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schmidt_fifty

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The detail missing from this explanation is that structs and classes are the same thing with different default visibility. I found this enormously confusing when learning the language, and I think it was a major mistake. My assumption was that a struct was exactly the same as a c struct, and the "new" functionality was all a part of the classes.

Still. There's always extern "c".

those running the country control the police

Interestingly one of the things that came out of 2020 was that nobody appears willing to control the police. Unless by police you mean FBI, which would both make sense for investigating a national politician and be directly under the control of the executive.

Vector search is almost never the winner relative to full text.

Full text search is certainly the winner in the time dimension, but can it compete in quality? Presumably which method is likely to provide relevant results depends greatly on the query. Invoking LLMs to pre-process the query and select a retrieval method is going to be quite expensive compared to each of the search methods.

"Real artists ship." —SPJ

Many of the most prolific artists of all time are now forgotten by the masses. The choice of "artist" is particularly perplexing here because the implied sentiment seems to apply primarily to industry and not to artists.

My understanding is this is rooted in the perception of hot water as a luxury—it's not like we have any shortage of evidence from chinese texts that people have always drank cold water. The idea that most people even could avoid cold water is an artifact of the last two centuries. Even where boiling water was necessary water was boiled and stored (that's not specific to my knowledge of China, that's just an observation from multiple different places and times).

Of course I'm open to be demonstrated wrong.

Again, this was not a disease control issue, as there was no notion of separating wastewater from spring water for health reasons — it was simply a matter of taste.

The idea that "there was no notion of separating wastewater from spring water for health reasons" is complete bullshit. The dirtier the water, the more need to boil the water. Boiling the water would not have significantly improved the taste. Some streams were known to be unhealthy despite not appearing dirty and locals knew to boil this too. Springs and deep wells were so highly valued in part because these were known to be safe to drink without any processing. European records are full of people being prosecuted or just directly murdered for messing with spring or fountain water. The idea people would not connect the taste of the water (which was quite well observed) with health is not born out by records of the time. Laws on the books dictated where one might bathe, wash clothing, rinse unhealthy flesh, and especially where one might piss or shit, specifically concerned with causing widespread disease. In siena in 1262 a woman was flayed alive after she was accused of poisoning fountain water—not dirtying it, but specifically destroying its safety.

The reason people drank beer is the same as today: it's tasty, it makes you feel good, you get some calories, and water is "boring" unless you're really thirsty. Plus it was "packaged" and ready to drink in town

I disagree, i think it's worse in every way except that you can hail one with an app now. It's certainly more expensive and the driver makes less than ever, but now there's a kafkaesque middleman that doesn't appear to provide any value but can fuck with both of you at will with little recourse available for either party. Pricing is only reliable in the sense of feeling gouged by a party that has provided no value.

But yea, slick app. I hear the drivers are sometimes less racist, too.

Bringing up personal responsibility always struck me as avoidance of addressing the problem at all. People will always be irresponsible. If you want to address the problem some part of the answer will have to come from society compensating for poor individual decision making.

To avoid doing this will just perpetuate the idea that a child is the property of the parent and deserves to be the victim of their failings.

Cigarettes are much easier to regulate than phones are because you need continual consent from regulated businesses to continue the habit. So regulation isn't really possible, and parents will never be perfect, so society needs to provide an alternative to whatever problem is being solved by giving these kids phones. Framing this as a moral failing just seems like a way to avoid suggesting any kind of improvement on a societal level.

There’s a very real/significant risk that AGI either literally destroys the human race

If this were true, intelligent people would have taken over society by now. Those in power will never relinquish it to a computer just as they refuse to relinquish it to more competent people. For the vast majority of people, AI not only doesn't pose a risk but will only help reveal the incompetence of the ruling class.

Arch Linux RISC-V 2 years ago

needing a ppa to install ripgrep

Might be easier to just install cargo and use cargo to install rust tools. I've found it's much less hassle than using a generic package manager.

what is with the obsession that ancient egyptians were incapable of building these monuments?

It's part of the broader new age movement. It coincided with the rise of commodification of the identity, individualism of the 80s and 90s, and the self-care movement. People express beliefs in a higher power as a way of dealing with many things, and many new age people look either to the stars or into "other dimensions" (whatever that means) for these higher powers.

I'd also like to point out that although you could view this as being cynical about the capacity of humanity, you could also view this as hope that someone will save us from ourselves. You can also see this in political belief with eg posadism (where dolphins/aliens elevate us after we destroy ourselves with nuclear warfare and recuperate by turning to communism, which to be fair is also basically the plot of star trek) or the belief that a free market expresses superhuman collective rationalism that will save us from individual failings.

LLMs won’t behave in a more creative and independent way (as we hoped), but more susceptible to issues like hallucination.

What is creativity if not what people call hallucination? Horribly named phenomenon, btw.