Viewing profile — thatoneengineer

Never use AI to write something primarily intended for other humans to read.

Good to know this is "discover" in the sense of "confirm, understand better" rather than "suddenly find out about". Otherwise this would be quite the background-tv-in-a-disaater-mo…

Same. Gutsy bet to make in the face of Fable / Mythos, but the multimodal quality is at least a promising technical/ product story to tell. Everyone knows throwing Opus at everythi…

Space is big and still very hard to get to. A kilogram of payload in orbit costs several times as much as a kilogram of silver on earth, even after SpaceX's aggressive scaling of c…

You could have said that about any successful technology ever! But for some reason everyone is anxious to say it about AI while being extremely vague about the benefits. (This is e…

I'm an early adopter of AI products myself, but I'm always disgusted when I hear this kind of case being made for them. It's fear-mongering, plain and simple. The cloud, mobile, ev…

Imagine a worst case scenario: the Herculaneum scrolls turn out to be just the works of this one mediocre pet philosopher. What would we still expect to learn from them, and what w…

Why do people get into birdwatching? It's a hobby, there doesn't need to be much in the way of novel "data" for it to be rewarding. Though considering this guy found a nebula I wou…

I'm sure it's a lot of work for him, mostly maintenance and cleaning. Also it sounds like the remote operation hardware and software are provided by him-- that can't be trivial and…

Don't forget screwworms! https://cr.usembassy.gov/sections-offices/aphis/screwworm-pr...

I stopped reading after the first sentence. Calling something "inherently political" is a self-fulfilling prophecy and intentionally so. It consistently turns out to be an attempt …

[dead]

Shout out to the apparently large class of programmers who think LLMs make it okay not to understand their own code, yet react with horror when someone suggests porting it to Go or…

I see we've finally progressed beyond https://xkcd.com/768/ , in specs if not in functionality or price point.

If you like this kind of thing, try reading Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. Similar themes, full novel, even older. It makes for interesting reading in that it more obviously represe…

What article is he referencing in the fourth paragraph? The New Yorker one? I got the impression that it was careful in its reporting and by no means one-sided. Seems pretty sleazy…

Same!

First impressions: LOL, the blunt commentary in the HN thread title compared to the PR-speak of the fb.com post. Second thoughts: Actually the fb.com post is more transparent than …

This very closely resembles my own experience, right down to the timeline. I don't have an answer, but just seeing this thread has been cathartic for me. Some of the options I'm co…

...in testing. Clickbait title IMO.

TI-83, a few afterthought programs in my precalc textbook, and a bunch of bored afternoons in class. This would be back in '06 or so.

Ideally, if you can convince yourself something cannot happen, you can also convince the compiler, and get rid of the branch entirely by expressing the predicate as part of the typ…