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SirHumphrey

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GPT‑Live 14 days ago

I am wondering for whom this new device even would be. Because phones work quite well for this use case and much more and everyone already has a phone.

Dopamine Fracking 1 month ago

Woodland strawberries grow even better somehow. We used to have them planted at the garden, then a few years ago we removed them and planted something else and this year I was surprised to find that they somehow survived and moved a few meters away from where they originally were.

They also taste better in my opinion.

Competitive programming scene always included offline competition and with AI they are becoming more important (and in general they were more fair even before). If CTFs are to survive, they should probably try to adopt this strategy.

You could even go so far that anything loaded on your computer is fair game, but not more than that (certain competitive programming competition for example allow unlimited amount of paper material - for CTFs you probably need much more than that, therefore electronic).

Nothing about PDF is easy. Similarly to what once Tom Scott said about time zones, every time I must deal with PDFs I pray that PDF.js can be hacked in to doing it instead, otherwise I just don’t bother.

It’s on of the few examples when converting it in to picture and chucking it in a multimodal llm is a more sensible solution than trying to parse it.

Ti-84 Evo 3 months ago

There is a certain joy in working with RPN and in using a piece of technology that was designed as a tool, not as a toy or an educational appliance.

With phone emulation, I probably need half a calculator. I have three.

Just because an AI can craft a decent Japanese text doesn’t mean I can. Just because AI can write x86 assembly also doesn’t mean I can.

You don’t give first graders a calculator because they will always have one in their pocket- they end up just inputting numbers in a magic box and not learning how to do this manually which will destroy their future mathematical education. It’s about the same with AI.

I don’t know what exactly the op meant by delivering a press release, but at least I after a four year high school german course can read newspaper articles in german but would struggle quite a lot to order food (granted, I wasn’t very good at it). In a more grammar heavy language understanding is a lot easier than writing which is a lot easier than speaking.

I didn't even mention France, but if you insist:

I am using Fossil Fuel Support dataset from OECD. Latest available year is 2024: Specifically for petroleum there were 5228 million euros in tax exemptions and 586 million euros in direct budgetary transfer. For all fossil fuels there were 5 656 million in tax exemptions and 2579 million in direct budgetary transfers. So real, direct subsidies definitely exist.

You are thinking too logically. In EU fuel is expensive because it’s heavily taxed AND there are a lot of fuel subsidies.

Or to quote an old TV show: Hacker: One of your officials pays farmers to produce surplus food, while on the same floor, the next office is paying them to destroy the surpluses. Maurice: That is not true! Hacker: No? Maurice: He is not in the next office, not even on the same floor!

Amara’s law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

In 2024[1]: - 37.2% in Sweeden - 51.6% in Denmark - 30.4% in Finland

of newly registered cars were BEV. Only Norway reaches 89% you are talking about. The total average of newly registered BEV cars in European Union was 13.6%.

The EV tech is here,but the grid in most EU countries is certainly not. The proliferation of heat pumps in the local area caused 3 blackouts caused by a failure of a local transformer - something that hasn't happened before or at least not as frequently. And in most countries you are looking at doubling the electricity consumption if all road transport was to switch to electricity.

[1] https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/new-registr...

Students are not only workers, they are also disciples of your work and, once forced to read it, will likely use it in the future even when they leave your lab.

Even completely egoistically replacing students with AI is shooting yourself in the foot in the long term.

The comments you write in to Zotero are not what paper is about - abstract covers this well enough - it’s about what you found interesting or useful about the paper.

It's also that the west collectively convinced themselves that the economy could be built on high value knowledge work and services and manufacturing will be handled by someone else. Of course people would rather live near some offices, or maybe a workshop than a heavy industrial site...

The transition of my country from a socialist to a western capitalist system included a mass closure of heavy industry and what remains is dying a slow death of high energy costs. I remember when a coal mine closed there were all those marvelous ideas how the area would transition to high tech programming jobs; the thing that actually saved the area was a fuse manufacturing plant.

I was asking myself the whole article “what does this mysterious semantic search api actually do?” and was a bit underwhelmed when the result came out to be - managed vector database.

There is a slightly unexplored tangent in Brave New World about an experiment on Cyprus, where a society of humans bread to be intelligent descended in to civil war because nobody wanted to do menial work.

Maybe it was, maybe he just writes that way. At some point somebody will read so much LLM text that they will start emulating AI unknowingly.

I just don’t care anymore. If the article is good I will continue reading it, if it’s bad I will stop. I don’t care if a machine or a human produced unpleasant reading material.

I can manage fine with other search indexes for English language searches; weather that is because others got better or google got worse i cannot tell, though I suspect the latter.

But for searching in more niche languages google is usually the only decent option and I have little hope that others will ever reach the scale where they could compete.