towledev

To my ear, that sounds very much like the GRE Verbal.

At Heritage, in the break room over the microwave, there's a sign: "science delende est."

may pass the Turing Test

Why do you say 'may'? Just curious. Surely you've got something

For me, Maps and pods.

If it looked like a RAZR, I'd buy one today

if anyone's writing a script with a nerd in it, this line would kill

I wonder how the bears would write this headline

Maybe you can point me to the "equal predictive and explanatory power" bit in William's writings.

The razor is commonly misunderstood.

William of Ockham objected to his fellow theologians inventing things out of whole cloth (like dark matter question mark). That’s the point, not that a simpler explanation is more likely to be true.

The common understanding would have us believe that creationism, being simpler, outshines evolution, or that there is no such thing as a color revolution because the simplest explanation is that the mass protests are earnestly aggrieved locals.

I think ppl really do overrate the "mind shift" needed for zero. That's my honest opinion. I think ppl don't think about it hard enough.

The fact is, zero's usefulness is a bookkeeping device. "There are zero apples" is not better or more useful than "there are no apples." That's not why zero survives. You can wax poetic day and night about what a mind shift "lack of existence is." You're not getting it. You're missing the point. What does that _enable_ that "no apples" does not? That's the measure of its usefulness, right?

It enables positional notation. That's zero's primary gift to the world. It is a necessary bookkeeping device for positional notation. And the measure of positional's usefulness over its predecessor, additive numerals a la the Roman system, is so profoundly great that no argument need be made. No waxing poetic is needed. No "it seems obvious now but back then." It's just indisputable.

XP was dope. Long-as-hell start menu with 80 folders.

In this case, the building. To give bricks the win over any building ever simply because bricks precede buildings is a little - what’s the word - dumb

And that is an all-time great innovation outpacing the Cartesian coordinate system, you say, being able to word a sentence differently

Do you build out your own information hierarchies and tell the model to use as-is, or do you let it organize everything itself?

Notably, zero persons have chosen to make the explicit case that zero is more ingenious than the Cartesian coordinate system. :)

ok, "no apples."

The circumstances are similar, but the people are different. Look outside: this is WALL-E.

Is it though? All languages have the word 'nothing'.

Better candidates: a) place-value numbering aka the positional numeral system, b) the Cartesian coordinate system. Forced to choose, I would pick (b).

Re starting wars, you’re preaching to the choir.

Re international agreements: yes, the idea is that _broad support_ is required for binding international agreements. Senate ratification represents broad support.

The JCPOA was written in pencil.

I seek only to point out that we, the United States, have a constitutionally-outlined treaty-making process which involves Senate ratification, and that in the case of the JCPOA, the Senate did not ratify.

It would be truer to say the agreement was between several world powers and Obama, as the Senate didn't ratify.

Was the fruit tree important for its fruit? Surely there are other fruit sources, no?

As a kid, I dreamed of doing this. Some of my earliest googling was related to rocket fuel, probably right after October Sky came out.

What differentiates High-Power from the other options?

The fact that unsympathetic targets are the first to be targeted need not be viewed as strategic. Other targets would be defended, which is a reason not to target them. Unsympathetic targets lack defenses and are therefore most likely to be targeted, all other things being equal.

We grant fully that it’s a slippery slope, ofc. But is the end of the slope in mind at the outset? Maybe, but not certainly.

I ran into the same problem. Tried using ChatGPT as a scrum manager. It was really good at checking off todos through conversation, but as I fleshed out the details of the project it would forget critical information - not necessarily todos, but critical information constraining the implementation of the project. In the initial stages, it was great, but it lost usefulness over time.

We need a Caesar who will ban all advertising. Lacking a Caesar, we could start with publicly funded NFL stadiums e.g. MetLife to get a foot in the door and go from there. Something must be done.

Very true, but the benefit to one-on-one instruction is so enormous that we should find ways to apply it fractionally if we can’t apply it fully. One thinks eg of the one-room schoolhouses of the 1800s, with younger students learning from older students.

Instruct them in how you want them to code

They don't always listen.

Writing SQL, I'll give ChatGPT the schema for 5 different tables. It habitually generates solutions with columns that don't exist. So, naturally, I append, "By the way, TableA has no column FieldB." Then it just imagines a different one. Or, I'll say, "Do not generate a solution with any table-col pair not provided above." It doesn't listen to that at all.

It's funny, we've watched for two decades as the click-driven dynamics of the internet have degraded the meanings of words. At first, I was outraged on a daily basis. Then, as we all did, I learned, against my will, to forgive. "Can't blame them for chasing clicks! Who among us wouldn't cheapen a word if it meant a view?"

But - and this is the funny part - I feel like my teen-angsty self has been vindicated. I'm so burnt out on exaggeration, not a single news site has gotten regular clicks from me in over a decade, nor do I comment or read comments. I listen to a little history dork YouTube before bed, or for tutorials. I'm free.

Haven't listened to Librivox in years and years, but I still fork over the annual $2.99 because I feel I owe it.

It's horizon-broadening. Lots and lots of interesting reads/listens I never would've picked up otherwise. 1800s ghost stories, darkly racist novels like The Leopard's Spots (good luck getting through the first 10 pages). My favorite is Havelock the Dane: A Tale of Old Grimsby, first written circa the 14th century but thought to be much older. When you listen to it, it is apparent that the author and the intended audience know 100x more about nautical things than you do. It's also charmingly simplistic; the main character is sort of like Conan the Barbarian. He'll do things like "lift a stone the weight of an ox and throw it the length of two men." You imagine the audience being like, "Oh my fucking god.... that's amazing."

You’re selling your point short.

In my time in management, I found that the commonplace psychological descriptors we use failed to adequately describe what I was seeing. Two employees may both be “detail-oriented,” but there are subcategories within that depending on where the motivation comes from and those subcategories behave differently. Some people want that A+, some people like their squares square and their circles round (and it gives them anxiety when they’re not). Those groups are different, and I don’t know what to call them.

At bottom, there are ‘simple machines’ of psychology that, in combination with each other, produce behavioral traits at the top level. We don’t really have words for them, or at least not words I can think of for the ones I see.