paragraft

Yes here's the patent. The independent claims are frustratingly broad if you're trying to think through practical NPC world sim systems.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160279522A1/en

I've recently come off a team that was racking up a huge Splunk bill with ~70 log events for each request on a high traffic service, and this is all very resonant (except the bit about sampling, I never gave that much thought - reducing our Splunk bill 70x was ambitious enough for me!).

Hadn't heard the "wide event" name, but I had settled on the same idea myself in that time (called them "top-level events" - i.e. we would gather information from the duration of the request and only log it at the "top" of the stack at the end), and evangelised them internally mostly on the basis it gave you fantastic correlation ability.

In theory if you've got a trace id in Splunk you can do correlated queries anyway, but we were working in Spring and forever having issues with losing our MDC after doing cross-thread dispatch and forgetting to copy the MDC thread global across. This wasn't obvious from the top-level, and usually only during an incident would you realise you weren't seeing all the loglines you expected for a given trace. So absent a better solution there, tracking debug info more explicitly was appealing.

Also used these top-level events to store sub-durations (e.g. for calling downstream services, invoking a model etc), and with Splunk if you record not just the length of a sub-process but its absolute start, you can reconstruct a hacky waterfall chart of where time was spent in your query.

What's the right way?

I've used it in anger on a project with an unreasonable start time in its test suite. Put an alert sound on VS when breakpoints were reached let me start a test with debugger attached, and then go do something else for the time it would take to start, but not forget what I had been originally doing.

I still haven't settled the nature of free will and determinism, aka who's actually controlling the trains, them or their drivers?

I know the article was about movies that persuaded viewers to _go_ to a certain country, but I am reminded of a former colleague who explained to me that it was actually a TV show ("The Mechanism", a drama about political corruption in Brazil) that finally convinced him he needed to take his young family and _leave_ Brazil for a better future.

Of course I had to give it a watch after a review like that. Good show.

This was the best I could find https://www.invasive.org/gist/products/handbook/20.triclopyr... (see Mode of Action)

The Prime Minister of Canada just did a state visit to India, where he was not warmly received, and made to look foolish on the world stage.

Have you considered the possibility that the reason he got a cold reception was he brought the accusation he just made publicly? Would put the issue with the plane in a whole new light too...

The graphics weren't elaborate, I just remember things like the illustration of a storefront before you worked on an inventory spreadsheet, or the ascii picture of a telephone and modem before the "Communications" tool (i.e. telnet) section.

I have fond memories of the early DOS version (1.something). Its tutorial was a masterclass (included full screen ascii graphics illustrating the scenarios) and as a kid playing on my father's laptop I went through it several times. I particularly enjoyed the database tutorial where you worked on WHODUNIT.WDB to solve the mystery of a murder at a ski slope by narrowing down the customers against clues...

Thanks, was unaware of the movie!

I've been on the look-out for that too. Have lined up Mike Royko's "Boss" on Daley in the interim, though the bookshop owner wasn't as fond of Royko's writing style...

Somewhat (by a few decades) behind the times here, but I finally found a set of Robert Caro's Years of Lyndon Johnson books at a 2nd-hand shop earlier this year. What a ride. I know it's a famous series, but I'm outside the US and so only recently became aware of its existence, and also therefore went in mostly blind as to the subject (I knew very little of LBJ prior). Am partway through the 2nd book now, with the conclusion of the 1948 Texan Senate Democratic primary, and my mouth just sort of hung open for pages at a time during that.

Caro's a talented writer, but what really shows through is just the sheer years of hard work he clearly put into the books. I don't know how one can focus for so many years on just one writing project.

Before my brain caught up I was just about to ask you what brewery is it that can do a 99% Indian Pale Ale...

Similar here. It's like I suddenly have access to an instant MidJourney that I can prompt with any suggestion. Sometimes a late night whisky before bed seems to help the process. Find myself wondering "is this what visually creative people get to do all the time?".

Tell me about it - I implemented this just yesterday except with a focus on functions rather than objects.

I feel like the better pricing strategy would be something similar to what the geospatial API platforms like Google Maps do, with their explicit no-caching or time-limited-caching clauses. E.g. you're actually prohibited from retaining results from say a geocode beyond 30 days IIRC.

Amazon made this explicit with their Geospatial API pricing ( https://aws.amazon.com/location/pricing/ - "Places" tab) - where the pricing for being able to store a result is 8x higher.

Wasn't this the basis of the failed Olestra products? https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/619261/olestra-fat-free-...

I think the big thing that happened around that time that marked the sunset of the Golden Age of Google was Google Books (launched 2003) and critically the response. It was the last large, ambitious project of theirs that really aligned with the old "organise the world's information and make it useful" mission, and from Google's perspective was clearly a no-brainer Good Thing for the world.

And instead of the same enthusiastic reaction at large they had become used to, they got _hammered_ for it by publishers and dragged into court. I do wonder if that turned into a fundamental cultural inflection point for them.

Surely you'd just be employed by the internal HR company and on the books each product company would be contracting your services according to timesheets.

On the original blog post announcing Whisper there was a demo ("Accent" under the drop-down) of it transcribing a Scottish accent. https://openai.com/blog/whisper/

I ctrl-f'ed for this one. First exposure was SOHCAHTOA and memorization without building intuition. I struggled and had no real understanding. Two years later a physics teacher draws a unit circle with sine and cosine marked out as an incidental explanation for something else, and 2 years of frustration suddenly clicked. Gave me huge appreciation for the power of a good explanation.

Site seems crushed under load.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220929224847/https://www.amazo...

Think they meant "AWS or GCP and only backup to S3 or GCS respectively"

React, presumably, with its approach that a UI is well described by nested functions operating on state. It's a good point. I remember long discussions on mailing lists for various FP languages conceding that UI toolkits were the one area where OOP seemed the natural fit. Haven't seen many of those discussions since React emerged.

I think what's more likely is we'd discover how many common, useful tasks you could perform with a humanoid robot that don't require AGI, with a more Alexa-like approach of iteratively adding support for explicit discrete tasks over time. We've already moved back the goalposts for AGI in so many other areas as we realise how many tasks can be decomposed to something quite mechanical in the right vector space etc.

As a NZer I got thrown when going to California, by asking the front desk staff to do something and then waiting patiently when they said "I can't do that". Turns out when you come from a place where there's a vowel difference between "can" and "can't", that's what you listen for. I didn't at all pick up on the "t" sound at the end.

Re units of measurement in Rust, have you looked at something like https://docs.rs/uom/0.31.1/uom/ ?

Fun. There's something captivating about watching a melting shape.

Bug: countries from the Southern Hemisphere are mirrored left-to-right. AFAICT NH countries are ok. Something

Can't speak to other countries but I know in NZ you're not allowed legally to rip DVDs or blurays you own (even just for private use, no distribution intended). The copyright act is structured with a whitelist of permissible format shifts, and while CDs made it onto that list, movie discs didn't.