strbean

22 ms·

331.
by strbean 4y ago
Interesting, I didn't know that! I always assumed it was new-age trends increasing the number. Immigration makes more sense I guess.
332.
by strbean 4y ago
It originally was the name for a non-SQL RDBMS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strozzi_NoSQL It malappropriated in 2009.
333.
by strbean 4y ago
I'm so glad this sentiment is being spread more. So tired of explaining that when I complain about SQL I *emphatically do not mean relational databases in general*, only to have everyone counter with "but relational stuff is good!
334.
by strbean 4y ago
Same phenomenon happened with Zoroastrianism in the US in the 2000s (?), growing from around 6,000 adherents to 15,000.
335.
by strbean 4y ago
Totally agree from a practicality standpoint. In regards to undue burden on companies: > I work for a startup. We occasionally have to make hardware. > What happens if we go tits up? I think if you go tits up, it's the same situa
336.
by strbean 4y ago
Right to Repair is incredibly important, but also feels incredibly insufficient in this context. What we really need is Obligation to Repair, or something of that nature. Producers of goods need to be accountable for the lifecycle of those
337.
by strbean 4y ago
The thought of an LLM interacting with the world through a MUD is entertaining :)
338.
by strbean 4y ago
The study linked in another comment finds that it doesn't reduce hospitalization or mortality: https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj.o3055 And while I understand the "see what sticks" mentality, drast
339.
by strbean 4y ago
When the little person in their garage invents the next light bulb, and goes to industry players to try to license it, they just steal their idea and legally stonewall them for the remainder of their lifespan.
340.
by strbean 4y ago
That sounds like a catastrophically bad idea.
341.
by strbean 4y ago
[Tangent warning] I recall some scare awhile back about a possible link between diphenhydramine and dementia / Alzheimer's. Googling turns up a study from 2008. Anyone know if that held water, or if there is ongoing research into
342.
by strbean 4y ago
In my experience, university CS courses are always pushing woefully outdated tooling and avoiding any remotely modern standard practices like the plague. I was lucky to have one course in 2018 in which the professor actually included the mo
343.
by strbean 4y ago
I see what you're saying; ChatGPT doesn't have a physical relationship with the world, doesn't have agency (is essentially paused until given input), doesn't have reward/punishment stimulae, etc. I do think that a l
344.
by strbean 4y ago
But we know enough about fundamental physics to know that all physical processes are statistical ones.
345.
by strbean 4y ago
Yeah, that argument seems especially hollow. Take someone and put their brain in a jar, with some Brain Computer Interface that enables call-and-response text chat. Are they suddenly not conscious, because they no longer have some transcend
346.
by strbean 4y ago
> Human minds have semantic relationships to the rest of the world that LLMs do not have. This is a bold claim that seems built on a presumption of mind-body dualism. Brains don't have semantic relationships with anything. They are
347.
by strbean 4y ago
If Data Scientists are essentially in-house management consultants, I wonder which is cheaper?
348.
by strbean 4y ago
Quick plug for https://brcaexchange.org/ It's a database of known BRCA1 and BRCA2 variants with significance scores and links to clinical research. If you get results telling you that you have variants in those genes,
349.
by strbean 4y ago
(butting in) What is recursive about the parent comment?
350.
by strbean 4y ago
> It will be interesting to see science fiction in the conventional _forms_ of fantasy I think this happened a fair amount in the forms of religious texts / mythology and mysticism in the early/mid 20th century, no?
351.
by strbean 4y ago
Maybe the intrusiveness and overreaching was just fundamental consumer protections all along.
352.
by strbean 4y ago
> I currently have no good idea how to make it work without a condition. Would this work? Or not worth computing both values each time? x = ((mask == 0) * x <<< popcount(x)) & ((mask != 0) * x ^ mask)
353.
by strbean 4y ago
There is quite a lot of slipper slope going on here. > centrally managed, and cryptographically-backed state identification cards, complete with RFID. Does not necessitate: > universally mandated > No access to anything > felony
354.
by strbean 4y ago
> The Impossible History of Soil Temperature in the Earth’s Atmosphere This one seems too good to be AI
355.
by strbean 4y ago
> big libraries are all designed to use reflection to present an API they consider usable. whistles in python
356.
by strbean 4y ago
I think the issue with nuclear energy is the combined threats of local destruction and global environmental catastrophe. They may be overblown, but mining lithium to make electric cars doesn't increase the risk of nuclear weapons proli
357.
by strbean 4y ago
I think "shell shock" vs. "PTSD" is a poor example of euphemistic language. The name "shell shock" is just inaccurate and misleading. It's a product of the poor understanding we had at the time. It would b
358.
by strbean 4y ago
> I also wanted to kill old, obsolete, crummy SQL when I first learned it as a teenager. It reminded me of FORTRAN or COBAL or something. > It took quite a lot of theory and maturity to understand why RDBMS is the right paradigm. You
359.
by strbean 4y ago
Look at the analogy to general purpose programming languages. Every single one , without exception, lets you do incredibly powerful things compared to its complexity. This hasn't stopped the progression of general purpose programming
360.
by strbean 4y ago
> except for a brief period in 2010 where we thought we could kill it Unfortunately, we never actually tried to kill SQL. We tried to kill relational databases, with the death of SQL as a side effect. This proved to be a stupid idea - no

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