wyattpeak

One day, long after I'm gone, people will finally accept that Python and JavaScript are no longer young languages.

JavaScript is 26 years old, Python is 31. They both continue to grow in importance year-on-year, JavaScript because there is nothing on the horizon which will plausibly replace it, and Python because a large number of industries and programmers genuinely love it.

I think there's a nontrivial chance they'll both still be languages of primary importance in 50 years, but I'd bet my bottom dollar that they'll at least remain as relics yet needing support the way Fortran and COBOL exist today.

I don't think that argument holds up. A VR headset, say, is astronomically high up the hierarchy of needs, but I know very few people who'd say the inherent value of a piece of modern technology is zero.

It really seems to be art specifically which people are often keen to describe as worthless, not any particular category of good that artwork might fall into.

I get frustrated with games that scale things with me. I want to be able to feel myself getting better, having my enemies scale with me on any axis really takes away from that feeling that I'm progressing.

I say this not because I think it's an especially noteworthy or important objection, but to echo GP's point, that it's very hard to find AI that suits everyone, and it's not just a matter of difficulty.

I think this is a weird framing of the issue. Sure, lots of businesses go under, and maybe being larger would have saved them, but maybe not. Plenty of VC-funded businesses go under precisely because they tried to be too large, when they could have perfectly comfortably served a few satisfied initial clients for enough money to pay all their bills.

I think the idea that companies go under because they aren't ambitious enough says more about modern attitudes towards growth than it does about the reality of business.

For anyone as confused as me, from Wikipedia:

> [Hunger] stones were embedded into a river during droughts to mark the water level as a warning to future generations that they will have to endure famine-related hardships if the water sinks to this level again.

Oh, excuse me, I entirely missed that section of the page. Makes sense there's a geographical distinction, I'm not American so I suppose I don't have the intuitive issue with it, but on reading I see the logic.

EDIT: Never mind, sorry, I missed part of the article, it does indeed say what you say.

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That's the opposite of what your source says:

> In writing, however, use to in place of used to is an error.

Used to X was the standard past tense of to use in the sense of being in the habit of:

I used to fish: I was previously in the habit of fishing, correct both in the past and today.

I use to fish: I am presently in the habit of fishing, correct in the past but no longer understood today.

The second, however, is according to MW occasionally misused to mean "I was previously in the habit of fishing".

Honestly, I started working this out because I thought it would be negligible. But I think you're right to doubt. Leaving aside the question of how much a human produces, since two people have suggested human output is neutral and I don't know enough to question it:

It takes an average of 0.10kcal to walk up/down a step, averaged.[1]

2.2kg of CO2 are emitted per 2000kcal of consumption (I just averaged table 3 for want of a better idea)[2]

37 steps in a staircase (TFA, 46 total - 9 flat)

3.7kcal burned, 3.7kcal * 1.1g/kcal ~= 4g CO2 per person per trip

Obviously very rough, but unless I've made an order-of-magnitude error it's in the same ballpark.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9309638/

[2] https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12937...

I don't know, I maintain that policy fairly strictly, but I can imagine falling for this.

I won't as a policy give out information to an incoming call, and I do call back if they want any info from me. But my working memory is not endless. The topic of discussion had changed three times before he was asked for any information, and the information still wasn't PII, it was a confirmation code. The scammer knew enough about him that he wasn't especially on alert. I can well imagine that flag in my mind that I was on an incoming call having been lost before we got to that point. And I suspect that's exactly how the scam was designed.

I've lost track of what point you're making.

Speed and memory is orthogonal to my point, which is about the output of two methods of arriving at an answer. I'm obviously not saying GPT-3 is anything like as efficient as running a small function.

What distinction are you drawing between the output of an interpreted program and a compiled program?

I don't think that's a reasonable assumption. If we allow ourselves to assume no errors, we could just assume GPT-3 makes no errors and declare it equivalent to a code interpreter.

I'm not talking about GPT-3, I'm discussing the theoretical question raised by the grandparent of my comment: How is predicting the output of a function fundamentally different from executing the code?

We call computers deterministic despite the fact that they don't with perfect reliability perform the calculations we set them. The probability that they'll be correct is very high, but it's not 1. So the requirement we have for something to be considered deterministic is certainly not "perfectly a hundred percent of the time", as the parent to my comment suggested.

Computers don't execute code perfectly 100% of the time.

I agree that it's fundamentally different, but I'm not exactly sure how, and I think it's subtler than you're suggesting.

After two or three years, neither would the owner.

Edit: More seriously, if they took this approach, people would regularly lose their codes, which would necessitate a backup means of obtaining it. Which would no doubt require the purchaser log into their Google account. And we're back at square one.

Are we golfing? This whole discussion is about clarifying units.

If I had to wait for several hundred network requests to complete and one or two pages to render every time I sudo'ed I'd complain about that too.

> Let's say you are the leader of a border post

Let's not say that. Suggesting that civilians have defence duties on par with members of the military is ridiculous.

The article claims that the chip is "the world’s most powerful and capable chip for a personal computer". It's reasonable to ask whether it genuinely is faster than another available chip, it's not an implicit argument that it's not powerful.

The trouble with this is it essentially reduces all differences to "biggest player wins". Because it almost never matters what symbol or representation you use for these things, your personal preference is largely based on what you grew up with.

I could resign myself to Americans* being allowed to pick the global date format to save a few cycles on an operation, but frankly I don't want to. It's not that important to me, and not having aspects, albeit minor aspects, of my culture steamrolled in the name of pointless efficiently is at least a little bit important to me.

Differences create friction yes, but I'm alright with that. I would prefer a little friction to grey uniformity. You're free to think differently, but you're not the speaker for everybody else.

* I should clarify that most Americans don't seem to want this either, this isn't a jab, it's just that if we did standardise everything their choices would probably be the ones which won out.

Does anyone know why RAR is better compression-wise than the two more modern standards?

It doesn't seem like it's been updated in a long time, and I would have expected modern software from two of the best houses in the world to handily beat it. Is it that good, or is it a matter of priorities, or something else?

I remember playing through Morrowind. It was my first Elder Scrolls game, and I got entranced by the in-game history books about a character called Jagar Tharn. They were deep and convincing in a way I'd never seen in atmosphere-setting content before, it really felt like I was reading about real events.

Turns out, Jagar Tharn was a major character in an earlier game in the series, and the histories more-or-less recounted the plot of that earlier game.

I think you're right that that referencing of earlier stories really carries a lot of weight, but I don't think the player even has to be familiar with those stories to profit from them. The very fact that they are "real" stories and places that exist outside of that game I think allows the designers to treat them more convincingly, more engagingly.

Nah, I disagree with you there. I don't think the nature of the product being sold affects my opinion or expectation of whether or not producers are expected to shoulder the cost of a discount given by a middleman.

For the record, I also disagree with your blanket claim that supermarket discounts are negotiated ahead of time. Some are.

It seems pretty surprising to me. When the supermarket offers a discount, they don't then turn to their providers and say "since we sold this at a discount, we're going to pay you less for it".

The terms on which Amazon want to offer Audiobooks are their business, but as I consumer I certainly wouldn't expect them to affect any downline incomes.

That may be so but feels tangential to my point. Perhaps address the parent to my comment? They're the one who believes that this is a symptom not present in the flu.

Why would you expect it to be similar to the flu? Covid is entirely unrelated to the flu.

SARS killed fifteen percent of people who got it. Was that due to treatment, since the flu doesn't do that?

I've made that gripe too, but there's something about error messages though that makes them very hard to take in. I don't know why, but I debug crap for a living, and I still every now and then find myself searching for a bug in Google, only to realise that there are instructions for resolving it in the error message.

I can't quite put my finger on why I can't adapt. It's some combination of the facts that 1) there's often a huge dump of information, much of it so technical that it's useful only to the developers, 2) it's fairly rare that it offers a truly useful suggestion, and 3) many of the messages I encounter ask me to do something that makes things easy for the developer rather than the user (update the software, contact the manufacturer).

I think it's something we as an industry ought to work harder on, because I don't think the failure is only in the users. I think, although I can't explain exactly why, we're communicating very poorly.

If you want the actual data sources used by the paper, read the paper. I'm not trying to replicate an academic's source-finding, that would take months. I'm trying to quickly demonstrate that the US was a thoroughly bureaucratic nation by 1920, not some kind of backwater where we have to guess and infer demographics.

Yes. It's 1920, not 1620. Here's a page from a 1920 census:

https://raogk.org/census-record/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2...

Here's a tax return form from the same year:

http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/1040forms.nsf/WebByYear/1920/$...

While it's true that there are differences, I think one lesson we should learn from history is that that virtually every group thinks they're especially unusual and that lessons don't apply to them, and simultaneously that they're usually not so unique as they think, and the lessons usually do apply to them.

School was less common at that time, but plenty of people went to school, and if there was a marked dropoff in employablility even in just that group, it should absolutely be visible.

I think that the fact that's he's been contracted for exclusivity really changes the nature of the free speech argument. Rogan is functionally being hired to Spotify to produce content. I don't expect the ability to freely express myself when representing my employer.

I think it's a very different situation, simply sharing your content on a platform, where I think free speech is much more relevant, vs. being contracted to produce content for a platform, where I think it stands to reason that you're expected to produce what the platform want.