Viewing profile — chongli

How is the GGP post (by Animats) trivializing the risk? They're saying "it's a survival issue" and saying the printers became homeless and struggling to feed themselves. Sounds muc…

The automation features in Apple Home can be set to do things at sunrise or sunset. These track down to the minute the sunrise/sunset times from the weather app data for your locat…

It’s not I who have twisted the meanings of the words, it’s the people who use the word amateur when they mean hack . The word amateur is very old, and for most of its history [1] …

The use of “amateur” is indeed a very poor choice. An amateur is someone who seeks to master a skill or perform a craft for the love of the art, not for money. It’s the professiona…

Good espresso is really difficult to make, with the lighter the roast, the harder it is to get right. Most coffee shops can get good quality beans that smell amazing but without a …

Question: how is your sense of smell? My friend has the same opinion about coffee as you (he just drinks cheap diner joe) and his sense of smell is almost nonexistent. I, on the ot…

It’s a rant, but not about technology. It’s a rant about her chosen genre being maligned unfairly. I think a more interesting tack on this argument would be to say that hard sci-fi…

I have not heard this critique of Wikipedia before. Can you explain further?

Regardless of whether he really is that deluded or not, what should he do? It's just as easy to imagine his company dying by playing extremely conservative and clutching on to the …

YouTube is better than no YouTube. Wikipedia is better than no Wikipedia. But Google today is way worse than first decade Google. There's curves to all these things. It just feels …

Would you say the same about a basketball video game?

Your comment said puzzle. I usually think of those things as made of cardboard or wood (really fancy ones), i.e. jigsaw puzzles. Since they're made of cellulose, you can turn them …

Soak it in nitric and sulfuric acid, let it dry, then light it on fire?

That’s easy: a proper emergency. Let’s say you’re controlling a piece of machinery with an app in the background and the machine starts on fire. Wouldn’t it make sense for the app …

Infinite scrolling + algorithmic ads. That's how Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok all make their money. You get way more ad impressions per hour than from people who click on links …

Enshittification is the answer. Old Reddit doesn’t make any money. Users block what few ads there are and it’s free so there’s no subscription revenue otherwise. New Reddit is full…

It's not a path, it's a tree, and a downward-facing one at that. To understand the root, you have to understand all of the leaves first, and all of the nodes above them, all the wa…

Soon we'll have explainer agents that translate these according to my level so I can, with effort and interest, follow along and stretch my understanding boundary bit by bit. That'…

No, I'd say ambiguous means "context dependent" and the context is unclear. Pronouns like you/me/he/she/they/them are context dependent in everyday English writing but they're only…

That's false. Z[n] in rings does not mean "an array of integers of length n", it means the subring generated by Z union with {n}, where n is an element of some other set. For examp…

No, math is difficult to approach because it's genuinely deep . Trying to verbalize what is going on is extremely difficult, because you end up saying stuff like "and then do that …

Mathematics would be much more approachable if it just used plain English like `sum(0, Infinity, my_func)` instead of a big Greek sigma with nested function nomenclature First of a…

I remember reading some of his columns growing up and I used to intensely dislike him for his dismissive takes on a lot of products and technologies I thought were important (most …

And that intervention was just an accidental discovery. Someone thousands of years ago stumbled onto a freak plant with no seeds and had the foresight to take a cutting of it. I do…

A hundred million is table stakes. They get better results by stoking the fires (bluffing) and keeping their opponents locked in a war of raising and re-raising the stakes. By ampi…