elgertam

Well-written fiction, even utopian fiction, can help us understand the human condition. Picard did not always make the best decisions, but he made decisions with impeccable moral foundations.

Every now and then, we see the limits of those foundations. In "Tapestry," we learn that if Picard hadn't been an aggressive, obnoxious, even womanizing young f cadet and junior officer, he'd never have taken the risks necessary to take command. In "Chain of Command," we learn that he in fact had been broken under torture such that he could actually see five lights when there were only four; his shouting "THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS" at the Cardassian torturer was as much an act of stubborn defiance as it was cleaving to moral foundations. Occasionally, Picard uses blackmail and veiled threads to get what he wants, such as implying in "Unification" that he may give his "gratitude" to the Duras family and enemies of Chancellor Gowron if his request for a cloaked Bird of Prey isn't dealt with expeditiously (this was after waiting like three days).

Picard has strong moral foundations because of his experience, which is why he has been promoted to run the Federation flagship. He takes enough risks with enough bravado to accomplish the Federation's political and scientific goals and to serve Starfleet's military goals.

One episode that sticks out to me as a good management episode is "Hollow Pursuits." Barclay is annoying everyone on the crew, particularly Geordi and Will to the point where they want him transferred off the Enterprise. Wesley Crusher has even begun calling Reg "broccoli" behind his back. Picard wants none of that. The Enterprise is a team in which members must be held accountable, but that does not mean simply jettisoning underperformers when they fail to deliver. He challenges his direct reports to make every effort to improve Barclay's performance. He also puts the kibosh on the rude nickname, though accidentally uses it to Barclay's face later in the episode. It's fiction, but everyone behaves in very believable human ways, and the situation is absolutely relevant to our lives today.

What's the point of this comment? Both things can be bad.

And people who use water intentionally to cause death or serious harm should face harsh legal consequences.

In fact, let's use your argument. People drown accidentally in swimming pools regularly. So then if some "protester" decided to set up one of those portable pools and forcibly hold people down under water in one, wouldn't they be guilty of attempted murder?

Using things that are known to cause death and serious harm in a way that is intended to cause death and serious harm is in fact the thing I'm against.

People are killed and maimed every year from Fourth of July fireworks. You're proving my point that these were LARPing revolutionaries who nevertheless engaged in real violence.

And please don't forget the attempted murder that the leader really did carry out with a firearm.

I accidentally set up a passkey for one application, a certain accounting software. Now when I login, I'm required to give both the passkey from my password manager and usually my password, too. It's a usability mess and basically makes it impossible for me to share my login with e.g. my wife when she might need to login to that account. That's the practical trap.

The real trap is when Google decides in a few years that third party passkey managers will no longer be granted an ability to use the Chrome extension APIs, and Google Sync and other pay-to-play vendors are the only supported ways to handle passkeys. uBlock was just the beginning.

I'm sticking with my passwords for now. Some providers ::cough:: Meta ::cough:: have become openly hostile to allowing anyone to login to their services, but most haven't made it too cumbersome yet.

"The sounds, but not the language. We'd be responding in gibberish."

Granted those were humpbacks (whales, not people).

> With BERT, you need a large, labeled dataset, and you have to train/fine-tune the model.

BERT requires a huge corpus, but it isn't labeled. BERT is trained through self-supervised learning using mask tokens and next sentence prediction. Fine-tuning is useful for specific tasks, but isn't absolutely essential for the model to function.

The only part of "hard to read" that has ever made sense is that the callback takes multiple args and sometimes I can't remember the order of the initial value versus the accumulator.

Incidentally, reduce is also powerful enough to implement both map and filter in terms of itself, though that's more of a teaching exercise than a good recommendation.

I mostly interpret it as of the same spirit with those who oppose proper tail calls because it "ruins" their debugging stack traces.

> Some Japanese utilities have introduced tariffs designed to encourage daytime water heating as growing volumes of solar generation enter the grid. [Emphasis added.]

I was quite confused at the use of "tariff" here, as it meant to me a "tax on a good crossing a political boundary." Turns out, 'tariff' has an older meaning: a published schedule of fees or taxes issued by some authority.

On initial install, sure. But user accounts can also be created at arbitrary times. The user may have changed the set of photos in the intervening time and might even be editing the directory during profile creation.

> “I certainly don't expect the industry to continue to spend millions of dollars to solve problems in mathematics, because there is no profit in it,” Columbia University mathematician Michael Harris wrote in an email to Science. But he worries the highly publicized achievement will be “extremely damaging to mathematics; it convinces decision makers that human mathematicians are obsolete, and it convinces young people that their passion for mathematics has no future.”

LLMs seem particularly suited toward these existence-proof problems. Working mathematicians seem absolutely essential for universally quantified results, still. I strongly doubt, for example, that if Fermat's Last Theorem hadn't been proven three decades ago, that an LLM would be able to do work equivalent to inventing the mathematics as Andrew Wiles did to solve the problem. I have similar doubts about P vs NP, the twin prime conjecture, even the Riemann Hypothesis (unless the latter has at least one counterexample).

And I want to be clear: I'm not downplaying the achievements of these models. This is remarkable! I simply think that the pattern of success is in existence proofs or finding counterexamples, which makes sense based on how LLMs function and are trained.

The site should have a disclaimer at the bottom: "A Sam Altman Production."

Holmes seems to have the Harvard Business (MBA) mindset: science, R&D, engineering are just results to squeeze out of recalcitrant practitioners. Any failure in those domains is evidence only of the scientists' or engineers' refusal to align themselves with the Vision.

Despite not even finishing undergrad, she adopted this persona so naturally, including the black turtleneck and a Zuck-esque vocal inflection, that due diligence apparently defenestrated itself. Phyllis Gardner is the unsung hero who tried to warn the world, but the MBA mass-delusion was too strong.