205guy

This article starts off well enough and covers some things I had been thinking about myself: exploring the many-dimensional space of an LLM. But then I think it veers into good old human hallucination (buzz-words disconnected from realities).

It even mentions my favorite show "Connections," but gets it wrong: it wasn't showing obscure or unlikely ideas, it was highlighting under-appreciated historical paths of developmnent. The one I remember (and have seen repeated on youtube since) was how the lathe boot-strapped the industrial revolution, crude ones at first helping to build more accurate replacements for themselves.

I want to give the author some credit for exploring some of the new possibilities that the LLM constructs offer. But the second half just veers into unreal territory. Typically, the author takes the words "latent space" and divorces them from their actual meaning to just make up stuff.

"Retro latents": nobody except historians will want to revisit the uncanny valley.

"simulate all possible latent spaces": that's just n-dimentional random matrices, for n trending to infinity, computationally infeasible. "computationally sweep through the space of all possible latent spaces, in a sense mapping the nature of latent space itself": no for the same reason. A "latent space" is only significant because it is based on a reality. It makes no sense to us to make a random "latent space" and ask what reality that corresponds to.

"create simulations of various propositions by moving through the latent space": there was already a documentary about this, it was called "The Matrix."

"Latent spaces contain all parallel worlds": if properly constructed and queried, it seems they would really only contain our reality. A parallel world would be a different "latent space" (ie big matrix) with different values.

The "Personal latent space" does make me think there might finally be a way to "download" our brains into silicon, but you'd really have to train it with google glasses running 24/7 from birth, and nobody wants that. Plus, it would be a security nightmare: unless you could carefully guard all access in an air-gapped container only you control (a bit like your brain in your body), you could be duplicated and your virtual duplicate could drain your bank accounts, be easily blackmailed, steal your IP, etc.

Just like planting trees, the second best time is now. Travel (with sensitivity and understanding) to see cultures and places that are at risk: glaciers, savanna, wildlife parks, minority cultures, and dare I add Western democracies.

Edited to add: maybe the computer history museum as well.

I hope that pun was intended‽

Also note that due to isotope decay in the ore, a natural reactor is no longer possible. From the wikipedia article:

"A key factor that made the reaction possible was that, at the time the reactor went critical 1.7 billion years ago, the fissile isotope 235U made up about 3.1% of the natural uranium, which is comparable to the amount used in some of today's reactors. [...] the current abundance of 235U in natural uranium is only 0.72%. A natural nuclear reactor is therefore no longer possible on Earth without heavy water or graphite."

Another fascinating detail from the article, due to our understanding of fission, we can get some incredible results:

"The concentrations of xenon isotopes, found trapped in mineral formations 2 billion years later, make it possible to calculate the specific time intervals of reactor operation: approximately 30 minutes of criticality followed by 2 hours and 30 minutes of cooling down"

Another example is the Honeywell corporation: from thermostats to computers, then parts of defense/aerospace. Looking at its wikipedia, it also seems like one factor of diversification was the WWII war economy where the government paid lots of different corporations to build new stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell

hacker news really needs a best-of page the way craigslist did (sorry, does), just so I can nominate this. Made me discover a great song (and a great cover), with such a wry commentary (the song's and your own comment being spot on for the original drivel). Or like we used to say, you win the internet for today.

Another candidate that I hope isn't vaporware: https://www.telotrucks.com/

The island of Kaua'i in Hawaii has both tours of a chocolate farm (Lydgate Farms) and a coffee plantation (Kaua'i Coffee) with a visitor center. Just gotta find a conference out there, then hop on a Southwest flight.

Why make (wrong) guesses when you can find the answer in minutes on Wikipedia? Plus it doesn’t make sense to do a TEI with unnecessary mass. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module :

“The six landed descent stages remain at their landing sites; their corresponding ascent stages crashed into the Moon following use. One ascent stage (Apollo 10's Snoopy) was discarded in a heliocentric orbit after its descent stage was discarded in lunar orbit.“

Elsewhere, I read that the ascent stages were crashed into the moon to provide impulses for the seismometers left on the moon. Snoopy is still in orbit around the sun. And the one from Apollo 13 is in the Tonga Trench. Two fascinating lists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_in_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_on_...

As for littering the surface of the moon, I was surprised to see in videos that in addition to the scientific equipment ( and golf balls) they left on the moon, there was a lot of other little pieces. In one of the videos on the rover, they literally remove the cover off something and just throw it aside on the ground.

The tile device works for members of my family who misplace their keys OR their phone:

https://www.thetileapp.com/

The canal expansion in 2014 was actually completed in one year:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Area_Development_Pr...

The boba phenomenon has always surprised me. I enjoy boba, but there are so many other cool slimy-solids-in-sweet-drink to be had at Ranch 99 market (the Chinese supermarkets in California): grass jelly, basil seed drink, nata de coco, and some I’m forgetting. It seems that most boba tea places only have the regular tapioca balls.

I was once in Chinatown in New York and found a sweet tea with small mushrooms floating in it (I think they were straw mushrooms) but I can’t find anything like it with Google. Then there is falooda from India with vermicelli, among others. But I think the next popular “drink/dessert” will be Filipino halo halo.

It’s a wide world out there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nata_de_coco

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_jelly

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falooda

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo-halo

As others have mentioned, Teslas charge at their fast chargers (and getting faster all the time) spread around the area. Other cars can do the same, or at workplaces. Some new building codes now mandate that the parking be charging ready, so they have to put the conduit under the pavement, but they don’t need to wire it right away. So that’s a first step to simplifying a retro-install.

I do think apartment parking will eventually be retrofitted. The charging networks could easily have a apartment product—or license their network access to a manufacturer. So you would just use your charging network app or card as when charging around town. There are also products like Evercharge that split the power from a single circuit across several plugged in cars (optimizing power usage and reducing the need for conduits and wiring).

The various EV promoters have been tackling this issue for a while, something like the Electric Auto Association may have people or resources to help convince an apartment owner.

I wonder: shouldn’t a grid with lots of solar incentivize workplace charging (day-time use of peak generation), and a grid with wind majority incentivize home charging (night-time use of peak generation)? Maybe

I remember reading Sun’s financial statements at the time and bragging about huge 50% margins and thinking that can’t last. In some alternate timeline, Sun would’ve lowered their prices, stayed in the game, and we’d all have rock solid Sparc laptops by now.

I remember that company towns had to allow private speech, but I never heard that shopping malls had to. I always thought that any protest or disruption or unpopular speech in a mall would get you escorted out by security.

Yes, and if they required the host to live in the space too, 90% of the issues they caused would have been avoided. But “disrupting” VRBO’s market by making it hip and ignoring all those pesky regulations (BnB licensing) made them realize that real estate arbitrage was _much_ more profitable. And their fault was the same as google’s: our motto is “don’t be evil”, but it’s so profitable so I guess we just forget the motto.

Sibling comment conductr is part of the problem, the same blindness as Airbnb: I want what other people have (private pads in cool locations, rented by the day), and I don’t care if that’s unsustainable in the long term, I will just take advantage of it now.

This is a great distillation of the issues, getting to the second order effects. I hope @pg thinks about this.

It still does in non-mobile browser tabs—and my iPad Safari can be set to non-mobile user agent (or whatever, it’s in the settings). So I can listen to YouTube and browse the internet, including HN, on iPad and desktop.

I use most services through their web interface, because I’d rather not use their apps. Though many services such as Instagram stopped making that possible so those I have no choice.

Atomic Park on Bodega Head, but that never happened for now probably obvious environmental reasons.

I think you mean tectonic reasons. Bodega Head is on the San Andreas Fault, not far from the epicenter of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake with an estimated moment magnitude of 7.9. Wikipedia has a graphic of the San Andreas fault showing a %21 chance of rupture before 2032: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Andreas_Fault#/media/File:...

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodega_Head:

"During the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the promontory shifted approximately 15 ft (4.6 m)".

I'm surprised this was ever considered for a nuclear generation facility.

tl;dr from the video itself: "the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds."

I'd forgotten the commentary by the reporter.

It is art, but the author also said he reads it daily to get a news digest. It is full-sized and sharp, so just as easy to read as a newspaper, and also hanging at eye-height.

I can also see it as part of a news diet: get the headlines and major trends of the day while waiting for your coffee and toast in the morning, then you don't need to be distracted by news websites when you're working. That's actually how the morning paper was meant to be consumed: get info early in your day. If you want the whole paper, the software could be modified to load the entire paper PDF and have a control to page through.

I got caught up in all his videos and had the same question. Fortunately, he has a dedicated video where he answers this with testing on the scope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCbAafKLqC8

tl;dr is what the sibling comment already explained: low clock rates.

I want to second that and add: grab a few tools and do some basic landscaping. Remove weeds and cut grass that is growing over curbs and sidewalks. Make it look tidy again.

There were 2 replies that I want to summarize together: empowering the current residents as part of the renewal, and rent control.

I think as part of the urban improvement is to work with the renters and landlords to let the renters capture some of the rising value, either through some sort of equity rent-to-own, or creative financing that lets the renters find other housing within the neighborhood. Maybe some sort of buy-out conversion from private landlords to private-benefit-corporation landlord (as opposed to public housing).

The alternative is localized rent control, that makes sure that the landlords don't capture the rising value of the neighborhood that is being added by the residents and their work. You also need some limits on redevelopment, so the landlord doesn't just replace the building with something more upscale and manage to replace the tenants as part of that. Maybe allow refurbishing and some new units in exchange for current residents getting rent control.

Not quite your description of bully becoming the bully, but I knew someone who was bullied who became a needy adult that used emotional abuse in their relationships. The person was high functioning on the autism spectrum and had been taunted and mocked in school for being awkward, different, and unable to defend themselves socially. More importantly, the person also said their parents were socially ambitious and always vocally disappointed in them for not being part of the "popular" kids.

As an older teen, this person rebelled against their parents, smoked a lot of weed to self-medicate, but also had serious self-image problems and attempted suicide. Eventually got into programming and earned a decent living in a different country. But when I knew them as an adult, I always found them cranky, critical, and anxious. I later found out from an ex-partner that they were manipulative and needy, threatening to leave or even kill themselves when they didn't get their way.

I was friends with this ex-partner who told me it looked like a mild case of borderline personality disorder: and the symptoms and actions seemed to fit. It's often caused by childhood emotional trauma, leads to emotional abuse of others in vain attempt to get the affection they were missing as children (that's a very rough summary). And it can lead to their own children missing the critical affection they need and thus perpetuate. And that made me think that perhaps this person's parents were also emotionally abusive because of a similar situation. And I even wonder if borderline personality disorder isn't a social comorbidity with autism spectrum, not medically related but a social situation that can happen more frequently.

Yes in the general case, but not for text editing software. Discoverability is great in modern GUIs, for example a photos app on a mobile device. There are lots of options and they’re all mostly independent and needed in different cases. So it’s great you can just get started, click around at icons that look familiar and get results.

I would argue that this doesn’t apply specifically to text editors. 95% of all text documents are paragraphs with headings and inline formatting. With styles and display codes, WordPerfect lived up to its name. You could get the document looking perfect, exactly the way you wanted it. WYSIWYG editors look nice and could get you started quickly, but anything more than a letter turned into a mishmash of styles and fonts and spacing. The now-infamous ribbon in Word lets you discover and apply all sorts of formatting, but what you really want are consistent paragraph styles. Word perfect guided you into using those styles because the UI was restricted in just the right way.

I agree, it is clearly a clickbait title with the keyword of "reaction" to imitate that type of youtube video title. Then again it might be tongue-in-cheek, but since it fits the content perfectly, it's always hard to tell.

You could short Tesla stock. It is well proven that the free market will correct mistakes like this. /s

Just watch out for left-hand exits like the HOV lanes at the Hwy 85 split going southbound.

Let's start "Falsehoods self-driving programmers believe about roads:"

All highway exits are to the right from the right-hand lane. If the left lane line curves away, the road is curving and you should follow it.

Picks up the mouse and speaks into it: "Computer?"

Classic scene: https://youtu.be/xaVgRj2e5_s?t=171

Star Trek isn't my favorite sci-fi show/movie, but they really nailed some futurism and in this case, lack therof.