That's interesting - Github as social media? That's an idea of would never have thought of in a million years. Personally, I'd be glad if a child of mine hung out there - not at all like something like Instagram or…
Exactly. Drew Talbot's brilliant "Bistro Huddy" (which anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant whether as a server or in the kitchen can relate to) is done as Youtube shorts because that makes sense for comedy…
For starters, what's "social media"? It's kind of a undefinable phrase. Obviously Facebook and Instagram are agreed to be "social media".But is Youtube social media? How about HN? Or any website with a comment section?
Do realize that the author is Czech. While being religious is the default and atheists face (mild) discrimination in places like the US, at least until the 1990s and the fall of Communism, things were reversed in (then)…
Seriously, there is more to computing than the Web. I've used Ruby for more than 25 years and never used Rails. I'm a computational biologist and like to use Bioruby to automate various sequence-based tasks. Not as…
A real, completely mechanical watch? No battery or crystal? I'm sure my Seiko isn't be best there is and maybe it could be improved with servicing, but I think electronics have given people unreasonable expectations of…
Yeah, but I'm sure your microwave isn't mechanical. What makes a mechanical watch cool, even a cheap one, is that there are no electronics at all - just gears and springs and things. I think that's worth a trivial bit…
Is it a Seiko 5 (self winding)? Yeah, those aren't that accurate, but I wouldn't call them "junk" - they do lose or gain a minute or two a day in my experience - I generally correct mine every couple of days against my…
In the 1980s, you often had programmers create the art and music for games, but for the last three decades at least there have been dedicated artists and composers who often have no coding skill at all.
I love how Moby Dick suddenly puts the story on hold and diverges into a chapter dealing with the classification of whales. 19th century novels do that a lot with Victor Hugo diverging into the architecture of Paris or…
Costco also delivers -- I also live in a city in an apartment and order bulky things I don't want to carry from Costco online.
They only joined the UCC (Geneva Copyright Treaty) in 1973 though. That was less than twenty years before the USSR ceased to exist. All the works published in the USSR before 1973 weren't copyrighted in the West (it…
And also, if you put an actual parrot in a room full of programmers, it might learn a few word if programming jargon, but it never will become a useful coding partner the way LLMs are.
This chess game has a min-max algorithm in it! AI slop! It should have a short person hidden inside like the original Mechanical Turk!
Biden wasn't "far left". The "far left" in US politics is basically Bernie Sanders and AOC's "squad", neither of which have ever come close to running the country.
I'm not against students working together -- as you note in some classes it is encouraged and often group projects are assigned. But this is different from the idea of a "take home exam" where students are supposed to…
Yeah, lack of Vitamin D may or may not be a problem (well, obviously in extreme cases it leads to rickets, but that's rare). But skin cancer unquestionably is a problem, and not infrequently a deadly one. Pick your…
These days, yes! Gemma4 is only a few gigabytes and is surprisingly capable and can run on normal consumer hardware. You could certainly run it off a thumb drive
Even before AI, take home exams were a bad idea. In theory students were supposed to promise to work alone and not share work but in practice many people, especially those taking the class with friends, worked together.
The problem with that argument is it is trivial to write a Markov chain program that takes in text and then can generate the most probable series of words given a starting word. I myself wrote such a program in BASIC on…
The US military thought a lot about how to entertain its soldiers because there was a lot of downtime during a war and most of them were draftees who didn't necessarily want to be there, Another thing they did was…
Scientific American hasn't been the magazine it was for decades -- there's nobody writing columns like what Martin Gardner or A.K. Dewdney used to write that made the general public interested in some mathematical or…
The obscure Russian nicknames! How is anybody supposed to know without being told that Sasha and Alexander are the same guy? (I do realize that while some English nicknames like Johnny for John are pretty…
Well, Crime and Punishment is often taught in US high schools. Or at least was back in the 1980s. During the Cold War there was a lot of interest in Russian literature in general in part because in the bipolar world…
While that's a bit cruel, I do have to wonder how exactly Doctorow got in the position he has -- he isn't somebody who has done great things and is now a tech critic like someone like Geoffrey Hinton. He seems a…
That's interesting - Github as social media? That's an idea of would never have thought of in a million years. Personally, I'd be glad if a child of mine hung out there - not at all like something like Instagram or…
Exactly. Drew Talbot's brilliant "Bistro Huddy" (which anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant whether as a server or in the kitchen can relate to) is done as Youtube shorts because that makes sense for comedy…
For starters, what's "social media"? It's kind of a undefinable phrase. Obviously Facebook and Instagram are agreed to be "social media".But is Youtube social media? How about HN? Or any website with a comment section?
Do realize that the author is Czech. While being religious is the default and atheists face (mild) discrimination in places like the US, at least until the 1990s and the fall of Communism, things were reversed in (then)…
Seriously, there is more to computing than the Web. I've used Ruby for more than 25 years and never used Rails. I'm a computational biologist and like to use Bioruby to automate various sequence-based tasks. Not as…
A real, completely mechanical watch? No battery or crystal? I'm sure my Seiko isn't be best there is and maybe it could be improved with servicing, but I think electronics have given people unreasonable expectations of…
Yeah, but I'm sure your microwave isn't mechanical. What makes a mechanical watch cool, even a cheap one, is that there are no electronics at all - just gears and springs and things. I think that's worth a trivial bit…
Is it a Seiko 5 (self winding)? Yeah, those aren't that accurate, but I wouldn't call them "junk" - they do lose or gain a minute or two a day in my experience - I generally correct mine every couple of days against my…
In the 1980s, you often had programmers create the art and music for games, but for the last three decades at least there have been dedicated artists and composers who often have no coding skill at all.
I love how Moby Dick suddenly puts the story on hold and diverges into a chapter dealing with the classification of whales. 19th century novels do that a lot with Victor Hugo diverging into the architecture of Paris or…
Costco also delivers -- I also live in a city in an apartment and order bulky things I don't want to carry from Costco online.
They only joined the UCC (Geneva Copyright Treaty) in 1973 though. That was less than twenty years before the USSR ceased to exist. All the works published in the USSR before 1973 weren't copyrighted in the West (it…
And also, if you put an actual parrot in a room full of programmers, it might learn a few word if programming jargon, but it never will become a useful coding partner the way LLMs are.
This chess game has a min-max algorithm in it! AI slop! It should have a short person hidden inside like the original Mechanical Turk!
Biden wasn't "far left". The "far left" in US politics is basically Bernie Sanders and AOC's "squad", neither of which have ever come close to running the country.
I'm not against students working together -- as you note in some classes it is encouraged and often group projects are assigned. But this is different from the idea of a "take home exam" where students are supposed to…
Yeah, lack of Vitamin D may or may not be a problem (well, obviously in extreme cases it leads to rickets, but that's rare). But skin cancer unquestionably is a problem, and not infrequently a deadly one. Pick your…
These days, yes! Gemma4 is only a few gigabytes and is surprisingly capable and can run on normal consumer hardware. You could certainly run it off a thumb drive
Even before AI, take home exams were a bad idea. In theory students were supposed to promise to work alone and not share work but in practice many people, especially those taking the class with friends, worked together.
The problem with that argument is it is trivial to write a Markov chain program that takes in text and then can generate the most probable series of words given a starting word. I myself wrote such a program in BASIC on…
The US military thought a lot about how to entertain its soldiers because there was a lot of downtime during a war and most of them were draftees who didn't necessarily want to be there, Another thing they did was…
Scientific American hasn't been the magazine it was for decades -- there's nobody writing columns like what Martin Gardner or A.K. Dewdney used to write that made the general public interested in some mathematical or…
The obscure Russian nicknames! How is anybody supposed to know without being told that Sasha and Alexander are the same guy? (I do realize that while some English nicknames like Johnny for John are pretty…
Well, Crime and Punishment is often taught in US high schools. Or at least was back in the 1980s. During the Cold War there was a lot of interest in Russian literature in general in part because in the bipolar world…
While that's a bit cruel, I do have to wonder how exactly Doctorow got in the position he has -- he isn't somebody who has done great things and is now a tech critic like someone like Geoffrey Hinton. He seems a…