samatman

21 ms·

211.
by samatman 2y ago
It doesn't actually: > Conflation is the merging of two or more sets of information, texts, ideas, or opinions into one, often in error. It can be done as a rhetorical ploy, but that's not part of the definition, it can also
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by samatman 2y ago
You're conflating an observation about the past with a prediction about the future. There's no reason to do that.
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by samatman 2y ago
Centitons of explosive then. Much like a Starship.
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by samatman 2y ago
Two paratroopers and some electronics can turn a passenger jet into a bomb carrying many kilotons of conventional explosive. Trucks have blown up buildings. Anything is a weapon if you arm it. Conversely...
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by samatman 2y ago
There's a lot of middle ground here. I suspect what's most accurate is "let's push the booster out of envelope a bit, if we get really nice numbers we'll go for the chopsticks landing, otherwise it's into the d
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by samatman 2y ago
Support for segregation is generally thought of as a right-wing position to take, is it not.
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by samatman 2y ago
I'm unaware of any definition of 'vaccine' which fits seasonal flu shots, but not COVID vaccines. Specifically, flu vaccine does not prevent infection or transmission, it has moderate therapeutic benefit and reduces instance
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by samatman 2y ago
Blink is a fork of WebKit, itself a fork of KHTML and KJS. 2024 - 1998 = 26
219.
by samatman 2y ago
I'm not sure how I could have phrased I consider the latter specifically to be very bad form any better? It's one thing to downvote a comment because you don't like it, flagging is quite another. There's a difference b
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by samatman 2y ago
When you said "productive", do you perhaps mean socially useful? It takes a lot of AI data center to derive a billion-dollar profit, which is the value just of the Bitcoin which Bhutan currently retains. Seems fairly economically
221.
by samatman 2y ago
About the downvoting per se, it has a way of canceling out. This is one of the reasons the guidelines ask that voting on the comments not be discussed: just because you see a good comment greyed out, doesn't mean it will end up that w
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by samatman 2y ago
This is a useful bit of conventional wisdom, but it helps to know when it is and isn't applicable. There is a huge amount of data analysis which uses numbers representing money as inputs where it's fine to use floating point, and
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by samatman 2y ago
Blue eyes, according to the best guess of geneticists, emerged in Europe around 7,000 to 10,000 years BP.
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by samatman 2y ago
I think (definitely not my idea, Alexander discusses it in his post) that a comfortably large tax break in exchange for a kidney donation hits the sweet spot. You can't get out of acute money problems with a tax break. Arguably still m
225.
by samatman 2y ago
The list is ranked in a completely transparent way. It's anything with the help wanted tag, ordered by number of stars. So this isn't some sneaky Microsoft thumb on the scale, the way you appear to be implying. Simpler than that:
226.
by samatman 2y ago
Because YCombinator is all about r-selecting startup ideas, and making it back on a few of them generating totally outsized upside. I think that LLMs are plateauing, but I'm less confident that this necessarily means the capabilities w
227.
by samatman 2y ago
For some value of 'old' perhaps. In terms of length of official support, and aftermarket value, Apple is at the top of the game. Those strike me as the most important metrics here. And while you might think that once official supp
228.
by samatman 2y ago
I have to assume this is some snarky way of saying "violating copyright is Bad, m'kay". Because taken at face value it's false. Any technical challenges involved in distributing a stream cannot possibly be affected by th
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by samatman 2y ago
My point is that given a prior of 'wired in a chess engine', my posterior odds that they would make it plausibly-good and not implausibly-good approaches one. For a variety of boring reasons, I'm nearly convinced that what th
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by samatman 2y ago
Piracy is distributed, yes. I think that is the point, in fact.
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by samatman 2y ago
True, but those people can move to Bluesky, and a lot of them have.
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by samatman 2y ago
I agree with you for what that's worth. I think there are two central criteria for some interaction-based online system to be called 'social media': follows, and DMs. Hacker News has neither of these things, so it isn't
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by samatman 2y ago
> we have no large software written in pascal What? This isn't true at all. TeX was written in Pascal. The original Macintosh operating system was written in Pascal, then hand-translated into assembly to fit in ROM. Pascal was ver
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by samatman 2y ago
I still think of Walter as the creator of Empire, who later went on to create D. The FM synthesis Hall of the Mountain King will be burned into my memories forever.
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by samatman 2y ago
> “Most of these vehicles received excellent safety ratings, performing well in crash tests at the IIHS and NHTSA, so it’s not a vehicle design issue,” said Brauer. “The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavio
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by samatman 2y ago
You're the one imposing an additional criterion, that OpenAI must have chosen the highest setting on a chess engine, and demanding that this additional criterion be used to explain the facts. I agree with GP that if a 'fine tuning
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by samatman 2y ago
I would say that "humans have to tokenize" is almost precisely the opposite of how human intelligence works. We build layered, non-nested gestalts out of real time analog inputs. As a small example, the meaning of a sentence said
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by samatman 2y ago
"Does it generalize past the training data" has been a pre-registered goalpost since before the attention transformer architecture came on the scene.
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by samatman 2y ago
It depends on the code as much as anything. I wrote a regex engine in Zig, and the instant I get a bug report I set breakpoints on a failing test and step through. On the other hand, I'm working on an interactive application, and when
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by samatman 2y ago
You're assuming that would be one person and one organization, the way it is now. I think that's the most likely outcome, but it isn't a safe bet by any means. In any case I hope it's a good long time before we have to f

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