Viewing profile — mannykannot

I take my previous phone kayaking. Once I have downloaded the appropriate maps over wifi, I can use it for navigation, logging and photography without being worried by the prospect…

And don't forget the Vikings, who may provide the best analogy to the Sea Peoples.

It looks very much like it: Julian James, 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' (see [1]), which influenced Neal Stephenson's writing of Snow Crash. …

Why complicate matters with pasta at all when spider silk is, at least metaphorically and rhetorically, at hand? As hinted at by its 2017 postscript, this article is a mess of inco…

This seems to tacitly assume that the outliers on either side have equivalent weight with respect to whatever is being investigated, while the explicit premise behind this proposal…

I take your point, as demonstrated here, that even straightforward written language can be completely misunderstood, and that emoji might help alleviate that, though how they could…

> You choose to participate here instead of having face-to-face conversations. Nothing about the comment you are replying to implies an abstinence from face-to-face conversations, …

Anyone claiming those developments enabled the expression of something previously inexpressible would have been mistaken.

If only Keats or Plath had emoji!

And in the next paragraph: "However, there are niche applications where the much higher costs of computing in space could be justified. Examples include ... active collision avoida…

It seems that in most ports they are required to hold and treat it (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, in inshore waters.) Fouling the places they take their customers to is ultimate…

A two meter cubed volume would be sufficient to hold that much. I would guess that cruise ships store more urine than that, though presumably not separated from everything else hum…

I have something I want to remove rust from, so I have been thinking about sand blasting. Thus, this thought popped into my head: how spectacular would it be to use aluminum powder…

I would guess you need something rigid and dense to generate enough pressure, though I don’t know if that rules out your suggestion. It does not have to be a ball.

The claim made in your first sentence is actually a reason to be concerned.

The claim that disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet. One might object that there is selection bias…

Yes - a point supported the Vera benchmark: https://github.com/aallan/vera-bench

This will serve as an interesting empirical test, then: will LLMs do better with Vera than with Go or other languages? The testing so far seems inconclusive ( https://github.com/aa…

Full disclosure: I didn't figure this out myself, I got it from Ms. Vale's review. I agree that the term "welfare trap" is a loaded one. This looks to me to be a case of refusing t…

On the other hand, an accurate digital simulation of a mechanical calculator really does calculate. The "a simulation is not the real thing" objection breaks down when the function…

There's interesting commentary on this paper from Maggie Vale here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-194580145 One of her points is that there are various pesky consequences for AI…

I would guess that Ada Lovelace was completely written out of the story in 1930.

I cannot, of course, speak about this particular incident, but a person inclined to skip procedures expressly implemented to avoid the problem which occurred, or who ignores clear …

I reckon that’s right (though maybe its mostly instinct rather than explicit worry), and I imagine there’s also the risk of being kicked out by a larger species looking for a nesti…

The controller was not guilty of malfeasance, but clearing the trucks onto the runway with an airliner on short final was a mistake, no matter whatever else one could say about it.…