rogerclark

These things really suck. The novelty wears off instantly. It's uncomfortable having to either stand up to get something from the robot or awkwardly reach over while sitting down. The moment when food comes out is the most likely time for customers to express positive emotion at a restaurant. You don't get to express gratitude toward human staff and the staff don't receive that positive feedback. The people working there are relegated entirely to cleanup and maintenance.

But I guess the robot companies are making money.

I would guess that abiogenesis is often framed around randomness as a strategy to argue for its implausibility. Of course, a completely random system is unlikely to produce enough coherence to convince anyone that it could be possible.

But in reality, the universe is full of patterns. The laws of physics are not random. Water behaves in very specific ways. Our planet revolves around the Sun in 365 day intervals. The planet rotates every 24 hours. Even out of these two interlocking patterns, you can see how energy delivery to the surface of the planet could result in mechanical and chemical cycles that may result in non-random mineral formation, concentration gradients, and thermal dynamics.

Scientists argue that abiogenesis is a result of inherently chaotic but non-random processes, not a hypothetical probabilistic scenario like monkeys with typewriters.

It already has, for better or worse. Why does anyone still take this guy seriously? It's one thing to be skeptical that AI is going to make the world a better place... it's another thing to be skeptical that it exists and actually does things.

You can't grasp this because there is no FTL communication. Quantum entanglement does not enable FTL communication, and wormholes etc. are entirely theoretical.

Is "what is this ?" even a productive comment in itself? That's the point the parent is trying to make. If you click on this link, and you can't tell what it is, you probably don't care what it is. And after that, if you don't care enough to search "Daffy Duck" on Google or whatever, you really don't care what it is. Why would we possibly need a Hacker News comment explaining what Warner Brothers cartoons are?

"Disappointed, but not defeated, they resolved to build a better version of Mario."

Carmack is a great programmer to be sure. Commander Keen, however, was not a better version of Mario. It was worse than Mario in every way -- art, music, and gameplay are all inferior.

Nobody outside of Gen X PC gamers know what Commander Keen is. Everyone knows what Mario is. While copying may be the way design works, copying only gets you so far.

htmx itself is not the future of anything. Businesses are not using htmx to make money and nobody is hiring for htmx. It's an ideological technology rather than a practical one. Maybe it'll inspire something that will turn out to be the future of frontend, but it won't be htmx as it is now.

That first sentence is one of the best-distilled insights I've ever read on HN.

IMO, the most distinct flavors in Dr. Pepper are cherry and almond. Benzaldehyde, an "artificial cherry" molecule listed in this spectrometer video, is found in both cherry and almond extracts.

If you're familiar with the taste of amaretto or marzipan, try thinking of those next time you drink a Dr. Pepper. That will unlock the flavor discrimination for you.

Japanese snacks and drinks also use high fructose corn syrup.

Someone please acquihire Sean and his compiler! This guy is a once-in-a-generation polymath: an expert in compilers (obviously), GPUs (worked on CUDA at NVIDIA), physics and topography (JPL etc).

Buy the compiler, get somebody who could build you a nuclear reactor, drug discovery simulator and a GPU architecture. Deal of the century.

The stereotype premise is funny but the jokes don't land very often. The jump cuts where he repeats words are also not jokes at all.

The recent video about the T3 stack just lists off names of libraries that we're all forced to use. I get that it's relatable but there's a difference between funny and relatable.

This would be a fantastic way to resolve both the gravity problem as well as the nature of quantum uncertainty.

The "random" fluctuations of gravity in Oppenheim's theory could be intuitively explained by the cumulative gravitational effects from all other mass in the universe, which of course is always in constant motion. This isn't explicitly stated anywhere in his work as far as I can tell, but it seems to be implied.

In order for it to fully make sense, you will need to study it from multiple angles. Hooktheory.com, books, and lots of YouTube videos will get you there over the course of 1-10 years. Ultimately, you won't understand music theory without trying to write a lot of your own music. It's like programming: you can read a book about JavaScript, but if you never wrote software and you never plan to, there's simply no way to actually understand the book.

An explanation of how this application might work (haven't verified from the source or letting it run long enough): let's say it chooses a subset of notes ("scale degrees") from a minor key, probably chosen at random. A subset of 5 or fewer notes from a scale (a pentatonic scale) will constrain the possible space of melodies so that most configurations will sound good. Even fewer and you get a more predictably pleasant (but perhaps less interesting) result. For instance, the notes that comprise the root chord will always sound good when played in any order. Acid lines typically suggest some kind of minor chord by playing an arpeggio (usually a repetitive melody consisting entirely of notes from a particular chord).

Also, a subset of notes from one scale are always going to be present in another scale. You can transition (modulate) from one scale to another by having a section use a shared subset of notes, then switching to the new one. In this manner, you can have a single piece of music traverse all possible scales (in acid techno, almost entirely minor scales).