At a slightly lower level, I’m excited about Servo. Activity died off for a bit but it’s gaining steam again. Still behind Ladybird progress-wise, but it will make a very strong foundation for a new web browser.

Yeah, bot posts are good IMO for things that are like once per day or less. More frequently and it can end up being spammy. OTOH, I’ve browsed all a few times and seen interesting posts from HN that I then went over and read, so there’s something to be said for that too. Maybe if there was a more nuanced option, like “don’t show me bot posts unless they’ve been upvoted by a non-bot” or something like that. Or maybe if bots reposting from elsewhere did that filtering beforehand, like top 10 per day or something

This is probably the best explanation I’ve seen:

http://adit.io/posts/2013-04-17-functors,_applicatives,_and_monads_in_pictures.html

Not sure what type of grass, it was there when we moved in. White clover

My lawn has grass, clover, and violets, with a few other random plants. The violets are great and look nice and don’t really need mowing. The clover and grass eventually require mowing, but not moreso than just pure grass.

Turns out the blue zone studies have likely just identified hotspots for pension fraud:

The observation of individuals attaining remarkable ages, and their concentration into geographic sub-regions or ‘blue zones’, has generated considerable scientific interest. Proposed drivers of remarkable longevity include high vegetable intake, strong social connections, and genetic markers. Here, we reveal new predictors of remarkable longevity and ‘supercentenarian’ status. In the United States, supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. In Italy, England, and France, which have more uniform vital registration, remarkable longevity is instead predicted by poverty, low per capita incomes, shorter life expectancy, higher crime rates, worse health, higher deprivation, fewer 90+ year olds, and residence in remote, overseas, and colonial territories. In England and France, higher old-age poverty rates alone predict more than half of the regional variation in attaining a remarkable age. Only 18% of ‘exhaustively’ validated supercentenarians have a birth certificate, falling to zero percent in the USA, and supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on days divisible by five: a pattern indicative of widespread fraud and error. Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and short life expectancy relative to their national average. As such, relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.

If I search for “steam vs epic” I still see the AI-generated summary. It probably depends on when the page was scraped and when Reddit (I assume) started doing this.

This is a good commentary on it:

It’s good to want to improve the world around you, which can be given a label of patriotism. Going too far down that road leads to lots of unhappiness, though.

; and ; respectively, in case anyone wants to see how it renders on their machine and is also lazy.

We’ve learned quite a bit about these Occlupanids thanks to the HORG:

https://www.horg.com/horg/?page_id=2

That’s pretty much https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol). You can explore it through an HTTP proxy like this: https://portal.mozz.us/

It was inevitable with inflation of course, but that’s why you don’t pick names like that. Wikipedia says they go up to $30:

Five Below, Inc. is an American chain of specialty discount gift shops that prices most of its products at $5 or less, plus a smaller assortment of products priced up to $30.

Thanks, that would be great! And even if you don’t post anything, comments are always appreciated

I’ve been posting things I find interesting to !discuss@discuss.online. I’m trying to grow it as a community that can have conversations about a broad range of interesting topics, without having to subscribe to a bunch of narrowly-focused communities. Think something like Hacker News or lobste.rs, but without the tech bro mindset.

Related SMBC:

Relevant comment

I don’t use Rust much, but I agree with the thrust of the article. However, I do think that the borrowchecker is the only reason Rust actually caught on. In my opinion, it’s really hard for a new language to succeed unless you can point to something and say “You literally can’t do this in your language”

Without something like that, I think it just would have been impossible for Rust to gain enough momentum, and also attract the sort of people that made its culture what it is.

Otherwise, IMO Rust would have ended up just like D, a language that few people have ever used, but most people who have heard of it will say “apparently it’s a better safer C++, but I’m not going to switch because I can technically do all that stuff in C++”

Blue ball model (also comes with gray ball option)

Gray ball model

I’ve got both and the gray ball model is definitely nicer. It’s got a wedge and a magnetic plate for picking an angle for ergonomic reasons. It generally feels nicer and has some neat things like a button for switching connections which is handy if you watch to use it with multiple computers. It also uses USB-C to charge (specifically the “MX Ergo S”, not the “MX Ergo” which is the older version and used micro usb).

If you’re new to trackballs though and just want to try them out, the cheaper model is perfect serviceable.

Neat, looks like the author got a publishing deal and has a new version of it coming out later this year:

https://qntm.org/antimemetics

Here’s the author’s blurb about it, if it piques anyone else’s interest that hasn’t read it yet:

An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.

Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you wouldn’t share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams…

But anomalous antimemes are another matter entirely. How do you contain something you can’t record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you’re at war?

Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.

No, this is not your first day.

Probably something like Tensor Processing Unit. That’s a specific Google product, but something along those lines

Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) is an AI accelerator application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) developed by Google for neural network machine learning, using Google’s own TensorFlow software. Google began using TPUs internally in 2015, and in 2018 made them available for third-party use, both as part of its cloud infrastructure and by offering a smaller version of the chip for sale.

Compared to a graphics processing unit, TPUs are designed for a high volume of low precision computation (e.g. as little as 8-bit precision)[3] with more input/output operations per joule, without hardware for rasterisation/texture mapping.

I’ll plug my home instance, discuss.online. We’re generally low-key and don’t heavily moderate stuff, but will also respond to bad actors.