nkurz

19 ms·

1.
Apple detectives solved mystery of ancient tree and rewrote the history of fruit(scientificamerican.com)
2 points by nkurz 7h ago|0 comments
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by nkurz 6d ago
No memory, but searching says it was Lewis Carroll in Photography Extraordinary, published in 1885: The Milk-and-Water School Alas! she would not hear my prayer! Yet it were rash to tear my hair; Disfigured, I should be less fair
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by nkurz 9d ago
https://archive.is/Lb2Bf
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by nkurz 11d ago
Hi Bryan, I liked your piece, and agree with almost all of it, but I'm surprised by your faith in the accuracy of Pangram at detecting AI writing. Is your faith based on testing it with lots of writing of known origins, or are you jus
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by nkurz 13d ago
It's the odd North American English "abbreviation" for a "prescription medicine". Where a "prescription medicine" is one that cannot be bought directly by a consumer and instead requires a medical profess
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by nkurz 16d ago
There doesn't seem to be agreement as to exactly what one is, with several definitions already appearing in the comments here. Do you agree with one of them and think everyone else is wrong? Or do you have yet another standard defini
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by nkurz 17d ago
It would be nice if this article defined a "ethernet patch cable". I think he's just using "patch" as a slang term for a short cable and it actually works with any length of standard cable, but I'm not certain
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by nkurz 18d ago
> You can interrogate the LLM. You can ask it all sorts of things. Tell it to justify its decisions. Tell it to give you supporting evidence. Tell it to give you options. Tell it to explain things in detail. Hopefully you realize that it
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by nkurz 19d ago
https://archive.is/2VOgm
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by nkurz 20d ago
Yes, I think this is correct. The money is for hiring researchers and running a lab, not just the salary for an individual. And I think this might be for a multi-year time frame, and not just a single year. I have a friend who is particip
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by nkurz 20d ago
https://archive.is/2VOgm
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by nkurz 22d ago
I think you are wrong about this. My belief is that that most states use "conventional" gasoline, a substantial subset require the same "reformulated" gasoline, and a handful only allow the sale of "boutique" f
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by nkurz 23d ago
It does feel a bit sloppy, but overall it's a decent article and I think everything it claims is accurate. The thing I learned that surprised me was in the fine print of the one of the sample labels. Perhaps I shouldn't be surpri
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by nkurz 29d ago
> I have a place in upstate NY, near the vermont/canada border. I have prime. The best shipping they usually do is a week. Nigh useless. We're in rural Vermont, but not particularly remote. Amazon is the same for us, with a mi
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by nkurz 1mo ago
Sure, it's a bit wild, and no, the same outcome may not have been reached if the case came up earlier. And if it makes it to the Supreme Court, who knows what they will turn it into. The flip side is that Alsup (the judge who wrote th
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by nkurz 1mo ago
> I don't understand why these companies haven't just licensed the scans Google has already done. Because for the vast majority of the books, Google doesn't have the legal right to license those scans. It would be legal i
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by nkurz 1mo ago
Until about a year ago this would have been a reasonable and respectable argument, but at least in California you are arguing against current legal precedent: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwbgq
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by nkurz 1mo ago
No, that's not the loophole. The loophole is that a US federal judge recently ruled that scanning a book for the purpose of training an AI is "fair use" and hence legal _if and only if_ the book is destroyed in the process.
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The Closure of the Internet: Most Important Social Phenomenon of the Late 2010s(arctotherium.substack.com)
2 points by nkurz 1mo ago|0 comments
20.
by nkurz 2mo ago
> According to GOST technical standards, Russian language uses the semicolon to denote time: Is it correct that Russian officially uses a semicolon (;) to separate time elements, or is this just a translation error? > : (semicolon) fo
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by nkurz 2mo ago
It's accessible for me in the US. But if it's not available where you are, try here: https://archive.is/qjCGK
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by nkurz 2mo ago
Not sure if it's what you meant, but archive.is and archive.org are unrelated.
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by nkurz 3mo ago
Yes, the diagrams help. The issue is that you aren't using standard English terminology. Typically, a "loaf" is the whole piece of bread as baked, although it's still called a loaf even after you start cutting pieces o
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by nkurz 3mo ago
Maybe I'm just slow this morning, but I had trouble figuring out what this story was about. The actual title on the linked article is "Historic co-determination helps monasteries navigate digital change across three countries&quo
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by nkurz 3mo ago
Assuming you are planning to continue participating anyway, you should just respond. Presuming it's a good response, with a bit of luck someone will vouch for it and make it visible.
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by nkurz 3mo ago
Is there any reason to trust Pangram's tool over Carlyle's reputation? I don't know whether this was AI generated or not, but an online tool claiming it's AI generated doesn't sway my opinion much. Are there any s
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by nkurz 3mo ago
https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/
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by nkurz 3mo ago
I agree that it sends the wrong symbol, but actually Daniel is great. He cares tremendously about doing work that is actually real-world useful. I've co-written a few papers with him, and he's really hard working and open to outsi
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by nkurz 4mo ago
You keep saying that you "can't read the article" rather than that you choose not to. Are you philosophically opposed to clicking the archive link in this thread: https://archive.ph/cgUxZ ? Which is fine, alt
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by nkurz 4mo ago
Here's a starting point if you are intrigued: https://www.jessamyn.com/barth/colby.html The page above that has more info and other stories: https://www.jessamyn.com/barth/

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