rsynnott

26 ms·

781.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
This is fun. > There are of course other very minor changes. For instance, Gandalf tells Bilbo to bring out the chicken and tomatoes in the unrevised edition vs. the chicken and pickles in the revised edition. But I'll skip over the
782.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
That's a retcon. There was no indication that he was a hobbit in The Hobbit (and as others have mentioned, in the original there was no physical description at all.)
783.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
On this 'ere orange website, we don't read the article.
784.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
> And can’t go over 28mph with pedal assist. Or set the pedal assist limit at 20mph if you’re feeling especially conservative. That doesn't seem _that_ conservative, honestly. Lots of places have a 20mph/30km/h limit for _
785.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
> I hope this article will inspire people to look at e-bikes as potentially commuter car replacement, to send Bosch and other e-bike technology manufacturers a message that if they won’t supply what people need that they are going to hav
786.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
Fun thing about that: > Netscape has stipulated removal of the <marquee> element from the Internet Explorer during an HTML ERB meeting in February 1996, as a condition to removing the <blink> element from the Netscape It&#x2
787.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
You'd hope, but, y'know, AI mania.
788.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
There's an art to it. Most human attempts, and every LLM attempt I've ever seen, are awful, sometimes bordering on unreadable, but, as you say, there are a relatively small number of authors who do it well. That doesn't mean
789.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
LLM prose is typically _painful_ to read, overly long, and bullshit-heavy.
790.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
> I hired a junior "dev" who literally hadn't even completed an HTML course. I mean, I'm a fairly senior dev, and have literally never completed, or indeed really heard of, a html course. Is that, eh, part of your ave
791.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
I gather that quite a lot of companies are using dumb metrics which would show this as _good_ behaviour, these days.
792.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
Spoiler: they're basically snake oil. Or at least they are grossly insufficient.
793.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
Yes, yes, yes, this time it's different, just like the other 20 times (I reckon one of these shows up about once every four or five years).
794.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
> The closer you get to releasing software, the less useful LLMs become. Which is _always_ the case with these things, honestly. Remember Ruby on Rails? Make a Twitter clone in half an hour by just writing some DSL! Of course, in reality
795.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
Nah, that came later as the canonical example, with Ruby on Rails (which also somewhat suffered from a "programmers are irrelevant now" meme). Rails would make todo apps and twitter clones too cheap to meter (pretty much all Rails
796.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
In which spreadsheet slop arguably sinks the economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho... (This paper was extremely influential in pushing austerity policies of questionable efficacy during
797.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
A particularly alarming case: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988 And then of course there's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho... > Or will people
798.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
... That's $7,000 per employee. I want to hear more about this party :D
799.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
> Work, a team using frontier model from top 2 AI lab was using it to perform DevOps type tasks, requested "Restart XYZ service in DEV environment". It responded "OK, restarting ABC service in PROD environment". It th
800.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
Further, VW AG sells about a million electric cars a year, growing at 33% YoY. Tesla 1.6M, shrinking at 9% YoY. It is likely that VW will be a bigger _electric_ car seller than Tesla within a year or two (already is if you count PHEVs, obvi
801.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
> Sounds like the making of a scifi horror novel :D See ‘Service Model’. YMMV on whether you consider it horror.
802.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
But not most things; there was a lot of nonsense back then, too. We all go to work in a bullet fired through a tunnel by pneumatic pressure, right? (This was a real thing, and they got as far as partially building a tunnel under the Thames
803.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
… Of course they are being oversold. But also, I don’t think even Google would claim that their LLM stuff can solve problems like this.
804.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
> The answer is to keep the same number of stops but run two or more vehicles simultaneously Then you end up with buses piling up at stops, which slows everything down even more.
805.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
Well, in that case they’re also far bigger turbines (bigger than were available when the original project was built, granted).
806.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
One compromise is to tap inside; some systems do this.
807.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
There are simulators for this, and of course there's data from places that have actually done it. In Dublin we have a bit of a mixture of newish bus routes which largely have a sensible number of stops, and ancient routes (the oldest e
808.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
The opposite actually tends to increase ridership; complex fare systems put people off and tend to make getting on the bus more time consuming (may require each passenger to interact with the driver).
809.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
I suspect the evidence here would fall mostly on the side of "it increases ridership", though it's probably hard to study, as it's rarely done in isolation, but more commonly as part of route redesign.
810.
by rsynnott 8mo ago
So this used to happen on Dublin Bus, but a while back they solved it with an astonishing innovation... a second door! You get on at the front and off at the back. Given that this has been common elsewhere forever, it's unclear why it

More ›