They don’t. They’re financing it via debt in an increasingly unstable and circular manner.

I’d like to point out that children do, in fact, get confused in this way.

When my sister’s child (who now uses they/them pronouns) was quite young (maybe three years old? I’m not certain), when something upset them, they would say “oh no wha happen?” because they knew that when their parents responded with concern after they scraped a knee or something, they would always respond with “Oh no! What happened?” So even though the new situation didn’t rise to the level of provoking crying or whatever, because they wanted that same level of attention and concern, they just directly asked for that response. It was pretty cute.

Similarly, when they wanted something to happen, they would ask it as a question: “want to make those guys talk?” (which meant “please make believe with me and provide voices for some of these stuffed animals”). Or “want to just bring the bowl down?” (which meant “I’m not sure which candy I would like! please bring the candy dish down so I can pick them by looking at them [and maybe take more than one]”). So they were definitely imitating things their parents said before understanding the full grammar of the situations involved.

Probably a Funkey? There have been various others (PocketSprite?). Anything smaller than a Miyoo Mini is really too small to practically play on, though. And even that is pushing it for my aging eyes.

They ported Half-Life to PS2. And the sequel was on everything.

If the AMOC shuts down, all bets are off.

thanks!

So is it being used as slang outside the context of describing people as non-Jewish? I grew up in Skokie, IL, so I was familiar with the yiddish term, but I haven’t heard this new usage. Are non-jewish kids online using “goyim” to refer to outsiders of some other in-group?

It’s because in the US pixel phones are one of the only ways to get a phone with an unlocked bootloader. Or, in other words, to actually own a phone.

I built one, but it was a (top-down) resin printer, so I don’t think I have any useful advice to offer. Also, I kinda burnt out on the project after I came in one morning and found the resin had melted the vat and leaked onto the floor–somehow I just totally failed to consider that the solvents in the resin could obviously dissolve a lot of plastics. Huge mess, huge pain to remediate. At least it was a concrete floor. I got a replacement vat in glass, but I never worked up the will to work on it again. It did basically print before that, but I had a lot of off-layer curing and didn’t get to do much work on tuning that in before the accident.

Yeah, agreed. I must have misunderstood your original comment.

I’m not sure I totally understand your comment, so bear with me if I’m agreeing with you and just not understanding that.

“let me prioritize PRs raised by humans” … but why? Why do that in the first place? If bots/LLMs/agents/GenAI genuinely worked they would not care if it was made or not by humans, it would just be quality submission to share.

Before LLMs, there was a kind of symmetry about pull requests. You could tell at a glance how much effort someone had put into creating the PR. High effort didn’t guarantee that the PR was high quality, but you could be sure you wouldn’t have to review a huge number of worthless PRs simply because the work required to make something that even looked plausibly decent was too much for it to be worth doing unless you were serious about the project.

Now, however, that’s changed. Anyone can create something that looks, at first glance, like it might be an actual bug fix, feature implementation, etc. just by having the LLM spit something out. It’s like the old adage about arguing online–the effort required to refute bullshit is exponentially higher than the effort required to generate it. So now you don’t need to be serious about advancing a project to create a plausible-looking PR. And that means that you can get PRs coming from people who are just trolls, people who have no interest in the project but just want to improve their ranking on github so they look better to potential employers, people who build competing closed-source projects and want to waste the time of the developers of open-source alternatives, people who want to sneak subtle backdoors into various projects (this was always a risk but used to require an unusual degree of resources, and now anyone can spam attempts to a bunch of projects), etc. And there’s no obvious way to tell all these things apart; you just have to do a code review, and that’s extremely labor-intensive.

So yeah, even if the LLMs were good enough to produce terrific code when well-guided, you wouldn’t be able to discern exactly what they’d been instructed to make the code do, and it could still be a big problem.

As a math nerd, this bothers me way more than it should. The reason we say “hundred” when we read a base-ten number that ends with two zeros is because that is the place value of the final non-zero digit–it is literally one hundred times the number you’ve already read aloud. But in the military time version, a) the hours are not hundreds of minutes, they’re groups of sixty minutes, and b) it’s groups of minutes, not hours, so the units also get messed up. If someone tells you it’s currently 0 hours and you should meet again at 800 hours, logic would suggest they’re asking you to go away for more than a month, but in fact they’re saying 8 hours, despite the difference being apparently 800 hours.

I’m aware how pedantic this is, and I’m perfectly capable of understanding what they mean because I’ve heard it so often in movies and whatnot. But I swear these stupid games with units contribute to keeping us dumb.

I’m a little disappointed this wasn’t a link to the film strip we saw in high school. The cop drawling “Now this here is Rolle’s theorem…” is classic.

Edit: https://vimeo.com/101691769

*Xerox PARC. It’s an acronym for Palo Alto Research Center.

Yeah, drinking from the hose was a lot less problematic than just breathing the air, which was full of tetraethyl lead.

M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead

Oh, I only minored in math, I’m no expert either! Yeah, your explanation was really fine, I just thought the “sum of a geometric series” thing might ring a bell for some readers.

Yeah, that’s basically how I remember it, though it’s not always stats–the terms are used in other fields of math as well. A first calculus class typically includes a proof that the limit of the sum of an infinite geometric series (a + ar + ar^2 + ar^3 + …) tends towards a/(1-r) where a is the first term and r is the ratio of successive terms, provided that -1 < r < 1. (Otherwise the series diverges and the limit isn’t defined.)

https://genius.com/John-mulaney-the-comeback-kid-annotated

I guess it’s not technically a new movie, but I just bought the 4k blu ray rerelease of Dark City that came out this year. So there are still some new releases in the format.