retrac

47 ms·

901.
by retrac 4y ago
> Or are you referring to punishing the parents? Generally these kinds of laws go after adults who sell, or otherwise enable access, to drugs, or pornography, or violent films, etc., to children. In my jurisdiction, it's a crime for
902.
by retrac 4y ago
Great point. The only time I've been required (rather than for fun/hobby purposes) to write assembly was for a controller where we didn't have a C compiler. Like I hinted, I followed the approach of writing in C (including
903.
by retrac 4y ago
https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Documents/GeminiMinnickMathFl... (large PDF) This is the flight software used in the Gemini spacecraft (1960s). The actual assembly code did not survive. It was considered sort of i
904.
by retrac 4y ago
It's not that hard to write assembly. Tedious is the word I would use. Learn how to express the basic operators of C in assembly (functions and parameters with the stack, do/while/if/for, array and struct indexing) and
905.
by retrac 4y ago
That shouldn't be too surprising. The technology used deeply influences writing. In the Latin alphabet, the upper case forms developed from the forms of letters used in stone and metal, with monumental carvings. While lowercase evol
906.
by retrac 4y ago
Yes the long S [1]. Not used at the end of a word. It's the origin of the German ẞ, which is visually a long S with a short s after. Increasingly often just written as ss, with some German dialects officially doing away with ß. Word
907.
by retrac 4y ago
It occurs to me that a program like this can be effectively complete. And stand alone. I'm sure there's a few bugs and of course always more features are possible. But this software would probably be usable as-is in 100 years f
908.
by retrac 4y ago
What's with the title change? I kinda thought the article would be about Stalin.
909.
by retrac 4y ago
You've asked a very deep question. What is the information density of language? Of general knowledge? How many bits, in theory, are required to describe the vocabulary and grammar of a language like English in a way, such that softw
910.
by retrac 4y ago
No, you're correct. I misremembered; the way the birds acquire the toxin is analogous to some poison frogs that are toxic the same way. Acquired through diet of poisonous insects. Apologies.
911.
by retrac 4y ago
Birds with toxic feathers are already known, for those wondering, though many species in New Guinea are unstudied; much of the interior is very hard to access to this day: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooded_pitohui
912.
by retrac 4y ago
I'm a millenial. At 7, I was allowed to cross the street and walk within one block (quiet suburb). At 12 I went to a school outside my immediate area, and I took the city bus there on my own. At 14 or so, I was allowed to travel any
913.
by retrac 4y ago
One of the most beautiful things about the open source / Linux world is that you rarely have to learn a new way of doing things, unless you want to. Prefer Gnome 2? Fork it. Not flippant advice -- enough people preferred it that a n
914.
by retrac 4y ago
> Only in the 50s did nuclear power find civilian (i.e. non-violent) application. Many of the early designs like Magnox and RBMK were for producing plutonium first, and power second. Nuclear power was a public relations project more tha
915.
by retrac 4y ago
Nuclear reactors produce plutonium. A world without any nuclear reactors or uranium enrichment facilities, is a world without nuclear weapons. It's perhaps particularly relevant with Japan; they are the nation probably most often used
916.
by retrac 4y ago
Reminds me of how and why it's illegal to booby-trap your own home and property with lethal traps, etc. Sooner or later, some drunk neighbour, or with dementia, or a kid, will try and "break in". (I've seen multiple tr
917.
by retrac 4y ago
The largest LLaMA model at ~60 billion parameters is not quite as large as ChatGPT 3 in size, and probably not quite as well trained, but it's basically in the same class. Even the complete, not quantitized model, can be run with llam
918.
by retrac 4y ago
> the uptick in driving fatalities [...] An entire generation has to be that much more reckless Smartphones.
919.
by retrac 4y ago
The tubes that are currently still produced (mostly late designs for audio use) have never been particularly rare, at least until very recently. I'm pretty sure the 12AX7 has never gone out of production completely worldwide. There&#
920.
by retrac 4y ago
A tube amplifier made in the style of mid-20th century ones is expensive, hard to transport, bulky, and requires regular tuning/maintenance (when compared to a solid-state device). Like you say, that's why people still buy and ma
921.
by retrac 4y ago
Modern digital sound processing allows the flawless recreation of a piano, and even to create an instrument with qualities no piano built in the old style could have. Everything, and more. Cheaper, probably portable, and it doesn't r
922.
by retrac 4y ago
But how would we even? Imagine all of GPT-4 is purged. Small groups, private individuals, and open source hackers have the capacity, in terms of both hardware, and datasets and algorithms and knowledge available on the Internet, to recrea
923.
by retrac 4y ago
> There’s a kind of understanding which is just coordination. For example, I could say, “Can you pass me the spoon?” And you’d say, “Here it is.” And I say, “Well, you understood me!” Because we coordinated. That’s not the same as genera
924.
by retrac 4y ago
> Machine translation is hilarious at best and dangerously wrong at worst. I picked a random passage from a novel in French I am currently reading. ChatGPT translated the three paragraphs I ran it on correctly; there are no major quibbl
925.
by retrac 4y ago
We do have a lot of hype and buzz. There's a giant AI hype bubble right now and it's going to pop and bring us back to reality. But at the same time, people are flipping out because it is, well, machine learning. I was following
926.
by retrac 4y ago
Mathematics continually surprises us when seemingly disparate areas suddenly become linked, sharing some sort of relationship that was not appreciated until much later. Some think mathematics is something like a physical law, or property of
927.
by retrac 4y ago
I think if there is any intentional misdirection going on, it's for a far more mundane goal. Governments and militaries are flying all sorts of weird, but perfectly terrestrial, craft, for all sorts of purposes, benign and some probab
928.
by retrac 4y ago
The compute costs must be extraordinary. As I understand it, inference needs, very roughly, something like 200 GB of RAM and multiple high-end GPUs/vector coprocessors, to give output not much faster than a person can type. A VM on AW
929.
by retrac 4y ago
A hot object will radiate heat as infrared. The hotter it is, the more heat it will radiate. So, a sufficiently large heatsink designed to exploit that, can cool even in a vacuum. (Theoretically, this could even be used for reactionless
930.
by retrac 4y ago
I consider the fact that these systems appear to create a very complex human-like internal model to be one of the, quite suddenly, most pressing philosophical problems of our time. If we had introspection into ML models, would they be se

More ›