rthomas6

31 ms·

361.
by rthomas6 6y ago
I think Blindsight by Peter Watts has a lot of relevance. It explores (among many other things) the concept of a Chinese Room [0] as applied not only to AI, but to biological intelligence. The exploration has a lot of overlap with machine l
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by rthomas6 6y ago
I don't see what prevents updating as long as you don't care about fragmentation. You probably can't compile all brand new software on a very old Linux kernel, but who cares. I mean yeah, you'll have to care more about f
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by rthomas6 6y ago
This is one of the best arguments for federation/decentralization, is it not? It's not impossible to block a protocol, but it's harder than blocking an IP.
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by rthomas6 6y ago
I haven't. I think people are too afraid to say "I don't know". But man, our universe sure is weird. On a fundamental level. I think people under-model just how strange our universe is. Even things like Pi. Why does Pi e
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by rthomas6 6y ago
This video brings up a crackpot theory I've been toying with. I know it's crazy, but I keep thinking about it. The Fermi paradox asks, why haven't we found any alien probes? Why have we received no contact or evidence of alie
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by rthomas6 6y ago
Perhaps it also causes a commensurate increase in androgen receptors.
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by rthomas6 6y ago
There is a large amount of circumstantial evidence that the plasticizers used to replace BPA, which lowers testosterone in men, also lower testosterone, and are simply less well studied. Combined with the increased use of bottled water, t
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by rthomas6 6y ago
Android is open source.
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by rthomas6 6y ago
Yeah but, why BTC specifically? Why not ETH or ETH tokens, or any of the hundreds of other cryptocurrencies that are faster and have lower fees?
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by rthomas6 6y ago
That is fair.
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by rthomas6 6y ago
How much did you automate before you quit? Because everything, on almost every level of abstraction, is automatable. That, to me, is a lot of the appeal. If you manually mine more than the first few minutes in the game, you are doing someth
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by rthomas6 6y ago
With digital encoding, you have a defined bandwidth you have to care about (the audible range of frequencies), which puts a limit on how often you need to represent the state of the wave. Also, digital transmission does fancy things with ph
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by rthomas6 6y ago
The trick is what the encoded sequence of bits represents. You have lossless "compression" built into the encoding of almost any kind of information because it by definition has repetition of some kind (if it didn't, it would
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by rthomas6 6y ago
To get a good experience degoogling your Android phone, you have to go farther and install an aftermarket OS, like Lineage OS.
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by rthomas6 6y ago
While you're maybe not wrong about it not changing the election outcome, I just wanted to say that it was more than a few Facebook ads. Russia was the likely source of the DNC email leak. Also, it was a lot of sock puppeting and co-opt
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by rthomas6 6y ago
The Arch Linux one sort of doesn't count. The AUR is a user-created package repository. Anyone can make a build and add it to the AUR.
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by rthomas6 6y ago
I can't tell if this is satirical or not. The examples of bad software given are two of the most popular and widely used OS's of all time, and the internet. Are these things piles of hacks? Yes, but for Linux and the internet, the
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by rthomas6 6y ago
"If you disclose our existence then we will [leave/blacklist Earth/blow up the planet]."
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by rthomas6 6y ago
No unfortunately. The FPGA "build" realm is mostly a clusterfuck of proprietary tooling. It all has poor to nonexistent integration with, well, anything else. There are some things that are okay for simulation like Cocotb, but for
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by rthomas6 6y ago
I come from a sofware world not typical for HN. I am a (very) low level software and FPGA guy. Despite my best efforts, I don't understand: What do any of these tools do that Make does not? Are they faster and easier to use? Do they wo
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by rthomas6 6y ago
Hasn't it always been this way? The only difference is now there are a lot more computer-illiterate people using computers.
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by rthomas6 6y ago
Reduced transportation and shipping costs means lower cost of basically all material goods, including the material cost of building housing. And in that kind of economy, I think overall wages will be higher in terms of actual purchasing pow
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by rthomas6 6y ago
Surely these career scientists have considered this problem that you came up with seconds after reading a press release about the idea.
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by rthomas6 6y ago
One could view the US defense budget as a sort of subsidy to Europe and Democratic Asia. If the US decreases its defense budget (by a lot), Europe will likely have to increase theirs.
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by rthomas6 6y ago
If a candidate is everyone's second choice, I don't think you can call them extreme or single issue.
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by rthomas6 6y ago
I wonder if it could be some instinctual thing. Maybe early humans had trouble with wolves for enough time that we selected for loathing them. I don't know how that would work with the existence of dogs though, so maybe not.
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by rthomas6 6y ago
I have good luck with DuckDuckGo for technical searches. It's local searches and searches about relatively current events it seems to have trouble with.
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by rthomas6 6y ago
Does it really inspire joy? Or does it just give pleasure? They are not the same.
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by rthomas6 6y ago
I'm gonna go against concensus and say I agree. There are countless excuses for why it's a net neutral or even a positive for us to waste our most finite resource (time). But chances are, you're not going to be glad you playe
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by rthomas6 6y ago
If you're familiar with Vim, you might want to give Doom Emacs a try. It has good Vim-like orgmode keybindings.

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