Zobat

It is a specific type of fasting. Saying only "fasting" can mean a lot of things, saying "water fast" means you only drink water.

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

As others have hinted at LLMs aren't really made in a way that makes them likely to play video games (CS/Halo and such) well. I wonder how they'd fare "against" text based adventures like Zork (which they'll no doubt have ample knowledge about) and newer text based adventure games (which they'll know less about).

Sometimes called "high instructional value".

I had some print or poster on my wall in my childhood bedroom in Stockholm. For sure no original but reproductions were, as I remember it, readily available when I grew up.

My previous work provided laptop had a touchscreen and I miss it (for the record, the screen didn't fold 180). It was useful about once a week and I completely forgot about it the rest of the time.

Two primary use cases. Sitting on the train with the laptop in my actual lap it was often more convenient to reach for the screen instead of the trackpad, especially when I had someone sitting next to me on the right and I didn't want to stab them in their ribcage with my elbow so I could reach the trackpad. Second use case was often scrolling while reading, for some reason (phone-scrolling-indoctrination I guess) it felt natural to scroll using finger on screen.

The screen was never my primary pointing device but it was always an option. I think it was annoying a handful of times during the two years I had it, you point at something on the screen and end up clicking something.

Yep, old men yelling at "the cloud"!

The Mona Lisa is a waste of canvas and oil - a hill I will die on

Seems like Mona Lisa elicits an emotional response in you as a viewer ;)

I get what you're saying though. I always "correct" people that claims some piece of music is "bad", there's no bad music, only music you don't like.

I wonder about the the service used for the test, never heard of Rapidata but if it's like Amazons mechanical turk och other such services there might be a problem where the respondents simply didn't care about reading the question. If the objective for the respondents were simply "answer this question and get your benefit" vs "answer this question correctly to get your benefit" I have no problem accepting the 71.5% success rate. If getting it right had benefits and getting it wrong had none then I'm (slightly) worried.

I fully admit that I only skimmed the abstract, but was reminded of an article in Wired about Sergey Brin and his "search for a parkinsson cure".

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/ff-sergeys-search/

He went backwards and started with just collecting an absurd amount of data. Later while talking to a researcher he could confirm years of research with a "simple" search in his database.

There's two hard problems in programming. Naming things, cache invalidation and off by one errors.

Not sure what the selection bias for this report is, perhaps that we care about code and believe in the value of static code analysis. Some interesting results in there either way.

They tried to find contraband, they found a marching band!

We do not need more ways for people to be convinced of suicide.

I am convinced (no evidence though) that current LLMs has prevented, possibly lots of, suicides. I don't know if anyone has even tried to investigate or estimate those numbers. We should still strive to make them "safer" but with most tech there's positives and negatives. How many, for example, has calmed their nerves by getting in a car and driven for an hour alone and thus not committed suicide or murder.

That said there's the reverse for some pharmaceutical drugs. Take statins for cholesterol, lots of studies for how many deaths they prevent, few if any on comorbidity.

Totally agree, try to never be afraid or embarrassed of not knowing.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Interesting how counter intuitive it felt to scroll up from the "landing spot". Even with the instructions right there on the screen I tried scrolling down at first.

You might not have noticed but Microsoft has moving heavily into the open source world. Mind you, they're still a for profit company and you and I might not like everything they do to make their profit but they're a long way away from hating on open source.

"Since 2017, Microsoft is one of the biggest open source contributors in the world, measured by the number of employees actively contributing to open source projects on GitHub, the largest host of source code in the world." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_and_open_source

This is a level of testing that exceeds what the testers I know commit to. I myself was annoyed the five or so times yesterday we had to sit and wait to check the error handling after a 30 second timeout in the system I work on.

I think it's quirky enough to be amusing, maybe even better that it's from "another" country.

Pre internet age I worked in a store where one "unlucky" guy out of reflex asked the king of Sweden for identification when buying with a credit card (fully aware of who was in front of him, it was a toy store and the king used to shop there once a year for Christmas). A colleague told the story at dinner, the colleagues father worked at an evening news paper and wrote a small blurb about it. The following two days news papers from (literally) around the world tried to get an interview with the guy.

Anything can become international news.

Using well thought out interfaces is a joy wherever we find them.

Something in your comment made me remember a DOS based file "explorer". Screen split down the middle with a folder-tree and file list on both sides. I remember hardly ever turning on the computer without starting that for one task or another. That was some serious UI pleasure, at least for the time. Ha, found it:

https://handwiki.org/wiki/Software:File_Commander

Ah, the nostalgia!

I do like having access to stuff while doing similar stuff. Perhaps I'm just a little too lazy to learn that stuff while still getting paid to know other stuff. And I do have just about every tool/feature you mentioned, just not in a single user interface.

I guess the path to Emacs was more of a possibility/probability earlier in my career and I might find it later but for now I'll alt+tab to the browser and/or open a new tab when I need to look up any etymology and stick to navigating around Visual Studio like a pro while they still pay me to do it.

This is impressive, but (and probably because I'm not the intended audience for this post) I don't get it, I kind of want to get it though. With "it" I mean making Emacs do X, where X is something far from editing text files. It always seems to me like playing Doom on a pregnancy test. Sure you can do it, sure it's impressive, but should you?

n.b. I'm a C# developer that has accepted my fate and use Visual Studio to earn a living, though I've made sure I know my tool, flaws and merits, better than most developers I've met/worked with. My first job as a programmer was writing C++ code in Emacs and can't remember anything negative about that experience (other than getting used to ctrl+x, ctrl+s for saving and, by reflex, doing the same in Excel, and losing a big part of the document that I had just selected to move, because Excel couldn't undo past last save).

Reading the (at the time I'm writing this) 13 comments on this post I see mentions of at least three lightweight programs that does this. What other than "the mountain is there" makes someone think Emacs would be the tool for this? As a Resolve user I know what tool I'd reach for even if using a multi GB, Hollywood grade, non linear editor, compositor and color grader for trimming a short video clip is about as ridiculously overpowered as using a sledge hammer to press a key (and I did exactly that just a few days ago).

Like I said, I'm most likely not "getting it", on multiple levels. Please educate me, why would I use Emacs for this or any of the page upon page of "strange" use cases you find if you search for "Emacs" here on HN. I know Emacs is a powerful editor but I can't for the life of me understand why I would use it to trim video clips.

I wonder if circular breathing would work, or works, for trombone. If so you could have held that note "forever" with some training.

Absolutely insane 3D camera tracking with free tools.

Human beings, it appears, are nearly unique in the animal world for being able to learn something by watching somebody else do it.

This is just blatantly wrong. If nothing else I myself have shown dogs how to solve problems, but here's a link to Wikipedia for good measure.

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

Search for "download" on the page and you'll find a link to downloading all the data, including drive types with too few data points to be included in the tables.

I'd claim that the time ranges for these depend on what we're talking about.

"I had a sandwich a while ago" is wastly different from "they had a child a while ago".

"The other day" and "back in the day" might not differ as much but still...

To be fair, they're also doing launches at a pace NASA could only have dreamed of back then. In 2024 SpaceX had 134 launches, we're far into the Space Shuttle program before Nasa had made that in total.

I wonder what "tons of payload to orbit" vs "dollars budget" would look like for Saturn era NASA vs Current SpaceX.

No doubt they're standing on the shoulders of giants, but let's not forget that they've helped transform the "go to space"-business.

Apple is Berkeley Unix-based, while not actually Linux it's possible their contributions to open source have made it's way into Linux (me guessing, no real experience of either Linux or Mac).

Could also be that there's been work done to communicate with Apple specific products, again wild guesses but based on my perception of people working with Apple products is that there might be above average number of "edge cases" that needs addressing when communicating with those.

I wonder if there's anything not referring to IBM that matches that search. Add them and you'll see that they soar over all others.

How small can you get if you accept that some users might have to disambiguate when they're too close to a border? Should top out at four choices, users with no geo data has to choose between all. Feels like we can make the assumption that borders are quite sparsely populated for the most part, of course excluding cities built on borders but those are exceptions and users there might be more accepting of having to choose.