Viewing profile — jprival

I think Scheme works well for the kind of conceptual overview the course is trying to provide. I think there is something to the argument that Scheme syntax is not ideal for readab…

> Paracetamol is an anticholinergic isn’t it? No, per https://agsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.15... Can’t say whether it’s good for your brain otherwise.

because of his sort of ascetic impulses in other domains one doesn’t imagine him as particularly hard-living, but this 2002 ilxor thread (bumped for his death) suggests that he had…

It’s not a particularly fair accounting of the framing of the article, which also profiles people who are working precisely on making the technology more practical and portable and…

To look is to train one’s eyes on, or to scan for, something. To see is to perceive it. So one can look without seeing, and one can also see something without intentionally looking…

OECD definition > any chemical with at least a perfluorinated methyl group (–CF3) or a perfluorinated methylene group (–CF2–) is a PFAS I don’t think that includes any of those, an…

Also sometimes they do make really painful and arbitrary UI/UX changes - don’t get me started on the iOS podcast app. Personally I’m all for preserving keyboard shortcuts because t…

> enter doesn't open the folder That’s a little like complaining that Alt-F4 is unintuitive, isn’t it? It’s historical continuity. On the other hand, they changed Command-N… > ther…

> This is despite the arrival of a boom in funding due to the generative model bubble. Does the boom in funding for AI companies make up for the overall drop in funding from late 1…

Reminds me tangentially of the study that found that strong chess players were much worse at recalling randomized positions than realistic ones: https://link.springer.com/content/p…

The appeal of prompting a whole song into existence kind of baffles me for the same reasons you are suggesting but there’s room for fun and creativity in working with samples and g…

>Five years ago people were in agreement that the turing test was a really good test The limitations of the Turing test have been discussed for much longer than that. Ironically it…

“Functional style” doesn’t offer the same guarantees, sure, but I wouldn’t underestimate the structural and readability benefits it can offer for certain kinds of tasks.

It’s a pretty good bet that quaternary ammonium compounds are used to wipe many surfaces wherever you are. They are probably the most widely used non-chlorine disinfectants.

There’s a graph in this very article that answers that question. Heroin deaths have declined significantly as fentanyl has displaced heroin on the market, but fentanyl deaths are f…

Worth noting that glucose meters are OTC. Continuous monitoring solutions generally seem to require a prescription, though there are telehealth companies that will help you sort th…

I recall certain intro CS courses being calibrated to be difficult enough to fit with the department’s (generally tough) grading guidelines without actually applying a strict curve…

I see a lot of conflation of “companies are shifting their product focus to AI” - which everybody knows everybody is doing - and “companies are replacing staff with AI.” To be fair…

I thought “Bard” was an Asimov reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_(short_story) (on top of the more obvious references)

About 420 ppm, an increase of about 120 ppm in the past 100 years? This is a strange question since it is obvious that it’s heavily “looked into” and easy to look up, and simultane…

Yeah the Power Macintosh line, as the name suggests, introduced PowerPC in 1994. There were Performa versions of those as well. Jobs’ return as CEO roughly coincided with the begin…

“rips” -> “kilorips” etc.