emtel

Compiler performance is dominated by algorithms

But you can always use the best algorithm no matter what your implementation language is, so it still makes sense to prefer a language that makes it easy to write fast code.

should I walk or drive to the car wash

there is an entire genre of riddles based on this kind of misdirection that works on humans, such as "A plane crashed on the border or US and Canada. Where do they bury the survivors?"

As with humans, comprehension is not a binary property of the agent - it is a quality that can be present in some situations and absent in others. LLMs may emit correct outputs sometimes because they do comprehend the input, and emit incorrect outputs in other cases when they do not comprehend the input.

In order to show that LLMs can't comprehend, we'd have to show that there are no (or at least very few) situations in which they exhibit comprehension, not show that there are some situations in which they don't.

Even if pre-training was the only training step, it still wouldn't necessarily follow that the only thing the model is doing is stitching words together probabilistically, unless you expand the definition of "probabilistically" to the point that it becomes meaningless. This kind of thinking assumes that design of the training process and the "design" of the artifact that training produces must be similar.

I’m guessing you don’t have kids. My membership pays for itself just for the savings on string cheese alone. Same for eggs.

audiophiles (https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/turntables-with-pace....) also claim that turntables can be rated on "timing, rhythm, and pace" in which supposedly the timing of the music can be affected by the turntable's mass and other properties.

How this would occur without also producing grossly audible pitch distortion never seems to be discussed.

What a strange paragraph! Why on earth should we assume that a body is a prerequisite for having emotions?

How is drugging an animal's food a "brute force tactic"? What would qualify as a non-brute-force tactic in your mind?

The "Einstein can't get a cat into a carrier even though he is smarter" is just a hilariously bad argument. All cat owners can get their cats into a carrier! And most cats don't want to get in, because they hate the vet! And it's almost entirely because the humans are smarter!

You can even get a literal tiger into a carrier, even though it can kill you easily. You just drug its food and wait till it passes out. This is because you are smarter than it, and know that tranquilizers exist and how to obtain them, which is a strategy that cats of any size are not even able to conceive of, and probably can't understand what happened after it's been done to them.

A lot of posts urging people to get colonoscopies. But general anesthesia also carries risks. How should one weigh the risk vs benefit?

The goal is not to force individuals to not replace their phones, but rather to provide that as an option at all, for those who want it.

But my point is that you need to recognize that in so doing, you are taking away the option of having other things, such as waterproofing, larger batteries, smaller/lighter phones, etc. There is no free lunch.

That's an odd reply since by that argument they also flocked to a phone with no replaceable battery, which was pretty standard in the 2000s.

But you could be right. I guess this will be an experiment to watch: If EU consumers show a strong preference for replaceable batteries once they become more widely available, we can expect manufacturers to start offering it in other markets as well.

One of the most frustrating things about HN is that people seem so unaware of how idiosyncratic their preferences are. If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".

It's okay to have idiosyncratic preferences (I certainly do), but people should recognize that this law will make phones _worse_ for most people, because this law will force phone manufacturers to compromise the things that most people want in order to provide something that most people don't want.

I suppose someone will say that this law is necessary for environmental reasons, regardless of people's preferences. But that's nonsense, because the law doesn't actually require people to replace batteries rather than replacing their phone, and by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new a phone. At the very least we'd need to see some data that shows that most people replace batteries when it is possible to do so.

I bought a north face backpack for college in 1998. It cost $60. It was an extravagant expense for me at the time and I felt horrible about it for weeks.

That backpack is currently at college with my son, who used it all through high school as well. It is by far the oldest and most durable daily-use object I’ve ever owned.

Communist regimes, especially the USSR, had nearly unlimited power to impose exactly the policies that supposedly would help.

Open societies, in contrast, must balance many competing interests and voting factions, meaning that free market supporters have limited power to enact their preferred policies, meaning they rarely can be implemented in a “pure” form.

It has never been the case that publishing a work entitles you to a share of all profits that are downstream of your work. Copyright law protects your ability to receive profits that result from the distribution of the work itself, but that's quite limited.

If you publish a cookbook, you should get a portion of the sales of the cookbook itself, and no one should be allowed to distribute copies of it for free to undermine your sales.

What you don't get is a portion of the revenues of restaurants that use your recipes!

This comment defies common usage and accounting practices.

When people say “selling at a loss” they mean negative unit economics. No one ever means this much more expansive definition you’ve invented.

They don’t allow unlimited “extraction” of wealth. It is inherently limited by the need for people to take the other side of a trade.

Importantly, people who either thought they had better information (and were sadly wrong) or people who were simply gambling. It’s not like prediction markets are taking money from orphanages.

I’m simply refuting the claim that when nasa launches a mission, they “know it will work”. They certainly do not.

NASA has killed 19 astronauts. SpaceX: 0

But McDonalds can't pay people $1 an hour because no one is willing to work for that little, regardless of how they classify them.

I'd wager most Uber drivers or prostitutes or maids or even staff software engineers would choose something else if they had a better alternative.

Yes, that's what I said, but you're missing the point: Uber provided them with a better alternative than they would have had otherwise. It made them better off, not worse off!

I was quite disappointed with the essay when I originally read it, specifically this paragraph:

This is extremely realistic. This is already real. In particular, this is the gig economy. For example, if you consider how Uber works: in practical terms, the Uber drivers work for an algorithm, and the algorithm works for the executives who run Uber.

There seems to be a tacit agreement in polite society that when people say things like the above, you don't point out that, in fact, Uber drivers choose to drive for Uber, can choose to do something else instead, and, if Uber were shut down tomorrow, would in fact be forced to choose some other form of employment which they _evidently do not prefer over their current arrangement_!

Do I think that exploitation of workers is a completely nonsensical idea? No. But there is a burden of proof you have to meet when claiming that people are exploited. You can't just take it as given that everyone who is in a situation that you personally would not choose for yourself is being somehow wronged.

To put it more bluntly: Driving for Uber is not in fact the same thing as being uploaded into a computer and tortured for the equivalent of thousands of years!

I pay for YouTube premium and it’s one of my happiest expenditures. YouTube is a miraculous, unbelievable treasure trove. Learn any language, any musical instrument, any academic subject. TV clips from the 80s that someone taped in VHS for some reason. Isaac Arthur, Veritaseum, numberphile. I’ve gotten more value from YouTube than any other single site on the internet, and it’s not close!

So yeah, take my $13.99/month

Time-keeping is vastly cheaper. People don't want grandfather clocks. They want to tell time. And they can, more accurately, more easily, and much cheaper than their ancestors.

I can't believe everything2 still exists!

I'm not sure you have to be terribly right wing to say that a "societal movement" which includes something called "The Reign of Terror", in which tens of thousands of people were executed, was a bad thing. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution#Reign_of_Ter...)

Guillotine for the super rich

Can we not glorify mass executions on HN please? Bluesky is available if that's your thing.

There are some situations with tricky lifetime issues that are almost impossible to write without this pattern. Trying to break code out into functions would force you to name all the types (not even possible for closures) or use generics (which can lead to difficulties specifying all required trait bounds), and `drop()` on its own is of no use since it doesn't effect the lexical lifetimes.

a reasonable concern

You should read the linked post. You can tune the particle size to affect only objects below a certain size.