puzzledobserver

9 ms·

61.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
About ten years ago, I sent a sample of my saliva to 23andMe. It was only later that I realized the privacy implications of what I'd done, and asked them to forget my data and deleted my account. Is there anything more I can do to prot
62.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
I've never played on an actual pinball machine, but spent a lot of time playing Space Cadet Pinball when I was a kid. I think I initially saw it as a random thing with bright shiny lights and funny sounds, but I eventually understood t
63.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
I like the videos posted by Practical Engineering, but I found this one unsatisfying. Both distillation and reverse osmosis are energy expensive, but this doesn't answer whether this is because these are poor techniques or because desa
64.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
Also: Why does / did legal writing prefer the structurally complex multipart sentence in the original article to this simpler two sentence version? Is there some formal ambiguity in the two-sentence version which the one-sentence versi
65.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
The term philosophy is used in the original Greek sense, "love of knowledge". As opposed to, Wikipedia tells me: theology, medicine and law. I guess it also has something to do with philosophy in the early sense of the word, befor
66.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
Does the answer to this question also depend on the order in which the pieces are laid out? I suspect yes.
67.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
Is it? Think of a single star during a galactic collision. It wants to collide with every star in the other galaxy. It gets pulled this way and that, so, in sum, it decides to collide with the oncoming galaxy as a whole. Unfortunately, desp
68.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
I have always found this refrain about freedom of speech vs freedom from consequences to be grating. I can think of only three categories of things a government can do: 1. Prevent the words from being spoken in the first place. This include
69.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
Roof-mounted solar water heaters were very common in South India too. Our childhood home had two solar panels heating a tank of water. Worked very well in summer, and there was a backup electric heater for the winter months. We also got som
70.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
I'd like to disagree with this. In particular, about [1]: It is a collection of papers in many different topics. There is little technical overlap between Alan Turing's Entscheidungsproblem paper, for instance, and Hoare's pa
71.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
In our own Indian family, family history is mostly an oral tradition. My grandparents and their relatives tell stories of their own relatives, so we know of a mythical great-great-grandfather who was apparently a doctor-on-horseback. My own
72.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
I mostly agree with you, but as a counter-point: How would one precisely draw the lines between search engines and LLMs? One provides mostly airtight attributions, and the other is famous for hallucinating citations. But this doesn't s
73.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
Basically, regular submarines blow compressed air into the ballast tanks when they need to surface. Because the Trieste goes so deep, compressed air wouldn't work. It uses fine steel shot instead. But at this point, to make it neutrall
74.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
"you need a new one." <-- New microwave, I presume?
75.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
I wonder whether the allure of migrating out of the country has lessened somewhat among more recent graduates. Speaking anecdotally, of my group of six friends (we graduated from an IIT about ten years ago), one never expressed any interest
76.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
Thanks! From the added context: 7. Pirrani's suit relied on Section 11 of the Securities Act. This alleges that the company lied in its registration document. 8. In an IPO, all shares are covered by the registration document. In a dire
77.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
Is it just me, or are newspaper articles surprisingly difficult to read? From what I understand: 1. Instead of a traditional IPO, Slack went public through an alternative process called a direct listing. 2. As part of its direct listing, Sl
78.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
Indeed, by "lightweight VM", I meant a container of the kind provided by Podman and Docker.
79.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
I wonder how Distrobox compares to nix shell. If I understand correctly, Distrobox makes it convenient to launch (and destroy) lightweight VMs on demand, while nix shell makes it convenient to drop into a shell with some package installed.
80.
by puzzledobserver 3y ago
What about limited liability? It seems to me to be an enormous concession to corporations and their shareholders, and which never seems to be questioned in popular consciousness.
81.
by puzzledobserver 4y ago
May I add "scheming" to your list of programming activities? At the macro level, this would be system design. Making sure that the architecture is extensible, transparent to failures, and easy to understand and develop for. At the
82.
by puzzledobserver 4y ago
I had previously heard of EA, and knew about paperclip maximizers, trolley problems, unintended consequences, and other risks associated with unregulated AI. But I wasn't aware of the connections between the two communities / fami
83.
by puzzledobserver 4y ago
I skimmed the article, and admittedly didn't understand much. Action principles and path integrals are unfortunately one step above where my knowledge of physics stops. But seeing a headline that reads, "Our reality may be a sum o
84.
by puzzledobserver 4y ago
But isn't this exactly the mindset that the original comment in this thread was criticizing? It might be fair to say, as a sibling comment does, that one needs younger politicians so they can better represent one's constituents. B
85.
by puzzledobserver 4y ago
CuriousMarc uploaded a video to Youtube showing the startup procedure for an HP 5061A cesium clock [0]. They switch on the clock and compare it to a GPS reference. Seeing the abstract description realized in concrete terms through hot cesiu
86.
by puzzledobserver 4y ago
The original computer assisted proof of the four colour theorem was written in IBM 370 assembler [0]. This was naturally susceptible to programming errors such as those discussed above. Gonthier's subsequent certified proof requires tr
87.
by puzzledobserver 4y ago
I might be misunderstanding Graeber, but I thought his point was that by viewing play through the calculus of evolution and survival probabilities, scientists have not paid as much attention to the fact that play is fun. How did animals com
88.
by puzzledobserver 4y ago
To install Windows 11 without a Microsoft account involves bringing up a command prompt in the middle of the installation process and typing some magic incantations. It's clearly not what Microsoft wants users to be doing.
89.
by puzzledobserver 4y ago
I agree. The American reluctance to metric units is strange and I appreciate the mathematical elegance of ISO paper sizes, but letter paper just feels more pleasant on the eyes than A4.
90.
by puzzledobserver 4y ago
Off the top of my head, I can think of two ways to resolve the paradox: 1. Reject the intuitive definition of "interesting"ness as being ill-formed. We need an objective definition non-self-referential definition of the word inter

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