dificilis

Dear ChatGPT please write a software application satsifying the following requirements. Write the code in the style of Mohamed Aboelez.

....

A slightly less hyped headline would be:

"Mathematical theorem used to crack US government _candidate_ encryption algorithm"

Cultures vary. Also individuals vary. That’s true now, and it was very likely true 50000 years ago.

Maybe not all the rugged individualists survived, but quite likely a few wandering souls travelled far away from their original homes, and got to see different places and experience different things.

Silly question: if the "second coming" is a risk, then could bitcoin itself be amended to deem sufficiently old wallets no longer valid?

Of course if it was seriously proposed, then the holder of said wallets might rush to cash some of them in.

IN MICE

"Your Cache" is like "The Common Cold" - it's not actually one thing.

It reminds me of a recent HN story telling us not to trust any number you see in a news story.

I tried Pocket, but it wouldn't let me edit titles, which was a bit of a deal-killer. So then I tried Raindrop (free plan), and I have been using that ever since.

I use "collections" to describe abstract properties of a bookmark, like "work" for work-related, "reference" for 'I have read it but I might want to refer to it later'. Then I use tags for identifying topic - but a lot of the time there's enough info in the title, and tags don't really add much for the effort involved.

Most of those definitions can be reduced to a single definition:

"the" <something> = the speaker believes that enough information has been given for the listener to know which <something> is being referred to.

Examples:

"the man who hit me" - makes sense as part of a story where only man hit me. "the world" - there is only one world, so we know which one it is.

That article contains 3 astronomical photos, but none of them are pictures of what the article is about. They are not pictures of "invisible walls".

Slightly hyperbolic headline.

"There is no well-defined time zone at the North Pole".

Also: "The sun sets & rises once a year."

If you move 1 metre away from the North Pole, then the first statement is no longer true, but the second still holds.

And "time" doesn't cease to exist just because you are standing on a large spinning ball on the part of the surface of the ball that intersects with the axis of spin.

"Conscious" is a word that has no objective scientific definition.

It follows that "slightly conscious" is not well defined.

In practice "conscious" just means "anything that thinks and makes decisions like I do".

Also, nobody actually understands how their own brain works when they are thinking and deciding, which makes it very difficult for anyone to determine if some particular AI software thinks and decides the same way that their brain does those things.

Truly terrible headline clickbait. Are scientists now doubting the existence of neutrinos? Better: “Physicists cast doubt on ‘Sterile Neutrino’ theory ‘ etc.

Bacterial “gain of function” experiments. What could possibly go wrong?

Once again I suffer from time-zone-ism, where someone on the internet announces it on "28 June", but it's actually already 29 June and it's too late for me to fully enjoy Tau Day.

It's not Turing complete. DSL yes. Programming language no.

If it's like Python, but somehow better for beginners, I would strongly suggest an explanation of exactly how it differs from Python.

The audience for this is: "I want to teach person X programming, and I think Python is a good choice because I know Python. Why would I choose Dip instead?"

Better, quicker, cheaper testing is the most robust way to fight Covid19, even if the tests are not perfect. If a combination of testing technology and isolation protocols is good enough to get the "R" number below 1, then job done.

Having some false negatives is OK. Too many false positives is not so good, because then you are isolating people who don't have any disease.

Vaccines can have bad side-effects, especially if you try to develop them in a hurry. The same with medicines.

Anything you have to put inside your body has the potential to cause a problem worse than the disease.

On a related note, was there someone working in US Intelligence whose job it was to tell President Trump that possibly the WHO's early statement on human-human transmission of the "new coronavirus" depended on information from China, and maybe that information from China wasn't correct, because, you know, you can't always trust everything that the Chinese government says?

Who are "Scientists"?

All scientists?

The authors of the paper?

One of their examples of "factual" questions is:

Is immigration harmful to the economy?

"harmful to the economy" is a rather subjective term, because different people care more about different parts of the "economy".

Does "harmful to the economy" mean share prices go down, or does it mean people lose their jobs, or does it mean there are more poor people, or does it mean you have less choice when you go shopping, or does it mean average wealth per person goes down, and does average wealth include public goods like the environment? And so on ...

For people who are disabled, dismissing cookie dialogs is one extra difficult pointless thing they have to do _every_ time they visit any website.

Is this a violation of human rights?

I am going to dispute "it is what it is" as a meaningless cliche, because I understand it to have a meaning like:

"We all know that this thing is not ideal, but, for various reasons, we are stuck with how it currently is."

It is acceptable to use this expression if those listening are already aware of the various reasons why "it" can't be changed.

It's more a summary of the situation as currently understood, than an argument in itself.

If the virus jumped from bat to some other animal 50 years ago, then the 1000 miles of distance is not hard to explain, and doesn't tell us anything about the time-scale of initial human infection.

We need to find the close relative of Covid19 (TMRCA < 1 year) in a non-human host.

I don't use Monzo, so there's still the question of what does the UI show when they can't confirm the name - how much do they emphasize that everything now hangs on the account number only?

The bank app I use always shows a confirmed name if there is one. The UI problem is that when there isn't a confirmed name, they just do nothing, and say nothing.

Also, for very large transfers, the UI should do more than just tell you that the name can't be confirmed. The app should also encourage you to pester the receiving account holder to sign up for confirmation, especially if they are in the business of receiving large bank transfers (eg real estate & lawyer holding accounts).

The absolute worst UI is the banking apps when they ask for details of an account to transfer money to:

* The app asks for the account number

* The app asks for the name of the account

* The app never tells you that it won't check the name against the account number.

This is the worst UI ever, because people lose hundreds of thousands of dollars when they don't realise that only the account number matters.

Dragging icons from one place to another on an iphone. It's almost impossible to move an icon from location A to location B without accidentally moving about 20 other icons at the same time, because everything is constantly re-arranging itself in response to the icon being dragged.

The official Hacker News headline-fixing person needs to fix this right now.

Even less dramatic, being somewhere near the edge of an Australian bush fire in January this year.

Orange sun, burnt gum tree leaves raining down from the sky.

That was the warning we all needed about the hot future that awaits us.

Seems like a distant memory now - so much has happened since then.

Does anyone know how to pronounce RaTG13 ? I've been saying "Rat Gee Thirteen".