noelwelsh
Joined 16 years ago
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Recent submissions
Comment · 3 days ago
There is a bit more to the story. There was interbreeding, which we can make up explanations for but none have any evidence to support them. Neanderthals were also under a lot of environmental stress. They were very inbred well before Homo Sapiens shared their range. We have no evidence they hunted from range (no arrow heads, for example, and their shoulder joints are not adapted to throwing) but relied on close range attacks. This would have become increasing more difficult in the Ice Age, due to the nature of the terrain and the increasing size of the megafauna.
There is a good case to be made that Homo Sapiens were just lucky to be based in the milder climate of Africa, and by chance being more adapted to hunting megafauna due to our body structure. Homo Sapiens are also very inbred. IIRC there are two main genetic bottlenecks that have been detected in our DNA. We almost didn't make it.
Comment · 5 days ago
Really cool. I haven't read it but I'm familiar with some of the authors so I expect this to be good.
Comment · 10 days ago
Nice concept. I caught European Sleeper last week, my first time on a night train. It was ok but I'd like something better if I was using it regularly.
It's a tough time to do something about climate change. Short-termism is very attractive right now.
Comment · 24 days ago
You have several comments in this thread. They would all be more useful if you would just plainly state your point and drop the condescending tone.
Comment · 26 days ago
> I recommend not starting with the old classics because they were in part made to be frustrating and difficult and played over a long time. Instead, look at modern text adventures that follow more recent advances in game design.
A timely comment for me. I tried the linked Planetfall game, and gave up after a little bit of wandering around and nothing happening. Apparently I was supposed to just putter about for longer until the game really started with the emergency event, which got me thinking about game design in these early games.
Some of these games really liked to give you a combinatorial search problem dressed up as a game. In Colossal Cave Adventure, one of the first puzzles is to get a bird into a cage, so you can use the bird to scare away a snake. The bird is scared of a rod you find earlier, so you have to drop the rod in a different room before you get the bird (and then go back and get the rod). Now none of this makes any sense. The expectation is that you have nothing better to do then just try different combinations until you find what works. In a way it's asking you to play a meta-game, rather than the game.
This reminds me of Sword of the Samurai [1], a Fighting Fantasy book I had the misfortune to read when I was a lot younger. It was fiendishly difficult if you actually played by the rules. Partly this is because the combat was really hard (see the linked review) but also because there were just so many choices where the book gives no hints what is a good choice to make. For example, right at the end there is fight between you and your buddies versus four baddies. Each one of your buddies can take out a specific baddy, but there is no indication which is which. So the book is really designed with the expectation that you're constantly going to cheat. This meta-game of bookmarking each decision point and exploring the decision tree before committing is the actual game that the book is written for, and it has a lot of content to explore if you realise this is the game you should play.
So yeah, game design has come a long way :-)
[1]: https://fightingfantasy.net/articles/the-parallax-walkthroug...
Comment · 27 days ago
This rhetoric (and it is rhetoric, in that it is designed to persuade) too often lacks nuance. Generating a 3 minute stand alone video is impressive, but it is a different task from generating code that must be consistent with an existing mountain of code. Generating code that implements a straightforward feature within an existing system is different to generating code that must make architectural decisions in novel domain or with a novel architecture. The Navier-Stokes result is impressive but 1) they spent a bajillion tokens / currency units to achieve it and 2) AFAIK all the recent mathematics results have been counterexamples, which are a different beast to proofs.
My own experience, pootling around with Claude like a peasant, is that it is simultaneously amazing at some tasks and an absolute moron at others. The more abstract the reasoning required, the worse it is.
Comment · 1 month ago
Pointing out an issue with one action doesn't mean approval of other actions. You don't have to invent an conspiracy.
Comment · 1 month ago
Using an LLM for any large project shows how useful it is to have data and functions that aren't siloed. That's why CLI apps have had a resurgence: because the LLM can interface with them. Yet the reaction from so many who are deep into LLM development is to build their own little silo: an app.
We really need a better model. One alternative is to have an everything-app: a general purpose tool in which (almost) everything lives. The terminal is one of them. The text editor / word processor is another. (I use Emacs for everything.) In a business context the spreadsheet is probably the best choice.
Comment · 1 month ago
I use Niri and love it. I think manually managing windows is a waste of time, and when I watch normal users they usually struggle with this and their desktop is a disaster zone. I never want to go back to that. Tiling window managers are slightly better, but they still require you do window management.
Comment · 1 month ago
I assume SOUL.md was empty.
Seriously, I want to know what's in there!
Comment · 1 month ago
A nitpick: Types are properties of expressions, not values. Type errors happen at compile time, before code runs. Values only exist at run time.
Comment · 1 month ago
It's most obvious in very formalized dance, but even in street dance, which emphasises freestyling, you can still find this kind of structure. There are videos of bboys talking how they come up with moves, and they'll talk about applying transforms (reverse, invert, change level, etc.) to existing moves, or combining parts of existing moves together. It's very far from everything in the dance, but it's a useful lens to guide exploration.
An example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCpXbHpy9LY
Comment · 1 month ago
Don't tell me how I should enjoy my hobby.
Comment · 1 month ago
When I think about dance, it's about the algebraic structure in it. E.g. translating moves between different levels, transitions between moves, and so on. That, and the movement options that increased physical capabilities unlock. So nothing like what OP thinks about. Not a criticism of what they've written; just a different perspective.
Comment · 1 month ago
The War on Iraq may not fit the definition of terrorism, being government actions, but it killed a shit load of people and was driven by religious convictions with flimsy or non-existent evidence:
https://san.com/cc/george-w-bush-saw-iraq-war-as-crusade-dec...
https://www.thirteen.org/worldfocus/blog/2009/05/27/religiou...
I'm a partner at Inner Product (http://inner-product.com) and Underscore (http://underscore.io), where I teach, mentor, and develop Scala.
I'm previously was a co-founder of a startup called Myna which applied multi-armed bandit algorithms to the problem of content optimisation -- where A/B testing is traditionally used.