retrac

5 ms·

31.
by retrac 2mo ago
> Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded
32.
by retrac 2mo ago
You know how people learn Ancient Greek to study Homer in the original language? Gilgamesh deserves that. I'm only a beginner but the refinement of the poetry is already obvious even as someone who doesn't know the language. Euph
33.
by retrac 3mo ago
Emphasis should be placed on "everything we call culture and civilization". There is a thought experiment that might help. Imagine we had a time machine, and no scruples, and we could go back and pluck babies from the past to ex
34.
by retrac 3mo ago
Quebec has a larger grid and lower rates due to its abundant hydroelectricity. Ontario's relatively high costs are from the supply mix which is about 50% nuclear, 30% hydro, 10% wind, 10% gas. Residential kWh as delivered is currently
35.
by retrac 3mo ago
We're in a prolonged guerilla conflict in Canada. We are winning but the end is not in sight yet. In Ontario every year the Ministry of Forestry distributes several million doses of rabies vaccine for wildlife. The goal is to immuniz
36.
by retrac 3mo ago
I think a reasonable definition of "novel" is a long-form work in prose, that tells narrative stories, often looking at individual families and characters and their development over time. In that sense, novels are not that novel
37.
by retrac 3mo ago
Hot sauna is often cautioned against for those with existing cardiac or vascular problems, with some reason.
38.
by retrac 4mo ago
The US ambassador to Iceland made an inappropriate comment about Iceland being the 52nd state and was summoned by Icelandic President to explain. A poor joke, apparently. One almost wonders if the US admin is actively trying to get one of
39.
by retrac 4mo ago
It's not a history book or even all that much a book about Lisp, despite its name, but Lisp in Small Pieces incidentally covers a lot of Lisp history. The book at its core is about implementing compilers and interpreters. It starts
40.
by retrac 4mo ago
Speech is not the same as writing. It is not interchangeable. It's not easy to compose writing aloud. Speech is a poor interface for manipulating words like that. Have you ever seen something like an ex tempore speech or panel disc
41.
by retrac 4mo ago
I have had some truly spectacular results that still kind of stagger me in the last few months using Claude in my hobby projects -- but even though Claude insists on trying to slip its name into the git history as credit it's not Claud
42.
by retrac 4mo ago
I have hearing aids with a deep-learning based noise reduction and speaker isolation/clarity features. So about 14 hours a day. Or have we moved the goal posts again?
43.
by retrac 4mo ago
I think it is an open question: can an unknown language be cracked -- without any dictionary or grammar or understanding of the language? Just lots and lots of texts, maybe some of it bilingual. It's a common misconception that is wha
44.
by retrac 4mo ago
I find significance in the shuffling and enjoy it. Always overhand. And very thorough; I have a perhaps overmechanistic view but I suspect effective divination requires true randomness in the information theory sense.
45.
by retrac 4mo ago
From what I have read the diet of people in classical antiquity was only terrible for the very poor. Most people in ancient Rome got to, at least rarely, eat honey cakes and fresh fruit and dried fish and maybe once a year at festivals eve
46.
by retrac 4mo ago
Both Latin and Chinese have been modified by the technology used to write them. When carved in stone the lines are much straighter. When written with brush or pen they became semi-cursive. When printing was introduced, they became grid-li
47.
by retrac 4mo ago
I mean a couple of those involved got the Nobel prize.
48.
by retrac 5mo ago
They reversed the lottery thing after just two years as a failure and reinstated the previous policies. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/tdsb-scraps-lottery-m... > “They decided to put ideology ahead
49.
by retrac 5mo ago
It's so strange to see this happen in the USA when our education system up here in Canada has essentially the same set of cultural and social values and there's plenty to gripe about but we haven't had the 'levelling&#x2
50.
by retrac 5mo ago
> I could a bit biased because I do have prior experience with SML You're probably under-weighing this factor. The average programmer looks at SML syntax and cannot make, pardon the expression if you will, heads or tails of it. Inde
51.
by retrac 5mo ago
For fun I've been vibe coding something I know well: toolchains. Maybe not the right thing to vibe code. But I can more or less judge the quality of the output. When left to its own devices with the instructions "make an assembl
52.
by retrac 5mo ago
> Can you take fluticasone permanently? This is a surprisingly controversial question. I've known more than one person who claims something to the effect of becoming addicted to Flonase. Like now they have to take it only to feel l
53.
by retrac 5mo ago
when pigeons are navigating their brainwaves oscillate around 150 - 200 Hz a 60 fps computer display for pigeon vision is like a sequential slideshow it's much too slow to blur into what they would perceive as motion many species of bi
54.
by retrac 5mo ago
We may never truly know when writing was invented. There's a stele that was discovered in 1986 [1] in Veracruz. You could be forgiven if you think that writing is Maya. But it is not. It some other language. A couple other small fr
55.
by retrac 5mo ago
Very interesting. My new hearing aids support Auracast and there's a complete dearth of transmitting equipment. I remain unconvinced about Auracast. This kind of short-range broadcast is what analog baseband radio (induction loop) st
56.
by retrac 5mo ago
How are you for task completion? For me, transferring a load of laundry from the washer to dryer is not an atomic operation. There is ample room to get derailed and wander off during the twenty seconds it should take. It can be interrupt
57.
by retrac 5mo ago
I've encountered several times an argument that goes something like this: corporations and other large economic or political institutions are the "original" AI agent -- slow and human-mediated, but with the same quality of no
58.
by retrac 6mo ago
> Modern implementation of FPU emulation might be more straightforward. Most 32-bit designs throw an exception on an invalid instruction so it can be caught and handled at runtime. Even basic ARM Cortex-M0 chips throw a catchable except
59.
by retrac 6mo ago
Focal length. In a phone camera the lens is smooshed right against the sensor. Such cameras have fisheye-type lenses, and the image is cropped in the centre and dewarped in software. But it's just not the same. That said convenienc
60.
by retrac 6mo ago
Oh yes there's been some ELKS activity lately. Does it support the 286's 16-bit protected mode at all? 286 protected mode has the 8086-style 16-bit addresses and segmentation. But with virtualization and protection. Not very many

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