retrac

38 ms·

451.
by retrac 3y ago
> Surely learning an algorithm is memorization? Yes. In a sense, every algorithm can be reduced to memorization, where you precalculate all possible inputs to all possible outputs and store them in a giant lookup table.
452.
by retrac 3y ago
You'll need some analog circuitry. Not much, but phone service has some kinks electrically speaking. A phone on-the-hook appears like an open circuit to direct current. Off-the-hook the circuit is closed, and current starts flowing.
453.
by retrac 3y ago
One thing I rarely see noted in these discussions is that no other animal treats or processes their food like humans, even without fire or fermentation. We effectively pre-chew our meals with our hands, breaking everything into a nice bite
454.
by retrac 3y ago
Async processors have been around a long time, and some were sold commercially in the pre-microprocessor days. The IAS machine and clones, designed by von Neumann's team in the 1940s, was asynchronous. A bit later, the PDP-6 and firs
455.
by retrac 3y ago
Some embedded compilers will provide stdint. And if the compiler doesn't, I've found that one of the first headers written for a project ends up being an equivalent to stdint. It's pretty common to develop part of an embedde
456.
by retrac 3y ago
> The context of the Iliad, ancient Greece, is completely alien to the modern US, just as it is to modern China I'm not sure about that. We do not still have the same emphasis on the classics as a century ago, but western societies
457.
by retrac 3y ago
These are settled questions if you substitute "sales employee" for "chatbot". Or at least, the law has mechanisms to answer such questions. Easy example first: if you're trying to fast-talk someone into agreeing to
458.
by retrac 3y ago
Oh, the idea is even older. In 1980, video games downloaded over cable TV, was tested in a few US cities. Intellivision! Same basic idea. Cable service allowed very fast (1 Mbit/s approximately) transmission for the time, so games
459.
by retrac 3y ago
> 60-70% taxes The highest Dutch tax bracket is 50%, but that only applies to income over 75K EUR. Also, VAT doesn't apply to rent, and it's reduced for food. Housing and food are most household's largest expenses. So t
460.
by retrac 3y ago
That's a variation on the anthropic principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle Maybe a kind of observer bias. If the universe weren't seemingly-perfectly balanced to allow emergent complexi
461.
by retrac 3y ago
It's the original "honey pot". (That's where the term comes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recruitment_of_spies#Love,_hon... ) A Canadian MP was recently dating a Communist spy: https:/&
462.
by retrac 3y ago
Heh, that screenshot is relatively high-resolution for the time in question, too. 800x600 maybe? The compact Macs were 512x342: https://www.betalogue.com/images/uploads/microsoft/pce-mac-w... (The toolbars
463.
by retrac 3y ago
A similar effect: the imperative (giving orders). It is nearly as taboo in English, to just use the imperative, as it is in Japan. For example, if you have a dinner guest, you will ask "Would you like some more? Could you pass the s
464.
by retrac 3y ago
"Copyleft compliance". Some argue the GPL and other copyleft licences help ensure the right to repair by helping to enforce the availability of source code. > We recently launched Use The Source (alluded to above), which helps
465.
by retrac 3y ago
Yes. A dedicated eink reader usually goes into full suspend-to-RAM mode, between each page refresh. Also, e-ink displays consume power when they update. It takes a lot of energy to change the state of the pigment cells, and no power when
466.
by retrac 3y ago
In northern Ontario an acre truly in the middle of nowhere costs just a few hundred dollars. An acre next to a road with year-round access to the highway system is more like $10,000. Most of the value of land is derived from how close it i
467.
by retrac 3y ago
Some more info about the lawsuit: https://avn.com/business/articles/legal/attorney-wants-to-su... (NSFW warning -- AVN is "Adult Video News") It's an interesting legal thought experiment. Poss
468.
by retrac 3y ago
> Of course digital cameras do a lot of processing on the captured sensor data. They don't, though. Oh, the awful camera in a smartphone does, because the sensor is so tiny and there's barely any lens. But classically speakin
469.
by retrac 3y ago
Aren't steroids (criminally) illegal in many countries?
470.
by retrac 3y ago
China's ongoing industrialization is so immense, that any and all forms of energy are desirable - coal, natural gas, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro - all are being built as fast as they can be. > China leads the world in constructing n
471.
by retrac 3y ago
> required many years until achieving a decent implementation for multi-threaded CPUs and during that time they have remained long behind Linux and other operating systems Many OSes at the time had hitches with SMP. BSD was one of them
472.
by retrac 3y ago
On Youtube lately, I have lately mostly been watching videos on metal smelting and ancient Mesopotamia. There are conspiracies about these topics, apparently. I wouldn't have thought so. But the Youtube algorithm manages to dredge th
473.
by retrac 3y ago
The whole "CIA agent" probably comes from "special agent" which is the title for US police investigators, who sometimes do work undercover, mostly on domestic policing matters. The CIA does have special agents, but it&#
474.
by retrac 3y ago
With the right conditions underneath AC power lines, you can light (dimly) a standard fluorescent tube by, literally, grounding one end of it. Gets turned into an art project now and then: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bristol/
475.
by retrac 3y ago
The correlation is most likely that, power lines are unsightly and people don't want to live near them, so it's actually measuring socioeconomic status. Some sort of electrostatic attraction of pollutants is another idea that gets
476.
by retrac 3y ago
> reading We learn to read aloud, and there's usually a long transitional period of subvocalization. And even people who can read silently, if they want to very carefully understand something, often subvocalize it - even moving the
477.
by retrac 3y ago
I must have expressed it poorly, because my conjecture seems to apply equally to blind people. Looking back, maybe it's because I wrote "see and hear"? Just an artifact of my perspective as a hard-of-hearing person who reli
478.
by retrac 3y ago
I have a conjecture, that we understand language primarily through proprioception. So when we see and hear someone talking, we mirror and model their muscle movements, and we understand it fundamentally, in terms of our own body moving. I
479.
by retrac 3y ago
To whom is it offensive if I describe myself as "culturally Christian"? Christians? Why? Which term would you prefer I use, to describe the effect I mentioned?
480.
by retrac 3y ago
What? People do talk of "cultural Islam". There's literally a Wikipedia page on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Muslims Cultural Muslims would be people who grew up in a predominantly Musl

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