taeric

Apologies, I didn't mean that at a personal level. Obvious the conversation here is happening. I was more gesturing at the national media which is basically eggshell walking around this admin.

My understanding is that more than a few of the things it planned were thrown into chaos. The new TSMC stuff is still planned, but it isn't hard to imagine that will hit more problems with how tantrum driven the current admin is. And tariffs and general posturing on trade wars is hurting everything.

Some of it is also just political fighting making it inconvenient to sign contracts and do work specifically right now. Even places that have favorable build out plans for data centers have strong fears on moving forward with them with how much political ads are using them as a focus.

Good news on that front is that political fighting typically evaporates with the campaigns. Bad news, of course, is that it typically comes back with them. So contracts have to be executed stupid quick.

Which flat out makes some things like the CHIPS act non-starters as long as we can't trust the next administration to give a good faith attempt at executing and honoring what came before.

How much of this is the current uncertainty over politics in the US? With the incredibly frustrating aspect that we can't really directly discuss exactly how corrupt a few of the main actors have been, to date.

And the oddest fear is precisely what will happen if we start trying to ramp up a bit of what used to be normal accountability?

Agreed. I have no doubt I could throw curveballs at it, but it has been getting things mostly correct for a while. And the fact that I can follow up with a direct challenge is kind of nice.

I think I could be ok with it, as long as I can query it. Preferable if I have a way to directly interact with it that isn't just moving things around; though honestly this is no different than many physical machines. Consider, what does the accelerator pedal do in a car that is not in gear? And consider that changing gears is done on a completely separate input mechanism.

(Really, people don't engage more with physical machines to consider programming. We insist that everything has to be distilled down to symbolic functions. Preferably limited inputs and a single output. If only life was so accommodating.)

This is a silly comparison. Dip pens are a novelty, and predate every other pen type.

Records are largely a novelty. And predate streaming services.

I'm fairly sure originals are almost universally novelties compared to things that came after.

AI promised less work for given output. Same as any technological change ever. And same as any previous advancement, it immediately increased output of existing/known things.

And it largely seems to be delivering on that?

Right, I guess I'm largely swayed by the argument that responses and likes were heavily impacted. Something responses down thread of that post seem to corroborate.

It is also hard not to see the obvious response from Musk and Putin as indicative that something worked.

Does anyone have the numbers on social media participation? I don't think anyone thought that their ability to execute media influencing activities was completely shutdown, but it did seem that social media was a lot quieter for a time.

Easy hypothesis would be that they were (probably accidentally) reliant on the news scraping bots to find where to focus responses and such. Would be like realizing a lot of US things do down when AWS' us-east goes down. It isn't literally where everything is hosted. A lot of things have accidental dependencies that go through there, though.

While this is true, there is a gaping hole in how foreign agents can amplify influencers on youtube and twitter. Probably even facebook, at this point.

My favorite thing like this is when Scrooge McDuck has made it into legal proceedings.

Yes, constraint learning is a huge deal. And there is a fun trick to solving sudoku that is basically this. Someone realized that you can essentially build an extra ring around the board that has the same constraints as elsewhere. Phistomefel Ring is the name, I believe. (This may be a different one, I just reached for the first thing a google search found for my vague description.)

Agreed. I don't know if I would be shocked, but I would be surprised.

This is one that is hard for people to really internalize, I think? The SAT solvers many are likely to use today are not at all the same as the ones they would have used 20 years ago. They have made some amazing advances in how to approach those problems.

There are also probably some very poorly conceived models that people use to adapt a problem to some of these solvers.

Absolutely this. The game is a prime example of how characters can drive engagement.

This always feels odd to me. It would seem a fairly straight forward optimization of the interpreter to special case the different types that it can reduce.

That is, why couldn't they have done the essentially same trick that you reference for += with reduce?

Amortized is a bit different, though? It largely implies that there is a heavy cost periodically. Average just implies that it varies. Which, fair that "massive cost periodically" is compatible with that. Just seems to have a very different context, to me.

With hashtables, it was more that it was not guaranteed to be the minimal cost. Just, depending on statistics of the data that you feed to it, it shouldn't be the worst case.

I used to think of it more as O(1) being the expected average of the cases. My guess is I'm probably thinking of it more as an amortized cost, in that framing? (That is, not that it is the average case. Is the average of all cases.)

To your point on the worst case being something you may worry about in denial of service, I think it is often the case that people should set bounds on what size N they will deal with in a program. And then decide from there on whether you are worried about some of the more esoteric growth patterns.

I'm growing increasingly confident that this is how people often work, as well.

I maintain my, "what is abundance good for, if we can't make it safe for kids to walk places?!" stance. :(

This is true of a ton of online discourse. Worse, when the headline of a claim doesn't even match the article it is fronting. I've seen more than a few articles that basically contradict the headline, but end in a "despite all evidence, we think it is correct to say X."

Yeah, what bit me was the place we were staying was off a JR line. Oops.

Huge shout out that if you are going to be in Japan, you need one of these cards. I had thought I could just buy a two day pass in Tokyo. Which, you can, but you are almost certainly going to be limited to what routes and lines you can use, then. Which is brutal when you can't tell google maps which card you have.

I think, in general, one should have the view that anything that can miss, will miss. Agreed that it is better to have something with a lower miss rate.

I always assumed it was a bit of a common practice from image based development practices. I'm now assuming I was incorrect on that being the case?

I'd love to read a good history of the different development styles. I know we often have a good exploration of the parts of an executable file. I don't recall seeing a good exploration of different compilation/build styles through the years.

This is silly. Fun. But silly. Is like claiming that math on the numbers that everyone knows is actually typed. Ignoring that that is only true if you do the effort to also do your operations on the types.

There are CDNs everywhere, true. It is not true that everyone deploys to them all, though. Also it dodges that the networks available to everyone are still not equal.

The deficit has far more closely followed tax cuts than anything else.

I'm sympathetic to this; but hard for me to really think this is actionable. Odds are quite high that someone did push for these perspectives a few times, but someone didn't have the vantage point to appreciate them at the time.

That can be a really hard thing for people to realize. We will ask, "why didn't someone use this really compelling framing to get me hooked on something?!" And then move to something like "how come nobody has ever said just walking an hour a day will get you in pretty good physical shape?" Thing is, plenty of people say stuff like that.

And don't mistake this as blaming the listener! The point is messages can often come when you flat out aren't prepared for them.

So, what do we do? We spend time on the rote muscle memory of facts. In the hopes that that will prepare you for the next time a message comes and you are then ready for it.

Ideally, you rinse and repeat this. Constantly. All too often, the cycle gets subverted, though, and you forget to reopen yourself to the messages that came before.

I'm curious that the latency of these is actually worse than the latency of floating operations. Yes, they are worse than many integer instructions, but they seem to be on basically the same order as the equivalent float operations?