gjm11

6 ms·

1.
by gjm11 5d ago
British plugs are worse to step on, not because the pins are any worse to have jammed into your foot but because the design of the plugs means that if you leave one unplugged on the floor there's an excellent chance that it ends up in
2.
by gjm11 5d ago
> Most supermarket "sourdough type" bread, even some quite expensive stuff, is a modified Chorleywood process. Most ciabatta are. I assume this is one reason why most supermarket "sourdough type" bread is, well, not g
3.
by gjm11 5d ago
There are British companies that sell (among other things) flour made from Canadian wheat. The specific one whose flours I use for my (very amateur) bread baking is Shipton Mill. I tend to make my bread using some of their very strong Canad
4.
by gjm11 6d ago
The previous discussion shows no obvious signs to me of being flagged, but perhaps it did at some earlier point. What is your evidence that they flagged it, please? (And by "they" do you mean Anthropic ? How would they have the
5.
by gjm11 6d ago
My understanding of what Anthropic are saying about this is that the labs in question aren't forwarding things to Claude to make money nor even to look better to the customers whose queries they forward to Claude but to get access
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by gjm11 6d ago
Hyperactive attention-detection. It's a reference to the idea that the origin of religious beliefs might be an inbuilt propensity to think of other bits of the world as conscious agents paying attention to us, because it's much mo
7.
by gjm11 10d ago
If you aren't an excellent speller and you are asked to count the number of some letter occurring in a passage of text, you will look at its written/printed form and go through the letters one by one. This is, indeed, a pretty eas
8.
by gjm11 12d ago
It is. And human beings are bags of chemicals. But for many purposes you will not find it helpful to think of human beings as bags of chemicals, and for many purposes you will not find it helpful to think of LLMs as next-token predictors.
9.
by gjm11 12d ago
This is a bit of a digression, but: It's an interesting question what (if anything) that larger dynamic range means . One thing you'll hear people say sometimes -- I've said it myself -- is that this shows that in some sense
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by gjm11 12d ago
That particular one may be no longer a thing, but there are definitely still plenty of puzzle hunts going on. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puzzle_hunt which has a list.
11.
by gjm11 13d ago
I am not enthusiastic about criteria for human-like intelligence that imply that dyslexic people don't have human-like intelligence. [EDITED to add:] I actually don't know whether dyslexic people find it difficult to count letters
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by gjm11 14d ago
Well, they could have written something like "The 2.0 release itself will be in the next few weeks" or "It will be a few weeks before the actual 2.0 release". (But I agree that "land" is fine here, and the rest
13.
by gjm11 17d ago
Obviously majorness is a matter of degree. And, yes, different people can weight things differently when deciding what's major. But you can't escape having to decide that sort of thing -- after all, you can't hold referenda o
14.
by gjm11 17d ago
I think the reason is probably that the relevant maintainer doesn't see DHH as someone it's embarrassing to be citing with approval, not because politics and technology are separable but because he shares the views a lot of peop
15.
by gjm11 17d ago
> A leave voter would argue for exactly the same thing - a clear majority need to vote to remain. But that's exactly what I'm saying is importantly not symmetrical. Making major changes has extra costs beyond the advantages a
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by gjm11 17d ago
What, as precisely as you can say, is the difference between an illusion of reasoning and reasoning ? (I am not claiming that there is none. But I personally would define "reasoning" in terms of its structure and its results, a
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by gjm11 17d ago
Plurality ("first past the post") voting systems always converge to a two-party system. There's even a theorem saying so, though of course the real world isn't always so polite as to behave the way the mathematics tells
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by gjm11 17d ago
In my more cynical moments I think that was the whole point of Brexit. An awful lot of the big names in the pro-Brexit movement were in one sort of investment-management business or another, and I'd love to see what positions they an
19.
by gjm11 17d ago
You can flip any argument, but there isn't real symmetry here. If a change would be large and far-reaching and painful to undo, then it should be more difficult to make. Not impossible, of course: sometimes you need to make large far
20.
by gjm11 18d ago
Very unlike Obamacare, which so far as I can make out was mostly a name given to the thing by its (and Obama's) opponents .
21.
by gjm11 19d ago
> You pretended that whether the law allows incest right now is relevant about whether incest marriages should be illegal, I did not. I already explained why I brought that up, and it was not because it makes a difference to whether such
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by gjm11 20d ago
> Stating that a blog post with an argument is sensible normally indicates you feel the argument itself is sensible. Yup. I feel that the argument in the blogpost is sensible. That is not the same thing as thinking that a particular poli
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by gjm11 20d ago
I explained in some detail why "I think the blogpost is sensible" is not the same thing as "I think this particular thing that the blogpost argues might be a good idea is a sensible thing". Your response is to ignore all
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by gjm11 21d ago
> Why do you think allowing incest and increasing birth defects among children is sensible? Well, first of all, that isn't in fact what I said. I'll come back to that later. Anyway: As I said in an earlier comment, not everythi
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by gjm11 22d ago
You are (and perhaps the other person also is) mixing up three questions. 1. Does doing X have costs? 2. If so, and if X is done, who should pay those costs? 3. Should we make X illegal? In the present case, first-cousin marriage does have
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by gjm11 22d ago
> Nobody said they were. No. But what the NHS blog thing said was that this particular thing shouldn't be illegal , and you appear to be arguing that that's bad because it's unwise and can increase pressure on the communi
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by gjm11 22d ago
I don't think I understand; would you care to be more explicit?
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by gjm11 22d ago
It's a guess rather than an assumption -- I wouldn't be astonished if it turned out to be a wrong guess -- but there was a reason for it: some of the comment seemed to require "bottom" to be about wealth, and other bits
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by gjm11 23d ago
Here is the actual thing they published (and unpublished shortly after, after backlash stoked by the right-wing press): https://web.archive.org/web/20250929053102/https://www.genom... Readers may judge f
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by gjm11 23d ago
My impression was that OP was using it rather fuzzily, conflating "poor" and "bad" and "unpleasant to be around" and whatever other notions of "bottom" might be floating in the air, in the service of

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