Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
Exactly. Either everyone is confused, or something is missing from the article.
Comment · 2 months ago
I was disappointed he didn't debug why amazon kept shutting down his tablet.
Comment · 4 months ago
There are many examples in anquity. Greek had a flowering in the Bronze age, then a dark age, before classical Greek took over. The Hittites had a major disaster including the destruction of their capital before they recovered in a great way (until their final demise at the end of the Bronze age). Egypt had several dark periods where they recovered from, until they fell prey to Greek and Roman imperialism.
Comment · 8 months ago
What's also annoying is that sizes of the same clothes change. I have a pair of jeans that I ordered on Amazon in 2020. It happens to fit me great. So recently I decided to order two more of the same. I got exactly the same model with the same size on Amazon, just with different colors. But neither fit very well, they were far wider. The first one had such a horrible fit that I immediately sent it back. The other I can wear, but it's quite different from the other perfectly fitting one. Why are they doing that? It's insane.
Comment · 10 months ago
How do we know the Cambridge Philosopher is conscious?
Comment · 10 months ago
I don't feel his overflow miscompilation example is a good one. A 64bit multiplication converted back to 32bit has the same overflow behavior as if the computation was in 32bit (assuming nobody depends on the overflow indication, which is rare). And in high level programming languages you typically can't tell the difference.
Comment · 1 year ago
St. Petersburg (at least for some time)
Comment · 1 year ago
Thats the pascal kernel in all its glory. Its just a bare metal hello world

KernelMain(); [public name 'kernelMain']; begin consoleClearDisplay(); consoleSetAttributes(White, Black); consolePutString('Hello world'); end;

Comment · 1 year ago
chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans evolved intelligence too. They are smarter than most other critters in the jungle. Just all not as much as the lineage that leads to humans.

It's actually quite difficult to define human intelligence. Every time we think we find something unique by humans eventually some animal turns up that can do it too. It may be all just a question of degree and how it's used.

Comment · 1 year ago
This is actually not correct for Starlink. They did a lot of work to lower their albedo based on astronomer complaints, even though there wasn't any government regulation in this area.

It might apply to some of the emerging Starlink competitors however, especially the Chinese ones and AST.

Comment · 1 year ago
If you would spin the whole structure you couldn't have multiple shells all with 1G on their surface. The required spin speed for 1G depends on the diameter. But their whole concept is built around multiple shells, which is clear from the name.

Regarding the GDP needed once you have a working "mine from the moon and send to orbit" economy it doesn't seem to be too bad. The assumption would be that a lot of technology is already developed for other projects. Launching it all from earth obviously wouldn't be possible even with vastly cheaper launch. That's why they put the build into the moon-earth L1 lagrange point to be easily reachable from the moon.

For propulsion and reactors, but there are multiple projects today working on all of this. Building a life support system for 400 years is still an unsolved problem however.

Comment · 1 year ago
There are also lots of extinct examples like Ichthyosaurs, Mosasaurs, Plesiosaurs

Modern examples are saltwater crocodiles, sea turtles or sea snakes

Comment · 1 year ago
I suspect for most cloud providers you deleting data is cheaper because the data is not charged by the byte. But then they like having data, maybe just to train their AI models or for bragging rights to their investors.

For the expiration dates most modern file systems have the concept of arbitrary extended attributes per file. It's quite easy to add meta data like this yourself.

Comment · 1 year ago
Does the really need reinforcement learning? It seems like something that classical controller should be able to do.

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