Viewing profile — adonovan

At least here in Brooklyn a significant minority (a third?) are purchased outright, as that gives the best long term return if you can afford the initial investment, and it simplif…

Stuart J. Russell (he of the AI textbook) claims in Human Compatible that YouTube is already an example of a runaway feedback loop between AI (YouTube's recommender "algorithm") an…

Inferring pronunciation from spelling is very regular in French; the reverse, not so: there may be many ways to spell a sound like “o”, each with a different meaning.

This trend is far older than the AI era. The British magazine Private eye for many years in the 1990s had a running joke in which each issue displayed the new logos of old companie…

How many parts is this skeleton disassembled into in transit? Each bone? Crazy project!

I agree. This is a most unexpected ray of hope.

Can someone with expertise explain what kinds of medical imaging are theoretically possible with this kind of sensor?

Understood. My point is that the job requirements are almost mutually exclusive: must be physically and mentally fit enough for arduous travel and harsh work, yet basically suicida…

Like enjoying earthly pleasures? The terminally ill do not make good astronauts.

I'd be surprised if there's a single person alive who would volunteer for a suicide mission to a miserable cold dark planet and could travel there for nine months in a tin can thro…

It seems quite common for the infrastructure teams to put up a dashboard just to keep a sense of what is going on, but it is then misinterpreted as a “leaderboard” and encourages t…

For a while we’ve been fixing telemetry-reported crash bugs in the project I maintain, and now hardware bugs are showing up with some frequency. I was amazed how common they are. S…

Does the ground source heat up (or cool down) over time, making it less effective? The deep ground is very well insulated, which is why after a century of operation the London Unde…

This administration does love "force".

Another situation to avoid the XOR trick, even when registers are tight, is when swapping pointers in a garbage-collected language, since the intermediate bit patterns are invalid …

Quite. A burger that wears its hat at a jaunty angle for a rakish look.

I once wrote a contract document in PostScript that changed the wording based on the date. Two parties could cryptographically sign an agreement in the document, which would change…

It's not an illegal monopoly to be the sole entity capable of a technique. The problems come from manipulating the market to prevent competition.

The subject of this story is a single proton that you would definitely feel if it hit you: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGodParticle/

Also weird phrasing: "a staggering 1.8 degrees" begs the reader to think of it as a large number (which in fact it is, as you point out) yet their intent seems to be, ironically an…

Thanks, that's a bug. We should never inline a function that directly calls recover. I've filed https://go.dev/issue/78193 .

> The “will lead astray” part is concerning. If you already have a clear idea in mind, you probably don’t need to have the debate with coworkers. Yeah, I certainly wouldn't trust i…

I’ve been an overt AI hater but have found very recently that, though I still hate a great many things about AI, it has become useful for coding. In 10m Gemini correctly diagnosed …

One annoying trope I keep seeing in Gemini output is the punchy invented concept name in a tripartite list: - “The Pledge”:… - “The Turn”:… - “The Prestige”:… (For this particular …

Likewise! I often marvel at the patience of readers of earlier times. Of course, they had more time and fewer distractions, and I suspect that there was a dynamic at work in which …