abecode

I think the parent is referring to agents as outward exploration that may come up empty-handed, but I see LLMs and agents as inward exploration, trying to define what is attention, knowledge, intelligence, consciousness, agency, etc. So in this case it is the terra incognita of the human "soul" that LLMs are exploring.

nice, you got claude to say "I'm deepseek" when queried/prompted in Chinese, that's great!

你是谁? -> 我是 DeepSeek 由深度求索公司...

I listened to the audio book version of War and Peace. I think it was something like 25-30 hours. The audio format helped keep the pace going and also it helped with the names. Although for some things, the audio format made it harder to look up in the dictionary, like I kept hearing agitant instead of adjutant, so that part didn't make sense in a lot of the military scenes. I agree with the parent that the book was very engaging, parts even felt like I was watching a movie, e.g. the drunken party tying a bear to a police officer, the foxhunt scene, the duel, the battles like when Petya gets shot, and the burning of Moscow. I even liked the abstract ending when Tolstoy relates human history to calculus so that each individual person has an infinitesimal but real contribution to history.

Corsica to Marseilles has an overnight ferry, at least back in 2000, but I don't think it's has sleeper cabins, more set up like an overnight flight, but a big cruise ship form factor. Instead of cabins they had space for cars. They had the option of getting a ticket without a seat so you just roam around the boat and find an open space, including outside on the decks.

My use case for this is making separate bookmarks in different folders for a single URL:

Example.com/interesting -> bookmark folder one

Example.com/interesting?dummy=t -> bookmark folder two

As a resident of MN I'm very proud of what fellow Minnesotans did to stop ICE's violent and illegal detentions here. Unfortunately the non-violent protest and anti-ICE techniques were met with violence from ICE, but the protests themselves were non-violent and well organized.

Fall, Or Dodge in Hell (Neil Stephenson) and The Waves (Ken Liu) are two other good stories about brain scanning and transhumanism. The first one is a ridiculously long novel about a future where the cloud is increasingly used for uploading souls of scanned brains, and the second one is a short story where people on a spaceship eventually evolve into noncorporal beings.

Maybe they could bury the clothes and call it carbon sequestration. I assume that clothes are made of mostly hydrocarbons.

I just had a nice trip to Venice and I was curious about it's history. Supposedly, the Venice republic lasted almost 1000 years, basically from after the fall of Rome to Napoleon based on a weird lottery system for choosing the Doge.

I think you need to change it to https://, ie, https://google.com/ads/preferences . It resolves to https://myadcenter.google.com/home?hl=en&sasb=true&ref=ad-se...

In Chinese one word for potato is "earth bean" 土豆 (the other word is "horse bell tuber" 马铃薯)

At ECAI conference last week there was a panel discussion and someone had a great quote, "in Europe we are in the golden age of AI regulation, while the US and China are in the actual golden age of AI".

one of my favorites is County Road AF, near Fall Creek and Augusta

Yeah you're right, I guess it was more the general fashion motif of long baggy pants being associated with revolutionaries/bohemians/anti-aristocrats.

Actually if you want to find the origin of bell bottoms, according to a museum exhibit on men's clothing I saw, it was the sans coulottes in the 1700s. They protested the aristocrats, who wore high-legged pants, and eventually led to the French revolution and the association of bell bottoms with revolutionary/countercultural things.

Good discussion on this article. I went to a Vampire Weekend concert last night and they used the 45 minute encore to play covers that were requested by the audience. They got through about 10 songs (a verse or two and chorus), everything from Talking Heads, to Creed, Sublime, Beastie Boys, and Prince and Bob Dylan (the concert was in Minneapolis, so they probably rehearsed the last two). So basically the band knew/memorized the tune for hundreds/thousands of songs from the past couple decades and the singer knew/memorized the words. So I think that this example supports the authors premise that creativity comes from some form of memorization.

Actually I heard the opposite... I was a premed student and I did and internship at a hospital and one of the doctors said it's actually fairly difficult to kill someone by accident, ie you have to mess up very badly or the patient must already be gravely ill for an accident to result in death. Still, the comment implies that doctors do in fact make mistakes and it was one of the experiences I had in that internship that made me decided to switch majors.

grind saffron in a mortar and pestle, then add it to yogurt with some salt, pepper, and diced onions (maybe some thyme or coriander or other spices if you are feeling fancy). Basically get the yogurt to a nice color and flavor, slightly on the salty side. Then use the yogurt mixture to marinate the chicken, preferably overnight. Cook on a grill or bake and finish with broiling to brown it.

yes, you presumed correct, it was a guy who had studied in the US.

I went to a conference in Nara last year and at one of the receptions I told a Japanese attendee that I was sorry to hear about the assassination. I joked that my name is pronounced Abe like Abe Lincoln, not like Shinzo Abe. He kind of shrugged and said it would be kind of like if it had happened to Trump in the US, in that there were a lot of of people that didn't like him.

The article makes it seem like people discovered about the cult connections after the fact. I wish I had known more about it to ask more questions. If anyone has more insight about it, I'd be glad to learn more.

Ironically I was reading 1Q84 at the time, which is about a cult in Japan.

If you think about the attention mechanism in LLMs, it may not work the same way as the brain, but there should be some functionality of the brain that also deals with attention. And if you think about that, you might also think that attention has some role in consciousness: you need to pay attention to things to be aware of them, and you need awareness of the self for consciousness, etc...

or make the neck vertical instead of horizontal. I found myself craning my neck to look at it that way.

Visiting the UK from the US in January and I was impressed by how far the dollars went. There was a burger and beer special at Wetherspoon for something like 6-7 pounds and a beer was under around 1-2 pounds. So my experience was different than the parent. Those prices are reasonable in the US under the old exchange rates but cheap now.

That being said, everyone was complaining about the costs so I agree that for people living there, the costs have gone up. My auntie kept her house very cold and taxi drivers complained a lot too about prices and the insurance system.

> .-- . .-.. .-.. --..-- / .. .----. -- / .... --- .--. .--. .. -. .----. / --- ..-. ..-.

Chat GPT :): The text you provided is Morse code. When translated, it reads: "Hello, I'm hoping off."

I got "well, I'm hoppin' off"

If you ignore the whole education thing, universities are organizations that aim to preserve their own existence (like religions) rather than return money to shareholders (like companies)

I went to a conference in Japan two weeks ago and before I travelled I got a Lonely Planet phrasebook from a used book store.

I did end up using Google Translate on my smartphone more, but having a physical book that obviously marks you as someone learning the language is a useful and underrated benefit. I had 2-3 conversations ('interactions' is probably a better word for me actually using the Japanese) over the course of a week that I can attribute to the phrasebook, which is somewhat significant because at the conference English was the default.

Also if the phrasebook is well organized, it can be a good scaffold for keeping the language organized in memory, so it can be a kind of a bridge between a simple translation lookup and a textbook. It's also like a fanny pack that has some retro appeal. Although the phrasebook had a dictionary at the back, it wasn't that useful. Having a proper dedicated pocket dictionary was good because it had words listed with phrase collocations/examples.

I like the anecdotes about quirky logicians and I thought I'd share one... I was taking a logic class with Leonard Adleman (the A in RSA). I was doing pretty poorly in the class (not good at proofs) but he was pretty helpful and he asked why I was taking the class. I mentioned that I took a philosophy of language class that I liked and then he asked what I thought of Wittgenstein. I said that I'm interested in all that stuff but I understand Wittgenstein the least. Prof. Adleman pretty much agreed and said that he didn't get Wittgenstein. I told him I was worried about passing the class and he asked me if I'd be ok with a C- and I said yeah... Best C- of my academic experience!

C.f. Addison's disease, caused by a lack of cortisol, the stress hormone, and treating some conditions like back and knee pain with cortisone, the synthetic version of cortisol

Curious, can you explain why? In my experience (just one company where I had some interaction with accounting), there was a preference toward CAPEX. The costs of building a product, ie software development, was prefered over OPEX, in this case, analytics. Since I was doing both development and analytics, they preferred me to account part of my time as CAPEX. Not sure if this is normal but for context it was a non/pre-public company.

Lithium supplements maybe? There are over-the-counter supplements available. Prescription lithium has proven uses for some mental treatments. I read some positive things about areas with naturally occurring lithium in drinking water. As far as elements go, it is the first solid element at terrestrial conditions, so one might expect it to be a trace nutrient for organisms living in terrestrial conditions.