IvyMike

This but for government:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/z4meh0/game_design...

https://web.archive.org/web/20021203075817/https://cr.yp.to/...

Maybe this from 8 months ago?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44728369

Once upon a time in the 90's I was at work at 2am and I needed to implement a search over a data set. This function was going to be eventually called for every item, thus if I implemented it as a linear search, it would be n^2 behavior. Since it was so late and I was so tired, I marked it as something to fix later, and just did linear search.

Later that week, now that things were working, I profiled the n^2 search. The software controlled a piece of industrial test equipment, and the actual test process would take something around 4 hours to complete. Using the very worst case, far-beyond-reasonable data set, if I left the n^2 behavior in, would have added something like 6 seconds to that 4 hour runtime.

(Ultimately I fixed it anyways, but because it was easy, not because it mattered.)

From the linked article:

By directly harnessing near-constant solar power

Implies they would not spend half of their time in the dark.

I don't pretend to understand the thermodynamics of all of this to do an actual calculation, but note that the ISS spends half its time in the shadow of the earth, which these satellites would not do.

To me, this is the only real football game: https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football.

(No spoilers please!)

The Dash Cart was pretty close.

The "just walk out" surveillance system sucked, but the Dash Cart shopping was actually pretty nice/

This is very forthright (misleading)

"If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking." - Leslie Lamport

Writing a blog entry to simply clarify your own thinking makes it worth it.

GNU Unifont is part of the GNU Project. This page contains the latest release of GNU Unifont, with glyphs for every printable code point in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)

I mean that's pretty close no?

I would need a device with a physical switch rather than a touch control. Sadly many devices, mine included, have "power was cycled = device is off" logic.

Holy shit, perfect!

I've been toying with a variant of this project for my Honeywell home air filters. I have one in all my "big" rooms, and I like to keep them running at a low speed most of the day.

But I also have time-of-day energy pricing, and it would be nice to automatically turn off (or at least slow) my air filters during the 5pm-8pm window. This project inspires me to at least look into the feasibility of adding that functionality myself.

I'm so happy that you get to discover Greg Egan. If you can find a copy of Axiomatic, start there.

Sounds like the type of mistake I always make: Notice someone being off by two days, and in haste, post a correction that is off by ten years.

Personally, I feel like human intelligence is "unknown black box" + an LLM.

And the LLM part of our intelligence isn't really thinking.

And some people out there have a very, very small "unknown black box".

what does this do that an app like AnyDesk doesn't

Work when the network config on that particular computer is down/borked.

More context, from an earlier HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3033446

Always gonna have to side with Peter Norvig on this one: https://pindancing.blogspot.com/2009/09/sudoku-in-coders-at-...

They said, “Look at the contrast—here’s Norvig’s Sudoku thing and then there’s this other guy, whose name I’ve forgotten, one of these test-driven design gurus. He starts off and he says, “Well, I’m going to do Sudoku and I’m going to have this class and first thing I’m going to do is write a bunch of tests.” But then he never got anywhere. He had five different blog posts and in each one he wrote a little bit more and wrote lots of tests but he never got anything working because he didn’t know how to solve the problem. I actually knew—from AI—that, well, there’s this field of constraint propagation—I know how that works. There’s this field of recursive search—I know how that works. And I could see, right from the start, you put these two together, and you could solve this Sudoku thing. He didn’t know that so he was sort of blundering in the dark even though all his code “worked” because he had all these test cases.

I have a BirdNET-Pi in my backyard constantly listening to and identifying bird songs. It's pretty neat. They also sell a purpose built device if you don't want to build a pi.

The data is sent to https://app.birdweather.com/ where I'm assuming bird scientists are doing something with it.

Seizing the means of production!

When I was an undergraduate at MIT I loved it. I thought it was a great place, and I wanted to go to graduate school there too, of course. But when I went to Professor Slater and told him of my intentions, he said, "We won’t let you in here."

I said, "What?"

Slater said, "Why do you think you should go to graduate school at MIT?"

"Because MIT is the best school for science in the country."

"You think that?"

"Yeah."

"That's why you should go to some other school. You should find out how the rest of the world is."

-- Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman

Certainly it's not going to compete with real time systems, but much like computing the speed of light using your microwave and a chocolate bar, it's just kind of neat to see how accurate such a system can be.

I'm still hoping someone makes an earthquake detection system where the data is just derived from people posting "Earthquake?" on Twitter/Threads/Facebook/Etc. Plot the geotagged tweets and it seems easy to get both the location and magnitude.

From the classic tweet[0]:

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

[0] https://x.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538?lang=e...

From the site:

All researchers must apply and present a researcher card, which may be obtained in Room 1000. This ensures that proper identification is on file for all individuals accessing the building to establish a legitimate business purpose. Abuse of any researcher registration to circumvent access by the general public may result in a trespass situation and a permanent ban from access to all NARA facilities.

What the hell does "legitimate business purpose" mean? What "business" need is there for JFK Assassination records (which I think are at this site), for example? If I'm getting a PHD or writing a book, is that a "business" need? I suspect not.

Also, "Abuse of any researcher registration to circumvent access by the general public may result in a trespass situation and a permanent ban from access to all NARA facilities" seems like a very poorly constructed sentence.

People who assume that everyone is an idiot but themselves are rarely correct.

This is an off-by-one error.

How will ChatGPT learn the next computer language now?