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gumby

61,234 karmajoined 16 anni fa
Currently working on removing excess methane from the atmosphere.

Previous lives:

gnu hacker (e.g. co-founder of Cygnus back in '89) Pharma developer (Talima) Distributed solar thermal systems (Terrajoule) MIT AI Lab/PARC/MCC/Rodin consumer tabletop AR (CastAR) Etc...

[email protected]

Submissions

MAGA's attack on science is worse than it looks

noahpinion.blog
12 points·by gumby·9 ore fa·0 comments

Cat Is Being Nice? Think Again

nytimes.com
5 points·by gumby·9 ore fa·0 comments

The tiny cell that wasn't there

grist.org
4 points·by gumby·l’altro ieri·1 comments

Grade distribution after switching from take home to in class

insidehighered.com
4 points·by gumby·l’altro ieri·3 comments

'It's just his AI and my AI going back and forth'

fortune.com
2 points·by gumby·5 giorni fa·1 comments

Decline of PhD Admissions Could Imperil a 'Generation of New Talent'

nytimes.com
3 points·by gumby·5 giorni fa·3 comments

Dupes (product clones) took over the world

vox.com
2 points·by gumby·6 giorni fa·0 comments

comments

gumby
·3 ore fa·discuss
The "list of undefined behaviour" annex has been written and was discussed at the last meeting. As I said, some of what's in it are already being implemented by the big compilers (though TBF to your comment not yet in any released versions as far as I know).

But this case will be one of the early ones.
gumby
·9 ore fa·discuss
These rules are great but “landmark” seems like puffery, as California has had such rules for quite a while.

Ironically that has meant it’s hard to unsubscribe from the New York Times except in California.
gumby
·9 ore fa·discuss
This is an internal form of the problem described in The Innovator’s Dilemma*: you optimize for what seems to work well and miss the big picture.

I thinkers a natural Hayflick limit for companies.

* you know: one of the 4 or 5 business books actually worth reading, that caused thousands of companies to start cargo-culting the word “innovation”
gumby
·ieri·discuss
“Halfway to” -> “half”
gumby
·ieri·discuss
Yes but it’s uncommon in English to simply drop a word from a sentence while pretty common in German casual discourse.

The only other English common case I can think of is the American “I could [not] care less” dropping “not” which is also confusing.
gumby
·ieri·discuss
This actually makes more sense!
gumby
·l’altro ieri·discuss
Best if the subject line is the conclusion and the message supports that.

Subject: feature X dropped from v4.4

Body: we all know this feature is delayed and will cause the release to slip. Marketing gave us the OK to defer it to 4.5
gumby
·l’altro ieri·discuss
The problem is future societies harvesting the engines for interstellar probes. This problem has been discussed in a series of books by Larry Niven.
gumby
·l’altro ieri·discuss
I’m a “quarter past” person but I’ve always been confused by “half ten” (which thankfully isn’t used in Australia). But in German, “half ten” means 9:30, which is make more sense to me (probably because I’m used to how German speech often drops words, which is less common in English)
gumby
·l’altro ieri·discuss
> for instance C and C++ leave signed integer wrap undefined

Not in C++29, and I think the big 3 compilers (gcc, clang, MS) will have squashed this long before that version is officially approved.
gumby
·l’altro ieri·discuss
Every time I encounter this story I read it again because it’s so great
gumby
·l’altro ieri·discuss
His ability to focus and execute has been haphazard. But as you say he is a good writer and was apparently able to force his will upon most of the writers in the stable
gumby
·l’altro ieri·discuss
Programming is even more recent
gumby
·3 giorni fa·discuss
If you’re a left leaning voter the Speccie is almost _never_ going to have an article for you.

And the “almost” is simply because often the articles are very well written and a pleasure to read even when the actual topic and argument are deeply deranged. Amazingly this was especially true when Boris was the editor!
gumby
·4 giorni fa·discuss
My company has a strict NTLA policy.

That’s No Three-Letter Acronyms

Instead we do name things after animals like Lamprey, Remora, Whelk, Axolotl, Tick (the last has not been approved)
gumby
·4 giorni fa·discuss
> … similar related drugs like dextromethorphan and ketamine and other NMDA receptor antagonists are innovative drugs to help prevent Alzheimer's.

Should read “NMDA receptor antagonists _may_ give rise to treatments that _may help prevent or ameliorate the symptoms_ of Alzheimer’s.

Nobody even knows how Alzheimer’s works at all — like most diseases it’s a description of some detectable symptoms, some of which could even turn out to be the body defending itself.

Thus compounds that may have a mechanism of action that affects some concomitant, visible symptoms might potentially be useful.

The use of definitive sentences about unknown results is how we end up with wellness and some “biohacking” nonsense.
gumby
·5 giorni fa·discuss
In the physical sciences at least, there are also corporate jobs.
gumby
·5 giorni fa·discuss
The German equivalent uses much less bandwidth as it’s simply a static png.
gumby
·5 giorni fa·discuss
Odd how? I’ve been a reader since 1985 and am satisfied.
gumby
·6 giorni fa·discuss
> …agents are predisposed to write extremely defensive, odd-case-handling code… the SNR ratio is very low. You get a spaghetti that is unlikely to crash, but really hard to extract the gist of. And finding more global bugs can be difficult because what should be structural impossibilities can be coerced into silent skips.

Have you tried asking for a summary of the logic being relied on, and asking LLM to simplify the code?

I’m 85% joking, of course, given the current state of automated code generation and the terrible summaries you usually when asking for a summary of text. But in theory that’s what they are supposed to do.