mjd

6 ms·

1.
by mjd 12d ago
I guess this was written in the early 2000s, while OBL was hiding in Afghanistan?
2.
by mjd 19d ago
Short answer: no. Interesting nevertheless.
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by mjd 28d ago
You don't think it would be parting the Red Sea?
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by mjd 1mo ago
The comment said that Jaynes's theory was that consciousness historically arose after writing, not that writing or literacy is necessary for individual consciousness.
5.
by mjd 1mo ago
That's exactly Jaynes's theory: consciousness not only arrived after the invention of language, it arrived after the invention of writing, literature, agriculture, metallurgy, and government bureaucracy. And also, that it _could
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by mjd 1mo ago
It was definitely the inspiration for one of the subplots of _The Big U_. A faction of college students regressed to a bicameral mentality and would hold rituals in which they waited for oracular speech from an electric fan. I remember thi
7.
by mjd 1mo ago
Incidentally, Ibn Battutah was on the at-my-elbow shelf for quite a while. The elbow shelf is not a static collection. Things move on, then they move off again, as Roget 8th edition did recently. You've got me thinking that it might
8.
by mjd 1mo ago
Since you asked, I took a survey around the office. I have the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the one edited by Wallis Budge. I have a Chinese translating dictionary, a Chinese etymological dictionary, and a Hawai'ian dictionary. I have
9.
by mjd 1mo ago
Thanks! I'm a big fan of David Macaulay's other books, but I've never liked _The Way Things Work_. _Castle_ and _Umderground_, though I love.
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by mjd 1mo ago
One really nice thing about Pseudodoxia Epidemica is that you don't have to read it cover to cover. You can pick it up, read the bit about whether “a Diamond is made soft, or broke by the blood of a Goate”, or what he has to say about
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by mjd 1mo ago
I do own more than these seven books.
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by mjd 1mo ago
The Netflix series is an "inspired by", not an adaptation. It does not have much in common with the original book other than the setting and the names of some of the characters. I enjoyed it, and I absolutely loved Tanya Reynolds
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by mjd 1mo ago
The one in TFA is Harper and Row, and the later 8th Edition, published by Harper Collins, is also organized the correct way. I think you'll be safe if you can get a Harper version.
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by mjd 1mo ago
The current front-runner is “The Crazy Ape” by Albert Szent-Györgyi, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering ascorbic acid. It's about how war is perpetrated by the old against the young. I've carried it next to my heart since I w
15.
by mjd 1mo ago
And I bet you won't guess what any of them are.
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by mjd 1mo ago
I was surprised that Gruhn didn't include this in his list of problems where the NP-hardness is not that important in practice. I think the Ford-Fulkerson maximum flow algorithm may be another example.
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by mjd 2mo ago
One of my life goals is to fully understand Jean Gallier's paper about Kruskal's theorem and the Feferman-Schütte ordinal.
18.
5.6 Sol produces a new research paper in one shot(aifails.substack.com)
3 points by mjd 2mo ago|1 comments
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by mjd 2mo ago
Ignore the title of the blog itself (“Funny AI Fails”). I confirmed with the author that he wasn't kidding: * He gave ChatGPT a single 300-word prompt describing an open problem in his area of expertise, game theory, and asked it to wr
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by mjd 2mo ago
Something in the main game page runs my Firefox process up to 100% CPU.
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by mjd 2mo ago
I know your comment wasn't. What do you feel you're bringing to the conversation? Are HN readers going to see your comment and say “Good thing this anonymous rando spoke up or I would have wasted my time!”
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by mjd 3mo ago
The author is a mathematician, so when he says “it is not in general possible to find bugs by examining the code” he does not mean it is completely impossible to find bugs. He means only that it is not possible to find all bugs or even any
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by mjd 3mo ago
In “The Origin of Consciousness” Julian James argues that human consciousness substantially predates language and even writing. For example he contrasts the language in the Iliad (which he claims was written before the development of consci
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by mjd 3mo ago
I've been having fun getting better at understanding where the letters begin and end. Something like this is easy for me now: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:-516170388361w7xlt8c... Next I'm going to
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by mjd 3mo ago
I think you left out an important technical advance: A theory of parsing was developed, parsing was systematized, and automatic parser generators were developed. Parsing in 1992 was very much a solved problem. In 1974, writing a parser was
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by mjd 3mo ago
One of the reasons I was so interesting to find this thing I had written was that things had (in some ways) changed so little in thirty years. Today I was re-reading Donald Knuth's 1974 paper “Structured Programming with go to Statemen
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by mjd 3mo ago
Not from the chatbot. From me. I'm the one who sent the message. And it wasn't inauthentic. I wanted to be polite and inoffensive, but I didn't know how.
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by mjd 3mo ago
Perhaps I'm wrong, but yes, I believe there is. Your own personal preferences are not universal.
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by mjd 3mo ago
As I mentioned, I'm hard of hearing and phone calls are difficult for me.
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by mjd 3mo ago
Your use of the phrase “undeserved politeness” suggests to me that maybe you aren't someone I should look to for advice on how to behave.

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