hirundo
hirundo on Hacker News
My cheap home thermostat has that frustrating +/- 5 degrees F accuracy. Is it very difficult to build an inexpensive 1 degree sensor?
Why is it "Forbidden by Gravity" but the "sub-Plankian unknown"? I thought that the Plank length was a hard limit like the speed of light. Is that not true, and there theoretically are unknown features smaller than that?
You could get the same distribution if everyone is assigned a random amount of selfishness regardless of wealth, but some people are better at achieving their selfish goals than others, or just luckier. How could someone know that the result is primarily due to non-uniform selfishness?
You could measure selfishness in small experimental scenarios and try to correlate it with the wealth of the subjects. Does that evidence exist?
Finance used to be the driver of marriage, and now that it is less so there are fewer marriages.
Wealth follows a Pareto distribution, and there are many Pareto distributions of things that are not caused by selfishness.
https://www.thelangelfirm.com/debt-collection-defense-blog/2...
If selfishness isn't a good general explanation for Pareto distributions, is there a reason that it's particularly explanatory for wealth distribution?
"Using theoretical arguments and statistical tests we find, as in Dagsvik et al.
(2020), that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be strong enough to cause systematic changes in the temperature fluctuations during the last 200 years."
I agree. Rule of law is critical and requires consistency. But given the choice I'd rather live in a jurisdiction where law enforcement tends to use their discretion in favor of less rather than more centralized control. That bias towards less control seems to be inversely correlated with population density.
We have no garbage pickup in the county, we haul it to one of four collection areas. Those cost $140/year plus about $7/100lbs, so no doubt some more thrifty neighbors are burning household trash instead, but I just burn slash and take household trash to the dumpsters.
There's a high fire risk in this area and smoke watchers will report it, and the VFD gets dispatched. They don't respond individually.
And it's self-reinforcing. I live in a rural county the size of Connecticut with just 5k people in it. The people that choose to live out here are frequently the ones who particularly value that extra freedom ... including law enforcement. It is almost routine here for the local sheriff to announce that will not enforce some local or federal code or another. Talk to a deputy about crime and he'll ask if you have guns, and then recommend that you buy one if you don't.
The county government does little and our property taxes reflect that.
I can and have burned very large piles in my yard, but we're not savages. I have to notify the local volunteer fire department first, or they're libel to show up, and not happily.
I've had to play dangerous games of Frogger to turn left at Bonny Doon & Hwy 1. You're lucky to be alive to write this.
The absence of a shibboleth is a shibboleth identifying an outsider.
You just spoiled my excuse to watch Die Hard again.
I suggest that air ducts should not be considered part of Nakatomi Space.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/PlayingWith/AirVentPa...
Because rather than being inventive uses of architectural spaces they're generally lazy plot devices.
Now I have a reason to go back and watch Die Hard again to see if John crawls through air ducts.
This is a great read, and a situation where an astute IT entrepreneur could make a fine business in return for doing much good. The main superhero power needed here is "software developer". I've been in the same position as the author and bounced off of the difficulties almost immediately. People are dying to find a better way to search a .gov site.
I went shopping for a new bed the other day and hadn't for decades. So I got some future shock when I found out that they now not only have wifi and bluetooth, but also artificial intelligence. The salesman pitched me an $11,000 Smart Bed. Fascinating. Call me a Luddite but I honestly prefer a dumb bed.
I was standing at a Home Depot self-checkout, looking all over for an employee to help me with an item, finding nobody. The guy next to me was waiting too and I asked him "does anyone work here any more?"
He said "I guess we do."
I wonder how they're going to get me to stock shelves and clean the restroom.
I got hired for a remote job in 2011, and have yet to meet any co-workers in the flesh, including the guy who hired me. I've spent plenty of time looking at him, talking to him. I've seen him at his worst and best. We know lots of little details of each other's lives. The fact that I've never touched or smelled him doesn't seem like any kind of problem.
From the graphs in the article it's clear that the omitted days were very close to each other, almost a vertical line in some. That seems to indicate that these are from particular events, rather than just chopping out inconveniently high readings that happen to cross the line. Not that this rule can't be abused, but these graphs look like relatively isolated events that local enforcers may have no control over.
A two-state solution is contrary to the policy of the government elected by the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Election. No further elections have occurred. Recent events indicate that this government still prefers a one-state solution.
That brilliant innovator and tycoon Edison invented a movie projector ... and decided that the best way to watch movies was one person per projector, leaning over box, peering into a narrow slot. The idea of making a whole room dark and projecting it on a wall for a group was not obvious, until it was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfI0NVC0hLU
It's just human nature. As a student teacher I was handed a curriculum that I really disliked to teach to an intro to physical science class. I thought it was badly written and not engaging for the kids, as if it was just done to check off concepts in a list rather than move them into the students' minds. Then rewritten to attempt to offend nobody on any school board anywhere.
So I did it over in my own words. Worked to find vivid examples, brought in models that could be passed around the class, tied it in to news stories at the time like Chernobyl. I had the kids write down their understanding (resulting in piles of papers to grade). I don't know if the students actually learned better from this approach, but it was clear that they were much more engaged.
Then week two came, and burn out was already at my heels. It was just a lot of work, and the prospect of developing my own curriculum week after week was daunting. Massive respect to the rare but real teachers who actually do this for a career.
So I bounced out of the teaching profession and have had a career writing code. A friend of mine in the student teacher program had no such problem. He loved teaching, made it his career and retired a few years back. But here was his secret: for him it was a low stress job. He took the curriculum materials and just passed them around or performed them verbatim. For him it is mechanical. He has no particular interest or opinion on his subjects, no sense that he might be able to improve on it. He saw my approach as pretentious and silly. So he was a good fit for that job, and he's the one that taught the next generation.
Think of requiring a minimum amount of hallucination in AI output as a safety mechanism, like mixing the distinctive odor into a propane tank. The odor is a signal that there's a gas leak that must be dealt with. A high minimum amount of hallucinations is a signal that the source is untrustworthy and must be checked. Hallucinations may turn out to be a feature that protects against over reliance. And defers the need for a Butlerian jihad.
> ... and is clearly an unbelievably, and unambiguously traumatic video that has no valid “free speech” argument,
Strong disagree. That kind of content is very effective at changing attitudes and shifting political pressures, which is the core purpose of first amendment protections. I completely understand not wanting to see it, but disagree with preventing others from choosing to see it.
"According to Section 102(b) of the Copyright Act of 1976, no “idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery” is eligible for copyright protection."
"Copyright law generally protects the fixation of an idea in a “tangible medium of expression,” not the idea itself, or any processes or principles associated with it." -- https://strebecklaw.com/idea-expression/
By tokenizing the data an AI bypasses the tangible particular expression that can be copyrighted under the Copyright Act, and takes away just the concepts. On generation, those concepts are converted back into tangible human expression that's unlikely to be protected by a copyright.
The indemnification means that Google engineers have convinced Google lawyers that this is in fact the case.
I've been watching too many Baldur's Gate Youtube videos on how to build a character, and one guy talks about the "power spike" when your character gets a particularly useful ability, like an extra bonus action per turn.
The biggest power spike of genus Homo may have been attaching a rock to the end of a stick. The spear changed our ancestors from sub-apex prey to predators ready to take on a lion in its cave. From meat to masters of all we surveyed. The next power surge of that magnitude may have been nukes.
Yet it couldn't save neanderthalensis from sapiens.
"My solution is to close the tab and to read a book."
Exactly. Exchange off-the-cuff zero cost near-anonymous speech with well considered, edited, personally identifiable speech with a significant cost to publish. Without knowing anything about the content of the speech you can still usefully predict that the later will be more dense with meaning and generally more worth your time.
HN is a good place to sift through the former to discover the later. So yeah, you have to put up with both.
Want to travel back in time? Go work for a small company. Our two dozen souls are human resourced by the COO, who hires and fires, and a manager of the basic paperwork. There are no layers to fight through, you just call the boss, and he's refreshingly blunt.
But warning, there are fewer places to hide at SmallCo.