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jprival

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jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
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 readability of larger programs, but I would wager that the bigger reason some students find SICP confusing is the same reason it blows others’ minds - the whole approach is at a higher level of abstraction than most “intro to programming” classes.
jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
> 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.
jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
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 his first heart attack way back: https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?bo...

edit: viral pericarditis, actually, before it was a hot topic
jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
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 ends on a hopeful note. For the time being it’s a high maintenance way to keep people alive, though, so the ethical dilemmas of resource allocation are real.
jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
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.
jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
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, and Xanax is not fluorinated at all. You might have been thinking of Prozac, which I believe does meet those criteria.

It is a broad category with competing definitions, some of which are even broader, though, yes.
jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
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 that’s something I really internalize but it would be hard to argue that they are consistent taking any kind of broader view.
jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
> 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…

> there is only a back button and not a go up directory button

Can’t argue with that one, though.
jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
> 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 10s-early 20s heights? That would not be my guess offhand, which makes playing up the contrast between “plenty of funding” (for one specific thing) and “job cuts” feel a little overstated.

It does complicate predictions, though.
jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
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/pdf/10.3758/BF03200937.pdf

I’m wary of inviting the too-easy “it’s just like how it works for people!” comparison, but the implied context and history of a game state seems to be important in processing it.
jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
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 given the substantial cottage industry that royalty-free samples already are this was pretty much the first application I was expecting to see in the audio GenAI realm.
jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
>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 its dependence on human judgement is arguably a weak point.
jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
“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.
jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
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.
jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
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 far higher than heroin deaths ever were, because it’s far easier to OD on.
jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
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 that out. According to the article what the FDA really objects to is “non-invasive” glucose monitoring devices of any sort, on the grounds of general lack of evidence of accuracy.
jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
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 to exam results after the fact, so as to encourage students to see it as a collaborative endeavor rather than a competitive one. That seems kind of ideal if you can make it work. But yes, it’s hardly unusual for grades to work a lot like stack ranking.
jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
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 the latter aligns nicely with the “bloat-shedding” rationale for layoffs, which also feels like a very real trend, but so many of these articles put companies like Google “pivoting to [selling] AI” in the same breath.
jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
I thought “Bard” was an Asimov reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_(short_story)

(on top of the more obvious references)
jprival
·hace 2 años·discuss
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 simultaneously hard to figure out what rhetorical point is being made in asking people to cite it out of context.