smithkl42

8 ms·

61.
by smithkl42 1y ago
I don't know that I would draw that sharp of a distinction between archaeological and Biblical evidence. Pretty much every strata of the Bible that we have, from pretty much every age, assumes that even Yahweh's worshipers are awa
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by smithkl42 1y ago
The Wikipedia article is a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baal Like all matters concerning the gods in the ancient near east, it's complex, and every answer has to be qualified. So apparently i
63.
by smithkl42 1y ago
"Baal" was less a name than a title. In modern Hebrew, it just means "lord" or "husband". It was also apparently a title that could, at some stages of Israel's history, even be applied to YHWH, much like &
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by smithkl42 1y ago
"missing for a millennium" - according to both the article and the journal piece, the most recent of these fragments is nearly two millennia old. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/iraq/article&
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by smithkl42 1y ago
We're paying for Copilot for Office365. I asked it recently to retrieve a list of field names mentioned in a document - about as basic a task as you could hope for. It told me it couldn't do so. My precise request: "Extract t
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by smithkl42 1y ago
I used VSS for a few years back in the late 90's and early 2000's. It was better than nothing - barely - but it was very slow, very network intensive (think MS Access rather than SQL), it had very poor merge primitives (when you c
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by smithkl42 1y ago
I don't know how well this holds out, but one thing I've noticed is that the very best developers I've worked with are all fast on the keyboard - not just fast at typing code or comments or emails or whatever, but they have a
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by smithkl42 1y ago
This doesn't actually sound encouraging. Judgment is not actually independent of skill, and the sort of music that this approach produces (i.e., nearly everything you hear on the radio these days) is a pretty solid proof of that.
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by smithkl42 1y ago
Maybe kinda analogous to the difference between declarative and imperative languages. They (supposedly) don't do step-by-step reasoning to get at the truth, they just "see" it. Like the old story about Bhaskara's proof o
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by smithkl42 1y ago
Heading out on Friday to do a black bear hunt in two of those Grizzly recovery zones...
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by smithkl42 1y ago
Did you sleep all night, and work all day?
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by smithkl42 1y ago
And in the process, they ended up creating an extremely powerful type system that ~nobody outside of that original team can (fully) understand.
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by smithkl42 1y ago
I made the observation back in the 90's that Word will always take several seconds to load. Any longer and it becomes too painful, so Microsoft will figure out a way to fix it. Any shorter and it just means that there are more bloated
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by smithkl42 1y ago
Absolutely LLMs can reason. There are limitations on their ability to reason, as you and everyone else has discovered. But they can absolutely reason about both concepts and the physical world in ways that, say, animals can't - even th
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by smithkl42 1y ago
The Chinese Room argument is a great thought experiment for understanding why the computational model is an inadequate explanation of consciousness and qualia. But it proves nothing about reason , which LLMs have clearly shown needs to be
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by smithkl42 1y ago
We've been asked that question before on security questionnaires, and our answer has always been, "Forcing users to change passwords regularly is widely regarded as a very bad security practice, and we don't engage in bad sec
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by smithkl42 1y ago
In C#-land, we just have it as a standard that ~every table inherits from `ITrackable`, and we wrote a little EF plugin to automatically update the appropriate columns. public interface ITrackable { DateTime CreatedOn {get; set;} Da
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by smithkl42 2y ago
Completely agreed. All the nonsense about getting just exactly the right soil composition, letting the soil "age", and what-not, seems bizarre and silly. If an animal needs to use the bridge, it'll learn to use the bridge. Sp
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by smithkl42 2y ago
FWIW, that doesn't appear to be a "hasty rebrand" - Oracle has had this distinction for a long time. https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/enterprise-performance...
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by smithkl42 2y ago
I'm the CTO of a US-based insurance company. Apart from some reinsurers in London and Bermuda, and a couple contractors in Canada, we don't do business outside the US. We've blocked all countries except those, and it has cut
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by smithkl42 2y ago
I don't know the details, but it sounds like there's a legitimate discussion to be had there. But the author's tone makes it difficult to trust that her reporting is in good faith. If there were extenuating circumstances, I w
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by smithkl42 2y ago
I think it really is a problem if they're getting artifacts without clear provenance. They've had to return some manuscripts, and I thought that they'd cleaned up their acquisition process. But perhaps not? https:/&#x2F
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by smithkl42 2y ago
I wish the author was a little less over-wrought in her descriptions of the Green family's religious commitments. I've heard complaints before about the Green's artifact acquisition process, and they've had to return som
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by smithkl42 2y ago
I run the tech org for an insurance company. We've got a team of about 30 folks working on a system that manages hundreds of thousands of policies. Apart from the API's we call (a couple of them internal, belonging to our Analytic
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by smithkl42 2y ago
I only ever played with DCOM and Transaction Server, and never in production, but I do wonder what about that tech stack made it so absolutely unworkable, and such a technological dead-end? Did anyone ever manage to make it work?
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by smithkl42 2y ago
Or more simply: "Science progresses one funeral at a time."
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by smithkl42 2y ago
"I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say “A green great drago
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by smithkl42 5y ago
Swyfft Insurance | C# Developers | Full Time | 100% Remote (US only, sorry!) https://www.swyfft.com/careers Salary: $100K-180K Swyfft is an Insurtech, primarily focused on Homeowners. We're not as well known as Lemonad
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by smithkl42 9y ago
As it turns out, Daniel Bennett is an atheist materialist crank who has developed evasive "materialist arguments" which apparently tell us that the universe has no cause of existence, which turns out (shock, horror!) to be the sta
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by smithkl42 9y ago
Heck, still is. C# is a nice, pragmatic, practical language, and the VS/Resharper combination can't be beat anywhere, period. I love how lazy it lets me be.

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