us-merul

9 ms·

1.
by us-merul 20d ago
To clarify, I am pro-university. I'm just saying that institutions do not always behave in ways that are purely for educational benefit, such as with legacy admissions or grade inflation. I don't think the blame falls solely on st
2.
by us-merul 20d ago
Absolutely; it's a real problem. But institutions like MIT have also been participating in, and benefiting from, this transactional relationship from their side in offering degrees that they know carry so much value.
3.
by us-merul 20d ago
I think this has been going on well before AI or LLMs: "A fundamental danger, as we’ve discussed, is that AI can allow students to bypass learning. Equally concerning is that students may internalize a transactional model in which assi
4.
by us-merul 28d ago
The French tried this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
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Super Mario 64 – 1996 Developer Interviews(shmuplations.com)
4 points by us-merul 1mo ago|2 comments
6.
by us-merul 1mo ago
I came across this while trying to find context around the “trip” move in Super Mario 64. Although I’ve been playing the game since it first came out, I only just found out that when you crouch and hit the punch button, Mario does a sweepin
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Show HN: Project ESPAÑOL: Find level-appropriate Spanish-language poems(dmerullo.github.io)
4 points by us-merul 2mo ago|0 comments
8.
by us-merul 2mo ago
I was referring to this bullet under Lessons Learned: "Manuscript translation is feasible but rough. A 14th-century Sephardic manuscript hand is readable at ~70–80% accuracy. The output is a useful rough draft, not a polished translati
9.
by us-merul 2mo ago
I think there's more to it than that. It's a combination of extracting the text from the PDFs, resolving persistently tricky issues (especially numbers), and flagging issues for human review at scale. You can view lessons from the
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Show HN: Surfacing gaps in neuroscience and narrative insights in Final Fantasy(dmerullo.github.io)
3 points by us-merul 2mo ago|0 comments
11.
by us-merul 3mo ago
I entered an interview with a hiring manger where they had received a "summary" of my resume that contained information blatantly not in my experience. The recruiter claimed they mixed my name up with another applicant, but the su
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HD189733B: A hot Jupiter that rains molten glass(en.wikipedia.org)
9 points by us-merul 4mo ago|0 comments
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by us-merul 5mo ago
Awesome site. I wonder how much of this is tied to the pre-mobile, desktop era. I never really thought of it that way, but I guess that’s where a lot of early Web nostalgia comes from.
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by us-merul 5mo ago
The difference for me has been the Apple Pencil. Now I don’t view the iPad as trying to replicate the mouse and keyboard experience, because it’s something different. For notes, brainstorming, research ideas—something where I don’t want a
15.
by us-merul 5mo ago
I'm not sure this is the best defense of the publishing industry. That $35 ticket price for a hardcover can be avoided by buying used, renting, or an ebook (if cheaper). It's true that a physical copy grants you perpetual ownershi
16.
by us-merul 5mo ago
Yes that’s true, but I was referring to the line where it said he was making more money as a writer, which was before he became a tenured professor. In any case, we’re both addressing the point that he did have an academic career aside from
17.
by us-merul 5mo ago
I looked this up on Wikipedia. It seems that he was working as an instructor (not a professor) of chemistry; since he was making more money as a writer during that time, he slowed down or stopped his research. Doesn’t seem to have been an i
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by us-merul 6mo ago
I think this also creates a vulnerability where, the more time and effort is spent to craft the “correct” solution, it becomes easier to dismiss topics out of hand. Even if our modeling tools have changed, emotions and the human mind have n
19.
by us-merul 7mo ago
GitHub: https://dev.to/padiazg/how-to-sync-your-obsidian-vault-using...
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by us-merul 7mo ago
There isn’t one singular “German.” Sure, there’s a standard form in the country Germany, but the language family is more diverse than that. My point is that the English terminology fuses the language family with the modern country of German
21.
by us-merul 7mo ago
For a while, I mistakenly thought that “Germanic” meant related to German specifically. Old English makes more sense if you’re aware of Frisian, Dutch, and other non-Scandinavian Germanic languages, since that’s the area it originated from.
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by us-merul 7mo ago
There’s a page “Robert’s comments on Tim’s MIT trip” that says: “I hope this does not offend Brewster, but I hope, probably in vain, that the commercialists will stay out of the Web world. Selling information is like selling air and water t
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by us-merul 7mo ago
The language family constellation is especially beautiful. I’m surprised the author didn’t make a tree of life as well. That would work here too.
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Every Enemy from Super Mario 64, 3D Printed [video](youtube.com)
2 points by us-merul 8mo ago|0 comments
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by us-merul 9mo ago
You can write your posts in Markdown, use Obsidian to sync them across devices, and render the pages in Quarto. This might not let you publish from mobile, but you can at least write them anywhere you want.
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by us-merul 10mo ago
I saw a comment recently that described the shift to a "consumer economy." Relative to boomers, millennials have increased access to goods and services like high-definition televisions, computers, international travel, and luxury
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Telescope in Chile captures new picture of a cosmic butterfly(apnews.com)
2 points by us-merul 10mo ago|0 comments
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by us-merul 10mo ago
This is a great summary! I've joked with a coworker that while our capabilities can sometimes pale in comparison (such as dealing with massively high-dimensional data), at least we can run on just a few sandwiches per day.
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by us-merul 11mo ago
"Humans will do what they’ve always tried to do—gain power, enslave, kill, control, exploit, cheat, or just be lazy and avoid the hard work—but now with new abilities that we couldn’t have dreamed of." -- A pretty bleak, and also
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Do Straight Lines Exist?(mikexcohen.substack.com)
5 points by us-merul 11mo ago|1 comments

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