julienchastang

:-)

I get that prices are high and that going to high school in France sucks in many areas, but to burn down the historic town hall seems over the top to me. (Doesn't help that earlier in some cases the gendarme/police violently tried to suppress the protests in other areas of France.) I suppose France has a long, and perhaps self-defeating history of conflict with their government, to say the least. Yet another chapter...

From the article:

  Allen places the onus for pedestrian safety on walkers. 

  “Pedestrians think you have the right of way all the time,” he said. “But that doesn’t matter if you’re not paying attention. You assume that responsibility when you’re walking out on that kind of roadway.” 

  Tennessee’s plan probably won’t make Union Avenue safer, Smart Growth America’s Simon said. The crosswalks on Union Avenue are still a half-mile apart; if crosswalks are too far away, she said, pedestrians won’t use them.

"The AI build-out is on track to become the biggest economic bet in U.S. history, dwarfing the investments made to fund other huge U.S. infrastructure projects such as the railroads, the highway system and the plumbing for the internet."

Ha! I just had a very interesting conversation with ChatGPT about a mushroom that I found in my front lawn. I am 99% sure it was an edible oyster mushroom which included analysis the of the size, growing substrate (dead ash tree root which turns out to be a useful identifying characteristic -- I learned a lot about mycology in a short time). Plus I don't use fertilizers, herbicide, pesticides, fungicides (obviously) on my lawn so I think it would have been quite tasty. Did I eat it? Hell, no. But then I got to thinking, would I trust a human to correctly identify it? I am actually not sure I would either. Penalty is just too great for misidentification LLM or not.

org-mode is a way more powerful literate programming environment which can be exported to many different formats including markdown. In the past, I have collaborated with others with markdown as the sort of interface format. But on the collaboration front and not everyone liking emacs, I found that there's no way around that. I am a huge fan of emacs and use it every day but it is not that great of a collaboration tool due to it not being everyone's cup of tea.

Does anybody else feel like this is the answer to the Fermi paradox? Advanced civilizations simply exploit, consume, and pollute their way of existence.

I am not part of the group being polled (firmly ensconced in middle age), but I feel the opposite. Yes, the AI roll out has been shambolic to say the least, and it can also be annoyingly intrusive. On the plus side, AI is allowing me to take on projects that I would never have bothered in the past because the learning curve would have been too arduous. I am currently reverse engineering an embedded system going in there with a multimeter and logic analyzer. It is a lot of fun and I am learning a ton. If you told me five years ago that I would eventually be taking on such a project, I would not have believed you. On the job side, a lot of what I do involves troubleshooting (e.g., looking at reams of logs), and there too AI has been a boon. So, yes, actually excited about where things are going (with some misgivings).

> Do you even know?

I've wondered about this too. Did Ridley Scott and crew set out to make the greatest movie ever (IMO)? Or did something magical happen? My guess is "auteurs" often set out to create a masterwork but usually something beyond their control derails that. But, if they are lucky, they stumble upon something extraordinary that touches the heart of the human experience and that only happens once in a lifetime, if even that.

The complete opening sequence of Blade Runner is "fucking amazing". The entire movie is "fucking amazing". It is a beautiful, visually stunning masterpiece that I will never tire to look at complimented with a Vangelis soundtrack that ranks as one of the best in all of cinema. And a performance by Rutger Hauer that is pure artistic mastery. And has a woman ever looked as seductive as Sean Young smoking a cigarette as she's being interviewed by Harrison Ford at Tyrell Corp? Speaking of the opening sequence, even that computer animated Ladd Company tree is cool and which I have only seen one other time in "Outland", I think. The music that plays as that tree is being rendered seems to announce you are about to witness something extraordinary.