ksenzee

There is a big difference between a member of a culture apologizing to other members of that culture, and an entire culture apologizing to the world.

I have sites behind Fastly and Akamai, and I would dearly love to hear from either of them.

It's only temporary, unless it works.

The really exciting thing in this article is that this research led them to a new technique for growing brain stem cells in vitro, which has been very difficult until now. If that isn't being oversold, it's big news. That's going to make future research into diseases like ALS a lot easier.

I regret to inform you that the equivalent has been around for some time already. They're calling it "GEO," for Generative Engine Optimization.

He had a perfectly good example of how to do that productively. His friend Dries Buytaert over in Drupal land has had a commit credit system going for years that has worked well enough that people are constantly trying to game it. Instead he went for the jugular. I really don’t think he’s okay.

Eh. It was pretty great in 2008, when I used my spotty cell service to tweet road trip updates by texting 40404. O tempora, o mores, etc. etc.

You can start typing words that were in either the title or the URL of some thing you vaguely remember visiting last month, or last year, and the Awesome Bar will reliably surface it for you. I hardly even use bookmarks; I just count on the Awesome Bar finding everything for me. If I had to choose between it and uBlock Origin, I wouldn't even have to think twice. Ads I can deal with, if I have to. I've been outsourcing my memory for the web to the Awesome Bar for decades. It's part of my brain.

No, you hire more of them, you give them what they need to do their jobs, and you actually listen to their recommendations. It's not even complicated. It just takes time and money, neither of which companies want to spend on reliability until their customers scream very loud en masse.

Superhuman intelligence? Really? These leading-edge advances indicate intelligence beyond the level of humanity?

To clarify: We are not training LLMs on any information that humanity does not already have access to.

Are you making a serious argument that superhuman intelligence is a plausible outcome of training LLMs on everything humanity knows so far? Or are you making the generic assertion that AGI is theoretically possible via means other than emulating the human brain? Because the latter is a strawman (nobody has asserted anything to the contrary), and I have seen no evidence at all to support the former.

LLMs are not emulating the human brain. Somebody may well be able to do that someday, but right now nobody is even trying to.

They were buying a home and a yearly family vacation on two modest incomes, though. Try doing that now.

Housing is not more expensive because people have granite countertops. If anything it's the other way around. The land houses sit on has grown exponentially in value regardless of the quality of the building itself. Take any modest US suburban house that's been around since the 70s, and check its value over time. Even if the house is still the same building, same square footage, its current value will be much more than its initial value in today's dollars. If you're paying $700k for a house that was worth half that in today's dollars a generation ago, you might as well spend the extra few thousand it takes to get the nice countertops; their value relative to the rest of the house has gone down considerably.

"You will be annoyed" and "you will be served malware" are two different classes of need. The first is enough to get me running Firefox/uBlock Origin on my own devices. The second is what got me to run it at work.

yeah good idea, I'll just pop it into my xbox -- oh.

This was Washington, D.C. during the Bush years. I could more easily have admitted to an ongoing affair or a cocaine habit.

There's a large middle ground between saying nothing in the face of bigotry and proceeding immediately from "oh you're a member of <group>?" to an itemized list of hypocrisies, without stopping to find out what the individual person in front of you actually thinks about said hypocrisies. All I'm advocating for is that last: talk to people like they're people, not like they're mindless members of <group>.

Having previously been a member of such a religion, and having left it specifically over human rights issues, I am delighted to inform you that there are many individuals who identify as members of such religions but who are not personally bigoted, and who in fact may privately be uncomfortable about that aspect of their religious belief. If you already know someone, and you have reason to believe they're not bigoted, but then they out themselves as a member of some such group, you don't have to assume the worst.

Of course people know how to hide things that aren't safe to tell everyone. I do, however, genuinely mean what I'm saying. I worked somewhere once where the nature of the work meant almost everyone was of a particular political persuasion. I was of the opposite political persuasion. I was also one of the most junior employees there. It was a good enough bunch of people that I felt safe mentioning it in passing one day, and it led to a really great conversation. I was not afraid of being fired for it, but more importantly, I was not afraid of being ostracized for it.

I don't own a company, and nobody reports to me. I simply said I want my coworkers to feel safe being themselves. I've had jobs where that was true, and they were better places to work all around, probably because "I feel safe talking about my transition/mental health/divorce" also translates to "I feel safe telling my boss this release needs to be delayed" and "I feel safe admitting I need some help writing this code."

Maybe not your whole self, but I'd like the people I work with to feel safe talking about their family, their disabilities, their religion, their culture or subculture, the things they love doing, whatever makes them human.

It's fascinating reading if you're interested in finding out the details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWV_(radio_station)

To clarify my point, I am fairly sure the issue is not fountain pens requiring less pressure to write with than everything else, but rather ballpoint pens requiring more pressure than all earlier pen technology. I have not used a dip pen myself, but I can't imagine it would require pressure to write.

In other words, all of the writing tools in common use since ~1950 make it easy to separate your letters, but before the ballpoint pen became commonplace, every writer had had the experience of using a pen that makes connecting letters easier than separating them. That's the experience most of us today are missing.

The cursive thing is almost certainly because he's using fountain pens. Pencils and ballpoint pens lend themselves to printing more easily, because they require pressure to write, and when you let the pressure up between letters, the line stops. The first time I picked up a fountain pen and tried printing with it, I found all my letters were connecting whether I meant them to or not, and I suddenly understood why cursive exists. Everyone who's learned cursive in the ballpoint pen era has been unwittingly taught a performance optimization for a tool they're not using.

I don’t know whether you wrote this by hand in the most painfully LLM style you could gin up, or whether you got an LLM to do it for you, but either way I tip my hat to you.

Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to imply you didn’t. If you were lucky enough to get a doctor to diagnose you before you figured it out yourself, congrats. That should be more common than it is. There are way too many doctors out there brushing off obvious signs of small fiber neuropathy.

Not OP, but this is fairly common knowledge. Here's a reliable source - search the page for VAPP: https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-detail...

Autonomic neurologists are the relevant specialists. I invite you to look for one in your local area and see how rare they are. The last I checked, the Seattle metro area (and in fact the whole state of Washington) had precisely one board-certified autonomic neurologist. Diagnostic delay is, unsurprisingly, around six years. Combine that with the fact that all the equipment you need to do a basic POTS test is a pulse oximeter and a blood pressure cuff, and yeah, you're going to have people self-diagnosing, for good reason.