Over 10,000km. This is home, it’s where my kids were born and are growing up. But there’s also “back home”, where I spent more than half of my life, where I met my wife, and where both our families are other than the two of us and our children.

This a great visualization of what LLMs are about. The purpose of a LLM is to produce something that looks right. The way this math sheet looks great at first look, but the actual content is just garbage, same do LLMs create output that sounds right and it doesn’t really matter if it is. And improving LLMs is not about making the answers more reliable, it’s about making them sound even more convincing.

If you’re not very familiar with JS, watch the Wat talk before taking the quiz to know what to expect from this wonderful language.

users opting into “cloud processing”

Is that something users are opting into or something they need to opt out of?

• Þþ = unvoiced “th” (“thing,” “thong,” “with”)

I pronounce “with” with ð. Am I wrong, or is the list wrong?

Edit: checked the dictionary, looks like both are correct

I opted against taking a burner phone—a move that some legal experts had advised, in the press—believing it would provoke suspicion, and simply decided to give my phone and social media a superficial clean.

But C.B.P. had prepared for me well before my arrival. They did not need to identify me at LAX as someone worthy of investigation: they had evidently decided that weeks before. […] In either case, a U.S. government officer must have read my work and decided that I was not fit to enter the country. Because Officer Martinez had apparently read all of my material so long ago, he didn’t even know that I had taken all this material down. What this means is that, by the time a foreigner cleans his social media in preparation for a trip to the U.S., as much of our news media has been urging us to do, it may already be too late.

This had nothing to do with recovering any data from the phone. The information was already known to them.

inb4 microplastics found in paracetamol

I just never got used to it. I grew up drinking club soda or sparkling mineral water. Also milk, I would drink liters of milk a day for a time, but no water. Flat water just doesn’t do it for me. If it’s ice cold, it’s ok, but I never think “I feel like I’d like some water now”.

It’s an Optima Yellowtop, which is what I saw most people online recommend for the Prius.

No, advanced AI is more accurate than humans at identifying the things it’s specialized in and it’s an invaluable tool in many domains. LLMs, on the other hand, are not made to be accurate in anything in particular, and anyone expecting them to be just doesn’t understand how they work.

They were behind white genocide in South Africa

I thought it would be funny this way. Guess not

choose it’s own sex and appearance

Data did not use contractions (as pointed out by his evil twin), so that would be “choose it is own sex and appearance”

During the communist regime in Romania there was a ban on abortion and the state encouraged people to have lots of kids (sound familiar?). This lead to A LOT of kids in orphanages and not enough resources to properly care for them. Conditions were atrocious, to say the least.

But, that lead to a lot of research data by following the lives of kids who got adopted from those orphanages. It was determined that 4 month old was the cut-off point from where kids can still recover from traumatic experiences. Kids adopted younger than that did fine, but kids adopted after that age were affected for the rest of their lives. The fact that they didn’t actually remember things consciously did not matter.

But B is true

But quickly banging out a concept, to me, is the big win for python.

For me the best language for quickly banging out a concept has always been the one I’m most familiar with at the moment.

Episode 4x23 “The Host”

Never had a console growing up. PC all the way. Started with a ZX Spectrum clone, then a 286, then a Pentium 100, and so on. I got my first consoles as an adult, first the Xbox One, which I never really played anything other than Just Dance on, then a Switch, which I couldn’t really get into either and ended up playing more on Ryujinx than on the actual switch. Bought an old 3DS at one point and its also just sitting in a drawer. Guess I’m too much of a PC gamer to get into consoles.

Also worth reading the books he co-wrote with Stephen Baxter.

The first book is ok, but the rest of the series is pretty meh. Still bought and read them all as a Pratchett fan, but I wouldn’t recommend them to others. If you want to expand past the Discworld series, Good Omens is a much better recommendation. Also Nation is a really good book too.

Prompt engineering is not easy. Getting something as good as a real artist’s work is very hard, especially if you’re not an artist. Of course actual art is going to win every time.