emtel

6 ms·

31.
by emtel 8mo ago
Time-keeping is vastly cheaper. People don't want grandfather clocks. They want to tell time. And they can, more accurately, more easily, and much cheaper than their ancestors.
32.
by emtel 8mo ago
I can't believe everything2 still exists!
33.
by emtel 8mo ago
I'm not sure you have to be terribly right wing to say that a "societal movement" which includes something called "The Reign of Terror", in which tens of thousands of people were executed, was a bad thing. ( https:&
34.
by emtel 8mo ago
> Guillotine for the super rich Can we not glorify mass executions on HN please? Bluesky is available if that's your thing.
35.
by emtel 9mo ago
There are some situations with tricky lifetime issues that are almost impossible to write without this pattern. Trying to break code out into functions would force you to name all the types (not even possible for closures) or use generics (
36.
by emtel 9mo ago
a reasonable concern
37.
by emtel 9mo ago
You should read the linked post. You can tune the particle size to affect only objects below a certain size.
38.
by emtel 9mo ago
There actually is one idea for cleaning up debris in high orbit: You launch tons of very fine powder into the orbits you wish to clear. These orbiting particles create drag on anything up there, so that their orbits degrade much faster. But
39.
by emtel 9mo ago
> "Splitting the universe of intellectual tasks" would be a gigantic job What I mean is a theory that allows you to categorize any given task according to whether it requires "thinking" or not, not literally catalogin
40.
by emtel 9mo ago
I think the burden to show that AI is not thinking lies on the skeptics. There are two broad categories of arguments that skeptics use to show this, and they are both pretty bad. The first category is what I'd call "the simplifyin
41.
by emtel 10mo ago
From the paper: > The main causes of death were cancer (769 and 853 cases per million in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, respectively), external causes of mortality (493 and 597 cases per million, including, among others, uninte
42.
by emtel 10mo ago
What a small and dreary way to look at the world
43.
by emtel 10mo ago
It absolutely is. If you are well equipped to navigate the adult world, you place yourself in hand-picked groups of people. I do not work with, socialize with, or live near a random sample of the population, and I highly doubt most people r
44.
by emtel 11mo ago
My understanding is that energy efficiency requirements prevent this. Dishwashers have a fixed energy budget they are allowed to expend, which may not be enough to heat cold tap water up to the optimal cleaning temp.
45.
by emtel 11mo ago
Yes but my dishes come out spotless with pods, so I don't need to change anything to make them cleaner.
46.
by emtel 11mo ago
Pods work great for me, and I love not having crumbs of powder under the sink, or a bottle of liquid detergent with encrusted drips down the side. It's just gross. They are more expensive, but I buy them on sale at Costco for about $16
47.
by emtel 11mo ago
I live in CA, but am lucky enough not to be a PG&E customer. My winter off-peak rates are $0.12, compared to $0.43 for PG&E. On the other end, my summer peak is $0.36, vs $0.56. Absolutely absurd.
48.
by emtel 11mo ago
Nope, that’s the crazy thing. busy beaver numbers are simple arithmetical constructions. There is a fact of the matter about each value of BB(n)! We just can’t ever know more than a small handful of them.
49.
by emtel 11mo ago
The best current lower bound for BB(6) is 2↑↑2↑↑2↑↑9 (google "Knuth Up Arrow" if this makes no sense), a number so inconceivably large it gives me the willies. In particular, this means that in going from BB(5) to BB(6), you have
50.
by emtel 11mo ago
The paper seems to make no mention of the natural proof barrier, so it is almost certainly not a proof of what it claims
51.
by emtel 11mo ago
Poor people can make their own decisions about whether to use an old fridge or not. They know much more about their own situation than you do. You are not well situated to make these sorts of decisions for them.
52.
by emtel 1y ago
I read this a few weeks ago, and was inspired to do some experiments of my own on compiler explorer, and found the following interesting things: // This compiles down to a memmove() call let my_vec: Vec<_> = my_vec.int
53.
by emtel 1y ago
Stablecoin payments are currently a hugely growing business, mainly for B2B payments as I understand it. I think its really hard for people who have absorbed 10 years of anti-crypto groupthink from HN to digest the fact that crypto is here
54.
by emtel 1y ago
As far as anyone knows, no models were trained on the illegally downloaded books.
55.
by emtel 1y ago
Swartz wasn’t charged only for downloading copyrighted material, he was also charged with wire fraud and breaking and entering.
56.
by emtel 1y ago
Stealing physical goods is not the same as downloading copyrighted material.
57.
by emtel 1y ago
They would only be wiped out if the court awarded the maximum statutory damages (or close to it). There was never any chance of that happening.
58.
by emtel 1y ago
No one, rich or poor, goes to jail for downloading books.
59.
by emtel 1y ago
But you can use copyrighted works for transformative works under the fair-use doctrine, and training was ruled to be fair use in the previous ruling.
60.
by emtel 1y ago
Banks could offer instant settlement, in theory. But they don’t. Blockchains plus stablecoins do.

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