jhbadger

5 ms·

1.
by jhbadger 4d ago
The Up series is genuinely interesting though and previous installments directed by the late Michael Apted were critically acclaimed. The fact that these people are normal British people (from various socioeconomic classes) is the point --
2.
by jhbadger 5d ago
Well, and also preventing things like slaughterhouses being built in residential areas, as they were often in the 19th century. I rather suspect that the real power behind wanting to repeal zoning laws aren't altruistic people wanting
3.
by jhbadger 5d ago
The difference is some taboos are just based on tradition, and others are based on actual damage. Nobody is hurt by seeing someone walking and eating -- they can just not look at them and the problem is solved. You can't not just hear
4.
by jhbadger 5d ago
I think it started in 2000 when Al Gore who clearly won the election was discarded in favor of Dubya thanks to a biased Supreme Court.
5.
by jhbadger 5d ago
I think you are vastly exaggerating the power of a few nerds -- the vast majority of people have never heard of Gamergate. I'm a nerd and even I only vaguely heard about it at the time.
6.
by jhbadger 5d ago
Logo is a serious programming language. People maybe only know it as the thing to teach kids programming via turtle graphics, but people like Brian Harvey at Berkley have used it to teach functional programming rather than Lisp or Scheme.
7.
by jhbadger 5d ago
Not to mention numerous ex-Soviet countries have replaced their Cyrillic system for Latin ones to demonstrate their independence from Russian colonialism.
8.
by jhbadger 5d ago
Well, not quite. Not showing your hair or not eating in public may have meaning in somebody's culture/religion, but it doesn't hurt anyone else either way. Playing video/music without earphones does. And surely people mu
9.
by jhbadger 5d ago
That I really don't get (and I experience it a lot using transit for my commute) . It seems more common now, but you'd think it would be less common. Headphones used to be bulky things, now Bluetooth earbuds are tiny things easily
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by jhbadger 6d ago
It literally is a reference to the Japanese hobby of collecting bugs and making them fight each other, so yes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect_fighting
11.
by jhbadger 6d ago
Yeah -- I remember in old (1960s) TV shows and movies the headquarters of organizations would always have a map like that, often huge on one wall. It makes sense -- why not just peel the Earth like an orange and flatten it out?
12.
by jhbadger 7d ago
It really was. Outside the nerdosphere, articles about fictional people or places in TV, movies or games were widely mocked and seen as "unprofessional" -- people were saying if Wikipedia needed to be more like Britannica if it wa
13.
by jhbadger 8d ago
The problem was in the early days when people were still mocking the idea of a crowd-sourced encyclopedia, journalists would snark about how (for example) the article on Captain Kirk was longer than some historical figure. So you can see ho
14.
by jhbadger 8d ago
Tolkien, who was a devout Catholic and who wanted his religion in LOTR to not contradict his own, literally had minor gods (the Valar). He squared that with his Catholicism because he had them subordinate to Ilúvatar (God), much like how sa
15.
by jhbadger 12d ago
I'm just saying it's analogous to Long John Silver's parrot saying "Walk the plank!" - the agents involved can't possibly understand what they are saying.
16.
by jhbadger 12d ago
I think that sounds scarier than it is because while it sounds like language evil hyperintelligent AIs would use in science fiction, that's presumably where they got these descriptions as they've been trained on "shadow lib
17.
by jhbadger 12d ago
Nearly all languages designed for mathematics are 1-based - R, Matlab, Mathematica, etc. because that's the mathematical convention and allows using formulas directly. The fact that Python isn't is a drawback in the domain.
18.
by jhbadger 14d ago
I think you miss the point of Star Trek, it, even more than most SF, isn't "really" about the future fictional or otherwise -- it is using the tropes of SF to make commentary on our society through analogy. That being said, I
19.
by jhbadger 14d ago
Maybe, but these are pretty famous writers and artists. I'm sure we would care today if say, Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald had locked away some works 88 years ago.
20.
by jhbadger 18d ago
Yeah. There is a difference between something like Geoffrey's "De gestis Britonum" which was thought by the author to be sort of true, and Malory who knew he was writing literature.
21.
by jhbadger 19d ago
The part where you gave the word your own private meaning was the unclear part. There are no two sides to "progressive". It means thinking the past was bad and that we can make a better, fairer society in the future. Those who thi
22.
by jhbadger 19d ago
There's two different goals to AI research - one was to get results - a chess engine thst wins, etc. But the other goal (which seems to have been abandoned in the deep learning era) was to use AI to help understand how human minds work
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by jhbadger 19d ago
Are you talking about frozen pizza? That's always rather disappointing. Even chains like Dominos let alone good local pizzerias make their pizzas to order by people.
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by jhbadger 20d ago
This is measuring on scientific tasks though. I haven't used Fable lately but when I was playing with it when it was new its "safety" features made it practically impossible to use for biomedical science -- it once refused to
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by jhbadger 23d ago
Yes. That's the only sort of "rare book" that makes sense in context to train on. There's no point in destroying an actually valuable rare book like a first edition of the Origin of Species because those are available ch
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by jhbadger 25d ago
Not really. Nobody has the space. Libraries, public, university, and private regularly "weed" their collections for things they view as outdated or just unpopular. If they didn't, they'd have no space for new books.
27.
by jhbadger 27d ago
But this is an unrealistic view of how AI works. You don't say "make this" and get a finished product. It is very much a back and forth process, very much like a boss to their employee. And I imagine most people have experien
28.
by jhbadger 27d ago
Under Lenin sure. Not so much under Stalin, though. He had old fashioned tastes and disliked abstract art. He preferred "socialist realism" which featured cheesy pictures of happy peasants and tractor drivers working to build Comm
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by jhbadger 27d ago
>How come we memorized chemical formulas but didn’t talk about that [exciting stuff about developmental biology] You can argue that about any subject. People want to take physics and learn stuff about black holes but instead the intro co
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by jhbadger 1mo ago
Also there are things that are just bad translations even for the era -- the KJV mentions unicorns 9 times, often in weird comparisons like "the strength of a unicorn" -- whatever the Hebrew original meant (many scholars think it

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