thom

59 ms·

901.
by thom 4y ago
Yep, fair point. David Braben and Chris Sawyer were quite close over the years (Frontier even had an in-game ad for Transport Tycoon).
902.
by thom 4y ago
I’m sure Cunningham’s Law will deliver some improvements to this list as people trawl their youth for innovations. But one thing I think is equally interesting is the list of _lasts_ in video games. For example I’m pretty sure Frontier: Eli
903.
by thom 4y ago
What’s really funny about this is that the answer to “what’s the meaning of life?” on Ask Jeeves about 20 years ago was an Eliezer Yudkowsky essay on AI saying that if we’re too dumb to know the meaning of life, we should build machines tha
904.
by thom 4y ago
Sounds like we’re agreeing - nobody _wants_ to write async code cos it’s terrible. You didn’t quite perfect the syntax above but I’m not denying it’s possible - Clojure treats async as a library, not a fundamental language feature, for exam
905.
by thom 4y ago
I actually think async/await is a terrible primitive, and if you’re on Java, the approach of Project Loom is vastly superior (i.e. threads can be cheap so everything can just be synchronous again). I’ve no problem with library-level co
906.
by thom 4y ago
Yep, I subscribe to this viewpoint. I am not as smart as the creators of ChatGPT or whatever is to follow, so maybe we’ll get lucky that AGI is pretty smart but can’t improve itself. But I think in the general case, if we create AIs that ca
907.
by thom 4y ago
I don't want to be an utter bore, but 60% chance of AGI by 2030, taken at face value, would have prompted me as an interviewer to more urgently ask deeper questions about safety. For a long time I have tried to comfort myself that brai
908.
by thom 4y ago
Nice snappy UI. I found a couple of times on iOS that after I'd clicked through to Apple Music, if I returned, the app had somehow stopped being able to play again but this is very well done. I think I would give a boost to song names
909.
by thom 4y ago
What were the decisive victories in antiquity attributable to elephants? I feel like I’ve read countless tales of them running away or rampaging amongst their own troops but relatively few of them carrying the day.
910.
by thom 4y ago
She didn’t move to Germany, but her kids have EU passports now and for as long as that’s a thing. Mine don’t and I do sometimes feel sad about that.
911.
by thom 4y ago
Perhaps a much better question is ‘how do you plan on making money from people who plan on making money from ChatGPT?’
912.
by thom 4y ago
The ZX Spectrum keyboard was a thing of wonder, and probably single-handedly responsible for me getting into programming just because of the keyword labels. I'm sure if I revisited it today I'd find it annoying but I don't re
913.
by thom 4y ago
Nothing but happy memories about this machine. My dad wrote books about programming microcomputers throughout the 80s so we were very lucky to grow up around a menagerie of machines, but somehow this one has the warmest place in my heart. I
914.
by thom 4y ago
As the incomparable Elizabeth Fraser once told us: Love… love is a verb Love is a doing word Unconditional love isn’t a promise to love someone forever (although that’s somewhat baked into the deal when you have kids). It’s a p
915.
by thom 4y ago
I was skeptical about the utility of 5G until I downloaded the whole of the Witcher 3 onto my Steam Deck through my phone at 200mbps while on holiday. To be honest I’m still somewhat skeptical, and maybe I should have left the Steam Deck at
916.
by thom 4y ago
Monads and 'do' and stuff are just a form of abstract control structure. They're hiding information about the actual nature of a computation, making it look like a bit of imperative code, but in the background they could be d
917.
by thom 4y ago
Sad if nobody manages to archive this all properly. Obviously a huge part of Magic culture is the tournament report, which became something of an art-form at its peak: https://amzn.eu/d/3TcYK4o I used to be an avid fol
918.
by thom 4y ago
I’d be very interested to see what’s possible taking SOTA models and trying to get some version of them working offline, on-device.
919.
by thom 4y ago
Very cool, I've daydreamed about building something similar but always convinced myself I'd have to wait until text-to-speech was better to really incorporate all the sources I'd like. Awesome work!
920.
by thom 4y ago
One of the suggestions I liked from Uncle Bob’s Clean Code was that the contents of each method should be at a single level of abstraction. In languages that require constant bookkeeping this is either impossible or requires sacrificing per
921.
by thom 4y ago
Sports science is probably the most unintentionally hilarious branch of statistics.
922.
by thom 4y ago
Oh, I think on a long enough timeline the master/slave metaphor will prove apt, possibly twice.
923.
by thom 4y ago
I've noodled around with ChatGPT as a source for game content. I think it's already good enough for _flavour_ - rather than repetitive NPC barks, you get more varied content. The issue is you'll always get jarring inconsisten
924.
by thom 4y ago
This doesn’t seem a surprising or particularly deep result, and perhaps we’re having the wrong arguments about LLMs. I certainly don’t doubt that they’re capturing deep knowledge, my only criticism would be that they’re doing so in a lossy
925.
by thom 4y ago
telnet discworld.starturtle.net
926.
by thom 4y ago
My wife and I made three little guys. We put them to work around the house sometimes, and on weekdays send them off to the training complex to improve their skills. They respond to both blue and red motivation. They seem pretty happy. We li
927.
by thom 4y ago
Yeah, I was at Chirp in 2010 and they couldn’t have been more explicit that they didn’t want people working on third party clients, which made for a weird atmosphere at a developer conference.
928.
by thom 4y ago
This is the most QBasic-like IDE I could find to install on my son's laptop when he became code-curious. I found myself wishing documentation was better integrated somehow, but it's a very tasteful little app.
929.
by thom 4y ago
The side-channel attacks are coming from inside the house.
930.
by thom 4y ago
There’s no possible circle in our universe that needs more than those digits of PI for accurate calculations. Obviously it’s fascinating to study Pi for theoretical reasons and I’m sure someone can tell me there are also practical reasons t

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