rappatic

East African dominance over track events has largely ended. The 1500m world record is held by a West African, while the mile and 3000m world records are now held by white Europeans. The 5000m at the recent World Championships had no East African medalists, and the 10000m had just one. Same goes for the most recent Olympic 5000m.

Compare this with the Olympic and World Championship podiums for the 2000s and 2010s; I don't believe a non-East-African-born athlete won a single 5000/10000m medal for 20 years straight.

Translation: “you will just pay more for electricity at other times of day”

The quality of HN articles has degraded rapidly in the last year. It seems a meaningful fraction of articles posted here, especially most blog posts, are now AI generated. (Of course, this is the case for the rest of the internet too, but HN has always been a haven from the rest of the internet.)

LLM-generated slop. Please don't post wastes of our time like this

I feel rather silly, all the news about the heat deaths in Paris must’ve crossed wires in my brain. But it seems the two cities have similar temperature extremes, so my point is the same

but if you get a really cold spell and it drops to -35C

Temperatures near 40C have been recorded in Paris dozens of times since the early 2000s. I don't think the winter temperature in Paris has ever dropped much below -20C, let alone -35C. So this isn't a very fair analogy.

Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day

It's like satire. What is AC for if not extreme heat?

Seems like OpenAI has succumbed to the urge to give their models catchy names like Anthropic does

Yes, there's no way to avoid this really. You have to pick some point on the graph as the origin.

There is so much I don't understand

LLM written slop article about LLM slop in bigtech

Vibecoded slop with LLM-written copy. When will it stop

When I see dark matter in the news I'm always reminded of the story of Vulcan.

In the 1800s, detailed observations of the planet Mercury showed that its orbit was slightly different than Newtonian mechanics predicted-- a difference of about 43 arcseconds per century. The study was rigorous enough to rule out any observation errors.

Le Verrier, the astronomer who made these observations, wondered how to explain the difference. A decade earlier, he had noticed a similar irregularity in the orbit of Uranus, which led to the discovery of Neptune, whose gravity caused these perturbations. So Le Verrier reasoned that something similar must be going on for Mercury, and he posited the existence of Vulcan, a tiny planet close to the Sun.

Many attempts were made for decades to observe Vulcan. It was even included on some maps of the Solar System at the time (https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3180.ct003790). But it was never conclusively observed.

When Einstein published his theory of relativity in 1915, the mystery of Mercury's orbit was finally explained-- Newtonian mechanics were simply incomplete, and the irregularity of Mercury's orbit was due to relativistic effects.

Could it be that something similar is happening today? Observations of gravity on galactic scales doesn't quite align with what relativity would predict, so we use dark matter to fill the gaps. We've tried for decades to detect dark matter, with no dice. Is our theory of gravity simply incomplete?

MOND may not be the solution, but I'm still skeptical about dark matter.

“I got an LLM to write a summary of the work it did while I occasionally checked in on Cursor.”

I’m getting so tired of these posts. Why waste our time?

OP, I love not just that you noticed this, but that you thought to post it here too. HN is the best.

meant

We're not meant to do anything. It's not like we were consciously designed with a purpose in mind. Do whatever you want.

LLM-written code, LLM-written blog post…

Why even bother?

Oleophobic coating is standard on phones and tablets, which is part of why they don’t pick up fingerprints as easily.

Some brands offer coating you can DIY yourself (eg ProofTech OLEOPEL) but these seem mostly designed for phone screens. I don’t know whether they’d be as effective on laptop screens

Similarly, it's possible to take the derivative of a song. You can use a Fourier transform to express the song's waveform as a series of sin and cosine functions, then take the derivative.

Imagine, for the sake of simplicity, you could express the song's waveform with the function 13 * sin(41x).

The derivative of this function is 533 * cos(41x).

Cosine, of course, is just a phase shifted sine, and the constant coefficient inside the function stays the same. So you're not changing anything about the shape of the wave, just stretching it vertically.

This has the effect of mimicking a "high pass filter," amplifying the volume of the highs.

Google and lots of other firms use a "leap smear" to hide the leap second from end users, essentially "smearing" the second across the hours before and after each leap.

https://developers.google.com/time/smear

Well yeah, when you exclude all the successful and profitable sectors things do start looking bad.

Just in: most people are actually short! Excluding people over 6 feet tall, the average height is only 5 ft 8!

I guess it shouldn’t be surprising for this post to be LLM-written when the author’s point is that they use LLMs to write a bunch of social media posts, but it still makes me a little sad.

The M1 Air didn’t have MagSafe, but yeah agreed

just unify the two already

Yeah but some people buy both, and apple wants to keep it that way

This is the way. Vote with your wallet!

"ChatGPT, write a letter to my company about laying 40% of them off but don't capitalize anything"

i'm gonna write this terrible news in all lowercase cause it's super aesthetic. maintain a bit of professionalism for the 4,000 people whose lives i'm throwing into turmoil? i don't think so, i have my shift key taped over so i don't accidentally show respect to anybody

There's no real arbitrage opportunity because he booked the hotel and flights on points. It likely would've been considerably more expensive overall if he'd booked in cash.

His organization says 32 states currently don't have a single competitive congressional race

I agree that the system is broken, but this is not a very fair statistic. 5 states have only a single seat in the House of Representatives. A further 7 states have just two seats. In total, there are 23 states with 5 seats or fewer. These states are all small and rural, which doesn't exactly make for a diverse population and means the seats tend to be safe R. For the states with a single major city (like Omaha for Nebraska) that city typically has its own district, and will hence be safe D in a sea of safe R. It's only in the more populous, more diverse areas where you start to get a lot of people living together who disagree with each other. This is what creates competitive races.

I think this article should’ve used the Cauchy sequence method to construct the reals instead of Dedekind cuts. It would’ve built on the earlier mention of equivalence classes.