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2 yr. ago

  • Three good novels to see if you have a taste for cyberpunk: The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, and Neuromancer by William Gibson. The first is lush and leisurely, the latter two are very lean and fast-paced.

  • I read Brave New World &1984 back-to-back and highly recommend it.

  • If I'm thinking of the same device, the one I used in Sweden and Norway, it's fantastic. It's in the shower itself, so you don't have to contend with 30m of cold pipes between a less effective water heater and the nozzle.

  • Did freaking awesome writing a resignation letter and removing the part where I sound like The Joker after a particularly vexing day.

  • Totenhose+Zorn=Sexmonster

  • Tux looks like he's about to regulate.

  • Anybody else see a thumbnail that doesn't appear to fit the article? Or does it fit and I'm missing something? E2a: It's apparently PM Modi of India.

  • This meme features a Finn in his full glory. Standing 10 feet away, quietly minding his own business.

  • If they changed the name to the Kids' Act for Online Safety, we could get Maxwell Smart and Agent 99 to fight against the bill.

  • Weinberg boiled it down to a single axiom for me: "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." I'm not sure if they're still in fashion, but two other things that inspired me were The Cathedral and the Bazaar and the front material of the original Gang of Four book Design Patterns."

  • I didn't always agree with Gene & Roger, but I did watch them every Saturday. What made it a little weird for me was watching Roger's magnum opus Beyond the Valley of the Dolls as a young adult, and trying - never succeeding - to reconcile that movie with this man I grew up listening to.

  • I'm bone-tired of movies that folio follow the Save the Cat! formula beat-for-beat. There have been some great ones: The Matrix, Big, and The Mighty Ducks are three of many, many examples. But, Good God, it gets boring.

  • And let that marinate.

  • Watched it a couple of days ago. Mostly on point and had a few good catches. One disagreement: he dunked on "Is that one of ours?" While not strictly necessary, that helped the viewer piece together the Miracle Worker's appearance later on if you weren't watching the episode through a microscope.

  • You can get 24MT of corn in a 20 foot container. So step 1 is deciding whether you want 96 or 120MT. For comparison, a mid-sized container ship can carry 6000 containers.

    The Maersk Triple E class ships can carry the equivalent of 20000 20-foot containers. In reality, a significant number of those would have to be 40 footers.

  • I've had a nagging issue with ChatGPT that hasn't been easy for me to explain. I think I've got it now.

    We're used to computers being great at remembering "state." For example, if I say "let x=3", barring a bug, x is damned well gonna stay 3 until I decide otherwise.

    GPT has trouble remembering state. Here's an analogy:

    Let Fred be a dinosaur.
    Ok, Fred is a dinosaur.
    He's wearing an AC/DC tshirt.
    OK, he's wearing an AC/DC tshirt.
    And sunglasses.
    OK, he's wearing an AC/DC tshirt and sunglasses.
    Describe Fred.
    Fred is a kitten wearing an AC/DC tshirt and sunglasses.

    When I work with GPT, I spend a lot of time reminding it that Fred was a dinosaur.

  • There's a headline that's ripe for misreading.