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jcynix

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Scientist, IT-Sec, Vegetarian, has no TV, reads books, takes photos. Fondly remembers his Usenet days from 1984 - 200x.

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I can sympathise with you, but how could a "quantum" effect" doesn't make this easier?

Maybe "Turing machine" is too abstract or simplistic as a concept? Both for real computers and brains?

I can see that a computer is on some level just a lot of sand (silica and metal) but put together in a really complex way, it "suddenly" can add and compare numbers … if we observe the complexity levels from sand to computer and try to see the analogy when comparing cells / neurons to a structure of billions of them somehow interconnected on both a physical and chemical level, evolved during millions of years, I have no problem to accept that brains are still too complex to explain for us.

Quantum field effects? You don't need these, IMHO, if you look at how highly parallel things seem to work in brains.

Marvin Minsky's theory of a "Society of Mind" describes a (highly) distributed model of the mind. Which BTW, always reminds me of the first Shrek movie, where the donkey jumps up and down, shouting "Take me! Take me!" to Shrek. That's similar to what I observe when I'm undecided but two instances of "sub-processes" (or agents as Minsky calls them) of my mind try to get attention.

Daniel Dennett similarly gives a distributed model of consciousness. Where many parallel "processes" are at work, competing and "observing" each other. And this parallelism is happening with a much, much higher degree than any of our computers parallelism.

Currently reading a web novel called The Years of Apocalypse.

Thanks for mentioning it. I'm now at Chapter 7 of it and it seems to be a well written story. Still need to arrive at the "time loop" moment ...

Your coffee mug isn't naturally brown and warm: it is a cloud of atoms made of 99.9999% empty space, with no color, no texture, and no intrinsic smell.

A tiger too is "just a cloud of atoms" but nevertheless I wouldn't like to share a room with it. The article sounds a bit like a variant of Solipsism.

Hmm, the review makes me rather curious. While in the movies "Groundhog Day" and "12:01 P.M." the protagonists awake at the same place and time each day.

How do these book explain that the protagonist(s) can relocate to different places? Even if it would give a rationale for that glitch in the loop, it would be strange if you'd check into a hotel and appear to be there the next morning without the check-in?

On The <dl> (2021) 2 months ago

But both i.e. and e.g. might be more easily understood by non-native speakers of English (IMHO ;-)

But I find it a little extreme to say "it's faster to build your own than to install an existing alternative".

Installing an existing alternative might be easy ... once you found the one which best (i.e. mostly) matches your requirements. The time consuming task IMO is the time needed to find and then choose between half a dozen (or so) alternatives which all might do the job ... until you installed them, tested them, and found that they are insufficient for the job you expect them to do.

ImageMagick is a wonderful command line tool, IMO. You could use it to extract various information, e.g. the 5 most used colors of an image, as in

    convert $IMG -colors 5 -depth 8 -format "%c" histogram:info: | sort -nr
If needed you can easily remove colored borders first (trim subcommand with fuzz option) or sample only xy% from the image's center, or where the main subject might be.
Lil Finder Guy 5 months ago

My first thought: a rather strange copy of the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillsbury_Doughboy

Google's Android robot has a much better design, IMHO. And I remember the Amazon box version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danbo_(character) and Arielle Nadel's photo stories "365 Days of Danbo" with it. Can't imagine that with the Apple Dough boy..

And the eye's periphery, while it isn't sharp, is highly sensitive to movement. Which is "obvious" if you ponder the question where dangerous things appear first. Thus things dangling from the rear mirror in a car are a bad thing, they need (subconscious) attention.

The cone cells in the eye's center are color sensitive, but need a lot of light, while the rod cells at the edges are highly sensitive to motion, even in low light. And that might be one of the reasons why flicker is strenuous for the eyes. Funny side effect is that looking at stars in the night sky seems to work better when you look slightly besides a star, I guess that's because then the low light parts take over.

Ah, yes, After Dark, with the "Lunatic Fringe" module, which was fun (and was a time sink ;-0). And what I would like to see again is the "Stained Glass" module which produced phantastic visual effects when tuned a bit.

Little Free Library 5 months ago

Wikipedia lists them by country, and with pictures, for example

French: [Boîte à livres](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%C3%AEte_%C3%A0_livres?wprov...)

German: [Öffentlicher Bücherschrank](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96ffentlicher_B%C3%BCchers...)

and many more countries. They all need a caretaker, or else they degenerate into rubbish.

In France I stumbled upon one during a holiday trip, it was located in an old phone booth. Hmm, I must have a picture somewhere in my photo collection, …

At my highschool radio station someone got a ton of great records from his neighbor who was replacing with cds.

History repeats itself: right now you can now buy loads of CDs for cheap on eBay.

Yes, some patterns of speech are recognizable … The "That's LLM generated" pattern is one of those. And while I can understand the motivation behind this, I find it more irritating now than LLM texts, if these contain useful information, which make me curious.

This text made me curious, I liked the approach the author has taken. And it made me think how I would do it. My first idea would be to use ImageMagick to render text and then use ImageMagick's https://imagemagick.org/script/compare.php to somehow calculate the risk of confounding glyphs.

So: Don't be snarky? Maybe we need another rule here, to limit comments on "LLM style" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I agree that mandatory developer registration feels too heavy handed, but I think the community needs a better response to this problem than "nuh uh, everything's fine as it is."

OK, so instead of educating stupid (or overly naive) people, we implement "protections" to limit any and all people to do useful things with their devices? And as a "side effect" force them to use "our" app store only? Something doesn't smell that good here …

How about a less drastic measure, like imposing a serious delay for "side loading" … let's say I'd to tell my phone that I want to install F-Droid and then would have to wait for some hours before the installation is possible? While using the device as usual, of course.

The count down could be combined with optional tutorials to teach people to contact their bank by phone meanwhile. Or whatever small printed tips might appear suitable.

Such organizations don't know what to do.

Maybe they should simply use some common sense? If someone could and would steal valuables, it seems highly unlikely that he/she/it would notify you before doing it.

If they would want to extort you, they would possibly do so early on. And maybe encrypt some data as a "proof of concept" ...

But some organizations seem to think that their lawyers will remedy every failure and that's enough.

Readers who payed (and only those) could vote on a scale whether the article was worth the payment? The amount payed might even be calculated into the vote, e.g. you payed one token and get one vote, I payed two or three tokens and get two votes.

The bibliography contains a typo, namely entry 5 misses an "l" in Allegro.

And a book, which I'd call "an Oldie but Goldie" could be added: John Allen's "Anatomy of Lisp" (1978) which still is an excellent read for those who want to dive deep into Lisp's interna. One might also call it a precursor of SICP, as it covers a number of introductory topics too.

Abstract: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/542865