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dreamcompiler

17,433 karmajoined 12 years ago
I write code without AI and if you think that makes me stupid I'm okay with that.

Submissions

Richard Feynman is Now A.I. Slop [video]

youtube.com
1 points·by dreamcompiler·2 months ago·0 comments

Six search engines worth trying now that Google isn't Google anymore

techcrunch.com
4 points·by dreamcompiler·2 months ago·0 comments

How to Turn Off AI Tools Like Gemini, Apple Intelligence, Copilot, and More

consumerreports.org
3 points·by dreamcompiler·9 months ago·0 comments

comments

dreamcompiler
·8 hours ago·discuss
I haven't bought a Sony product since 2005 when they put a rootkit on music CDs. Apparently their customer-hostile attitude hasn't changed much.
dreamcompiler
·yesterday·discuss
I think of C as more of a dark side language because it's basically a portable assembler. Lisp at least prevents you from doing the stupidest things like overrunning array bounds or writing to freed pointers*, which C is perfectly happy to let you do.

* Of course there are no user-visible pointers** in Lisp so the concept of free vs. not free doesn't come up because memory allocation and garbage collection are automatic.

**Under the hood most everything in Lisp is a pointer, but the user cannot see them or mess with them.
dreamcompiler
·yesterday·discuss
Oh of course. Mycelium is just the tip of the iceberg e.g. "Spock had a secret sister." Oh come on!

Yes some Trek scripts are better than others, as are some entire shows. But the creators of Disco seemed like they had never watched a single episode of "real" Trek or understood what made it work.
dreamcompiler
·2 days ago·discuss
Yet another thing they didn't teach us in Texas history class.
dreamcompiler
·2 days ago·discuss
I think regime change is likely to happen within two years. Just not in Iran.
dreamcompiler
·2 days ago·discuss
And Anthony Rapp (the actor who plays him) went through some awful stuff that made him famous for another reason and he seems to have come out stronger. Good for him.

As for the whole mycelium plot in Discovery, I found it so ridiculous that I refuse to consider that show canon.
dreamcompiler
·2 days ago·discuss
I grew up in Texas and took Texas history. I learned things like Texas being the only US state that was once an independent country and where the Six Flags came from (later the name of an amusement park empire that originated in Texas).

But they never taught us much about New Mexico.
dreamcompiler
·2 days ago·discuss
TIL Bonnie Tyler was the female Meat Loaf.
dreamcompiler
·2 days ago·discuss
There are a number of lesser-known chunks of American history like this.

One of my favorites is that Santa Fe has been the capital city of Nuevo Mexico since 1610. Acoma, another city in modern-day New Mexico, is about 500 years older still.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoma_Pueblo
dreamcompiler
·2 days ago·discuss
How long ago was this? In the last 5 years rent has increased dramatically in many of the historically LCOL cities.
dreamcompiler
·2 days ago·discuss
Even better question: Compute the moving median.

Computing a moving average with samples being pumped through an n-element buffer is easy. Doing so for the median requires more thought. It's also very useful e.g. for removing single-sample noise from an audio track, so it's not a meaningless exercise.
dreamcompiler
·3 days ago·discuss
I thought it was funny that almost every alien planet on Stargate SG-1 looked like British Columbia.
dreamcompiler
·4 days ago·discuss
I was trying to keep it simple. Yes you can buy n-acetylcysteine but OTC versions can vary in purity and dosage and it's not the only treatment you might need. With an acetaminophen OD you really want to be in a hospital.
dreamcompiler
·4 days ago·discuss
There is an antidote available for acetaminophen overdose, but it's only available in the hospital. So if you think you took too much, get to a hospital quickly before your liver suffers permanent damage.

Untreated acetaminophen overdose is an extremely unpleasant way to die.
dreamcompiler
·4 days ago·discuss
Until the late 1960s, codeine was considered the definitive over-the-counter cough medicine. It worked well. Maybe a little too well, because it was easy to get addicted to it. So the FDA banned it from OTC sales and dextromethorphan was substituted. Which brings us to today.
dreamcompiler
·4 days ago·discuss
Absolutely true. Phenylephrine liquid applied directly to nasal mucosa is a quick and effective decongestant. It doesn't last as long as oxymetazoline (the other big nasal spray ingredient), but it also doesn't cause you to become dependent on it as much as oxymetazoline does.
dreamcompiler
·5 days ago·discuss
Don't mistake tenure for competence. Meta's stock structure is such that Zuck cannot be forced out by the board or the shareholders regardless of how many mistakes he makes.
dreamcompiler
·5 days ago·discuss
As well as laws that make forced arbitration contracts unenforceable.
dreamcompiler
·7 days ago·discuss
Fair point. The mathematical process of differentiation is always straightforward even if in some cases one ends up with e.g. /0 singularities.

With integration, there's often no closed-form process at all, as the author points out.
dreamcompiler
·7 days ago·discuss
> And it turns out that it’s quite straightforward to calculate a derivative, no matter what type of function it is.

I get the author's point but this is not completely true; there exist functions that are not differentiable at certain places (e.g. ideal square waves) and others that are not differentiable anywhere (e.g. Weierstrass functions).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weierstrass_function