jasamer

Another thing is that trying to take away creative jobs from humans and giving it to robots while the menial ones (like data entry, manual labor, household work, etc.) are still being done by humans is an insult to humanity itself.

I don't think this is going to happen anytime soon. LLMs may be able to somewhat compete with people who are average at these creative tasks, but those are not the people whose work most people consume. We listen to music and read books by people who are very good at creating music/writing, and I don't see LLMs competing with those people. And even if they were able to compete, they'd still miss the "human" element - eg., I'm probably not going to a concert if there are no humans performing.

AI will expand to be able to do more boring, menial tasks. Writers and musicians (and other creative people) will probably be amongst the last who loose their jobs to AI.

I don't think a simulation needs to simulate anything real. Eg. if I have a program that runs Conway's game of life, that would be also be a simulation, but there's nothing "real" it references against.

In other words, the universe simulating ours might work completely differently, and some beings there are just testing how different laws of physics (i.e. ours) work out.

Afaik what makes fusion hard is maintaining the conditions that allow fusion to occur. Because of this, it’s quite safe - if anything goes wrong, it’ll just stop working.

Probably, but the amount would be tiny. ITER is trying to generate 500 megawatt from a half-gram of hydrogen.

This animation was super smooth on even the slowest iPad.

The point of it is: they were going to do a skeuomorphic animation, and they put the effort in to do it right. It's a level of polish that I really appreciate, even though it isn't really necessary for anything.

The page turn animation was truly excellent. I have seen a few other apps/sites try to copy it, some of them did it pretty well. But one detail I’ve never seen anyone else do: the text of the curled page is “distorted” in 3D, as one would expect of a real page. The closer the letters are to the part of the page that’s orthogonal to the screen, the more the are squished.

It’s an effect that’s quite complicated to do. You need to put the page on a 3D cone and render that. I have quite a bit of experience with UI kit animations, but I don’t know how I would do that one.

It’s a question about ethics, I think it’s implied that legal consequences are not part of the consideration.

But even when including possible jail time in your consideration: if you think that saving two lives at the cost of another is worth it, surely a life saved is worth more than a jail sentence?

And raw potato vs cooked potato?

I don't think #1 matters, because it runs again once it's in a valid state again. Your test will fail while in an invalid state, but that's to be expected.

As the author explained in another comment, it initially generates the code coverage for all tests. When code is changed, only the tests that cover that code are rerun.

This tool doesn't run all the tests, only the ones affected by the code changes since the last run. It figures out which tests to run by initially running all tests, and storing the code coverage of each test.

It doesn't need to rely on "test change likelihood" - if a code change is outside of the code coverage of the test, it doesn't affect the test.

I folded his hydrangea design recently, following a video tutorial[1]. It is amazing. The finished model is a beautiful fractal flower. The folding steps aren’t terribly hard to do, but robinhouston‘s description - „magical and startling“ - fits this model very well.

[1] https://www.happyfolding.com/instructions-fujimoto-hydrangea

But the bullet will still hit the plane following you at roughly 1700mph (you could say, the plane will crash into the bullet at that speed, but it‘s the same result), because it‘s also moving at Mach 3.

Do base your believe that Factorio is under-optimised on anything specific?

The Factorio devs regularly put out blog posts on the optimisations they have done, like [1][2][3] (and many others), and they have done so for a long time. This gives me the opposite impression.

[1] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-322 [2] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-281 [3] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-209

Factorio's visuals support that take. I feel bad when the trees next to my coal power plant go brown and then die, and the initially beautiful blue lake next to the spawn point turns into a disgusting brown-green. In the later game, dropping nuclear bombs on the aliens leave permanent marks on the map, always reminding you of your crimes when you build more factory on the scorched earth.

Touring completeness is about accurately simulating any Turing machine. Not approximately simulating one (what would that even mean?), or simulating just some of them.

When we say something is Turing complete, there’s always an implicit “if it ran on a computer with unlimited memory” assumption that comes with it, because no computer with limited memory can ever simulate all Turing machines. You can always construct a Touring machine that makes a given computer run out of memory.

So technically, no real computer or computer program is Turing complete, or able to accurately simulate any Turing machine. The whole thing is an irrelevant technicality though, as A) we have so much memory available that we might as well treat it as unlimited and B) touring completeness is a theoretical property - if you prove it for something like python type hints, that proof won’t assume any memory limitations, ie. it’ll assume the computer the thing runs on has infinite memory. The proof is valid even though no such infinite computer actually exists.

Lidl tried to switch to SAP, keeping their own processes and customising SAP to fit their needs.

After seven years and 500 million euro spent, the project was cancelled and they went back to using their old inventory system.

So, in this case, customising SAP to fit the company's processes wasn't worth it even for a rather large company like Lidl.

There are efficient ways to compute x^n. Eg. you want to compute x^8. Instead of multiplying x eight times by itself, you can do ((x^2)^2)^2, which is just three multiplications.

To be fair, I’m not sure whether similar optimizations exist for computing the factorial, but I don’t think so.

The plan seems to be to have the gyrotron that generates the drilling beam on the surface, so the electronics don't have to withstand any heat at all. The "only" need to manage to get a beam that's clean enough that it reaches 20km into the ground.

Why not just go for:

Peter: "My number is [X]." Sandy: I know the answer!

The author does not state that people "disagreeing" with crypto are toxic, just that a subset of anti-crypto people are toxic. (Same applies to some pro-crypto people).

I live close to a smaller stadium and recently rode past it while a game was being played. The number of police deployed there was insane, I estimate a ratio of 1 police per 10 visitors. The first thought that went through my head was that this could not possibly be worth it. Paying wages of the police alone has to absolutely dwarf ticket costs.

But I guess it's worth it when you factor in that without security, football fans might trash the place and mess other people up like you describe.

If you get past the fancy custom scrolling part of their website, it also mentions flax and switchgrass as other plant species that could be used in "climate solutions".

Trees‘ natural purpose isn’t to sequester as much CO2 as possible either.

I used the JS Date API for the first time a few months ago, and wrote something like

    date.getYear() + "-" + date.getMonth() + "-" + date.getDay()

The actual result for that date is "122-0-2" - not a single component of the date was what I expected.

They also require ... absurd amounts of space.

I'd have thought that nuclear requires the least amount of space of all energy sources.

1. Apple announced that they will release an App for Android that detects when an AirTag travels with you. I don't think it has been released yet, so currently, nothing prevents you from tracking Android users.

2. The iPhone can detect the distance to the AirTag quite precisely. I think this type of false positive is going to be rare enough for notification fatigue not being a problem. In your bus example, reporting the false positive would be fine imo. (It would also allow you to return the air tag to the owner).

3. The notifications don't go through Apple's servers, so Apple would need a backdoor in the OS to disable the feature. They might have added something like this, but it might not matter much - if someone plants a tracking device on you, they'll use one without silly privacy features.

One of NSO’s previous exploits targeted WhatsApp, so they seem quite capable of using “normal” apps to get their spyware on your phone.

Apple’s Apps are better targets of course because those are on every phone.

https://www.ft.com/content/4da1117e-756c-11e9-be7d-6d846537a...

Apple will allow you to stay on iOS 14 and still receive automatic security updates.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/psa-you-dont-have-to...

I'm not arguing that these aren't real problems, but neither are unique problems of the the client side scanning solution. It's the same or maybe even worse with server side scanning.

I'd assume FB, Google & co have some solution to b), so Apple should be able to figure out something. For c), at least Apple takes extra precautions by requiring the photos to be in two separate database provided by different governments. (Maybe other cloud providers do that, too, I don't know).

The CSAM scanning solution allows law enforcement to do one thing, assuming they have full control over the image hash database: find people who have multiple photos that are already known to law enforcement that they upload to iCloud.

How would you use this to find criminals in general? I have a hard time to think of a very useful example. Maybe photos of bomb plans downloaded somewhere from the internet that are known to be used by criminal groups?

As to what stops a pedophile or a journalist form disabling iCloud photo storage: Absolutely nothing. This solution is supposed catch people storing CSAM photos in iCloud, that's it. A careful pedophile will not be caught by this.