82 years old at the beginning of their term. That sounds like a much greater potential threat than regular national security worker
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by p-e-w 3y ago
So the author, a philosophy professor, casually permitted themselves to vandalize a public resource "for science", with the only accommodation given to the public being that they generously fixed their own vandalism after 48 hours
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by p-e-w 3y ago
> There's enough inchoate nonsense on the Internet I agree 100%. But the top-level comment is not an example of such. However, the reply in question – and your comment – are certainly examples of the kind of tone-deaf, needlessly ag
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by p-e-w 3y ago
> And, thanks to Moore's law, they now are. Not thanks to "Moore's law". Thanks to the countless engineers who made that happen, and whose work is much more important for today's AI systems than the theory that w
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by p-e-w 3y ago
Modern AI depends on one thing above all else: The unimaginable compute power provided by today's GPUs. All theoretical foundations are trivial by comparison. The basic math can be understood by an interested high school student, but u
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by p-e-w 3y ago
The article clearly has xenophobic undertones, which is somewhat surprising for CBS. But then again, American society's reaction to xenophobia strongly depends on which country/group the xenophobia is directed against, and CBS i
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by p-e-w 3y ago
> That's akin to Ferrari covering their very exclusive cars with promo stickers hawking those ferrari licensed asus laptops. No it's not, because Windows is not a "premium" or "exclusive" product, at all. It
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by p-e-w 3y ago
Gatekeeping gives power to the gatekeepers. It's literally one of the easiest social phenomena to understand.
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by p-e-w 3y ago
> a short&simple jq-snippet can work wonders for readability of the overall script. ... if the reader happens to be familiar with the niche language "jq". Otherwise, you may as well have put some Akkadian cuneiform in there
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by p-e-w 3y ago
> Dean was doing an Erlang project so he asked “What example program would best exemplify Erlang“. I wish such a canonical example was easy to find for every programming language, particularly those on the boundary between mainstream and
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by p-e-w 3y ago
> That's exaxtly why jq is so nice. Nice alternatives just don't exist Write a simple Python script, parse JSON into native objects, manipulate those objects as desired with standard Python code, then serialize back into JSON i
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by p-e-w 3y ago
You're making it sound as if the headline was poorly written, perhaps by accident or by a poor writer. I can assure you that isn't the case. Whoever wrote that headline is a copywriting genius. The headline conveys almost the exa
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by p-e-w 3y ago
> The core Unix philosophy is about enabling workflows that combine a set of independent tools in novel ways. You mean like ls | rm deletes the files in a directory? Uh wait, that doesn't actually work. Because the Unix too
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by p-e-w 3y ago
That's a very important insight. Faster doesn't mean less effort. More efficient doesn't mean more intuitive. I think that today's hacker attitude tends to drastically underestimate the degree to which natural languages
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by p-e-w 3y ago
> Recently, I had a chat with some of my friends about Nushell and why they stuck with traditional shells like bash/zsh or the "new" hotness like fish rather than using Nushell. Umm... because Nushell is pre-1.0, with majo
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by p-e-w 3y ago
Why exactly do I still need a middleman in 2023 to talk to someone else's computer? Is NAT the only reason? Also, why exactly did we introduce IPv6 again? Everything today is NAT-within-NAT-within-NAT (much of it using IPv4), and almos
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by p-e-w 3y ago
Is it? There have been two major nuclear power accidents in 70 years of civilian use. The total death toll, including long-term cancer deaths, from Chernobyl is typically estimated around 4,000. For Fukushima it's a few dozen at most (
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by p-e-w 3y ago
> SF is pretty much always about the current day. I'm not sure that's true, although in the past two decades or so it may have been. But going back to the classics of 1960s and 1970s SF, I just don't see it. Sure, The For
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by p-e-w 3y ago
> The rise and fall of the Nile. The ancients noticed patterns, but had almost no causative understanding of what was happening. > The influence of the moon and the sun on weather and tides. Even Newton didn't correctly understan
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by p-e-w 3y ago
It's pretty surprising how strongly top performance at that institution seems to correlate with accomplishments later in life that are mostly unrelated to academic prowess. That isn't true for regular universities, I think.
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by p-e-w 3y ago
The design of a time capsule is above all else a task of cross-cultural communication. Until very recently, ethnography, linguistics, and social psychology simply didn't exist as formal disciplines. Prior to the 20th century, questions
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by p-e-w 3y ago
I'm not a fan of such relativizations. Today's understanding of just about anything is unimaginably more complete than it was 200 years ago. The amount of thought that tends to go into such projects today puts to shame all that 19
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by p-e-w 3y ago
IMO, voice alteration in general would undermine the concept, which is to hear genuine human voices. That seems like the opposite of what you want. Have you considered limiting the number of voice messages non-paying users can post? As in,
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by p-e-w 3y ago
> I feel like there will be people telling me that I am exploiting people's loneliness if I ever make a penny from this. That would be a silly objection, like claiming restaurants are exploiting people's hunger by selling food

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