af3d

6 ms·

1.
by af3d 1y ago
Sorry, but the whole story just reads like a bad mystery novel; tales of Russian hackers, "suspicious" Github repos, somehow-nefarious (docker?) "containers", unspecified threats made (and I quote) in "meat space&qu
2.
by af3d 1y ago
Neat concept! Although I was a bit surprised at the AI stand-in's finding. I posed the silly argument that "My neighbor's dog refuses to speak French" with the options "Neighbor is culpable" and "I am clea
3.
by af3d 1y ago
Relatively speaking, perhaps, but things really have progressed by several orders of magnitude. When I was young we had access to very little "technology". (Maybe that's why people tended to be somewhat more down-to-earth?) I
4.
by af3d 1y ago
Of course it does. The National Post article I linked to is about Mahmoud Khalil, who is indeed mentioned in the Zeteo article.
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by af3d 1y ago
Compared to most websites these days HN is about as lightweight as it gets. I would say if you are experiencing laggy page loads, the issue is most likely something else. (Maybe disable extensions and restart?)
6.
by af3d 2y ago
Iterating over some huge search space in an essentially sequential manner is generally not going to be nearly performant as simply selecting an odd number at random. You could try using a generating polynomial instead such as f(x) = x^2 + x
7.
by af3d 2y ago
Blame it on bad culture. Good people know that orderly conduct is necessary to maintain a healthy and vibrant community. Just take a look at the Nordic countries where this used to be the absolute norm across the board. Now even there you s
8.
by af3d 2y ago
I normally tend to attribute these kinds of things to a rise in socialism/marxism, but to be totally fair I do think at least to one degree or another social-media is perhaps simply amplifying something which has more or less been arou
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by af3d 2y ago
This is pretty impressive. Given the following scenario, "A bliirg is any non-wooden item, which is the opposite of a glaarg. In addition, there are neergs (non-existent things) and eeergs (things which actually exist). Now a glaarg w
10.
by af3d 2y ago
> But basically the entirety of physics works in a time-reversible fashion: if you could flip the direction of all the particles in a system, it would evolve back to its previous state What does that even mean though? Certain systems may
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by af3d 2y ago
> While we don't yet have a good microscopic theory of what's going on, macroscopically we know that the information (entropy) doesn't just vanish into three numbers. What information could one possibly extract from a &qu
12.
by af3d 2y ago
Somewhat tangentially, what really perplexes me about Hawking radiation (HR) is this: What happens to the individual particles within the black hole as it evaporates? Like say we start with X particles. The black hole emits HR and shrinks a
13.
by af3d 2y ago
From what I understand of it the singularity is analogous to what happens in the 2D Cartesian plane with functions such as f(x) = 1/x. When x equals 0, the function itself "breaks down" because the y-coordinate extends to inf
14.
by af3d 2y ago
The link to the documentation seems to be dead. Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20221203043431/https://embed.cs....
15.
by af3d 2y ago
Yes kind of a hybrid, isn't it?
16.
by af3d 2y ago
They could also be descriptions of musical scales, or maybe weaving patterns, base-encoded numbers perhaps....who knows, really? Also Egyptian writing goes back perhaps 5000 years. That is a Semitic language so it stands to reason that it t
17.
by af3d 2y ago
Really? Windows2000 (which was based on NT) hit the sweet spot for me. Anything earlier than that seemed too buggy, and from there onward just seemed to devolve into a bloated mess of unrequested "features". (The very reason why I
18.
by af3d 2y ago
For reference, this is the story in question: https://web.archive.org/web/20170204091511/https://thoughtca... Looks like it was deleted by the editors as it violated hate-speech laws?
19.
by af3d 2y ago
The ability to instantiate multiple types by redefining the defines (as it were) is a pretty clever approach. I also love the idea of using small, self-contained "no bloat" libraries such as this one to build software. I was able
20.
by af3d 2y ago
I don't know. People will always believe all kinds of crazy things. The way I have always dealt with that is to just state the facts as I know them and then simply move on. That seems to work pretty well, actually. Because eventually t
21.
by af3d 2y ago
Again, what I am saying is that many of these outlets are spreading outright lies and then turning around and labeling anything which contradicts it as "misinformation" and hence the label itself is meaningless. If that seems li
22.
by af3d 2y ago
Perhaps a more important question is, who decides what constitutes misinformation in the first place? Many news outlets these days use the term when referring to anything which contradicts their narrative (which quite often turns out to be
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by af3d 2y ago
Sadly, censorship is becoming a norm these days. Politicians such as Jugnauth are increasingly aligning themselves with well-heeled socialist-leaning benefactors and then covering it all up by basically censoring everything that makes them
24.
by af3d 2y ago
Kind of sad to see that the library "custodian" as it were seemingly uninterested in fixing the software in question. This may not effect most commercial scanners but the fact that it is even out there in wild is a bit disconcerti
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by af3d 2y ago
Can you really blame the computer tho? That sounds more like a case a PEBCAC, if you ask me...
26.
by af3d 2y ago
Or perhaps it is in hopes that some unwitting fee-dodger mails back a flyer with "Bugger all is what you'll be gettin' for license fees, ya bloody parasites!" scrawled across it. As long as the faintly-printed address in
27.
by af3d 2y ago
It's called the "Lucas–Lehmer primality test". Without it, GIMPS probably wouldn't have found a single one of them in an acceptable amount of time. The one that was just discovered is HUGE. I had to write a program just
28.
by af3d 2y ago
Yes, the Mersenne primes do indeed extend to infinity. That is due to the simple fact that perfect numbers (for which they are intimately connected to) are also known to be infinite in number.
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by af3d 2y ago
I always fancied that they might be debating philosophical points or maybe even offering up "tweets" of wisdom. Owl: "In order to understand the very nature of the mind itself, one must earnestly seek to find the answer to th
30.
by af3d 2y ago
Unfortunately, timestamps are not immutable. The system clock can be miscalibrated or even deliberately manipulated. It is however something of an open question. CAP is still a bit lacking in terms of rigorous mathematical proof (albeit t

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