alex_young (u/alex_young)

alex_young commented on Robin Lakoff has died nytimes.com/2025/08/15/us... · Posted by u/drankl

alex_young · 13 days ago

In case anyone else is wondering - Robin is the ex-wife of another prominent linguist, George Lakoff.

Somehow GPT-5 got this badly wrong when I first asked:

  Yes — George Lakoff and Robin Lakoff are related. They are siblings.

Er, no. They were married once and divorced 50 years ago according to their Wikipedia pages.

alex_young commented on Hiroshima (1946) newyorker.com/magazine/19... · Posted by u/pseudolus

throw0101d · a month ago

If anyone thinks that dropping the bombs was unnecessary, I would recommend reading Barrett's 140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hir...

* https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-...

It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making process leading up to the eventual surrender.

What was most surprising to me was the reluctance of many members to surrender even after two bombs were dropped. The Emperor himself had to be called in multiple times (which was unprecedented) to ensure that the surrender was 'pushed' through. Even after the vote to surrender happened there were still machinations to overturn it: a reminder that there was a coup attempt to prevent the surrender from being broadcast:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident

alex_young · a month ago

Isn’t it clearly a horrific crime against humanity to knowingly, instantaneously, and with premeditation, murder hundreds of thousands of civilians?

The normal response to this line of reasoning is that they were / could have been doing the same to us. Two wrongs does not make a right does it?

alex_young commented on Hiroshima (1946) newyorker.com/magazine/19... · Posted by u/pseudolus

JKCalhoun · a month ago

Is that true? I thought they had a core at Los Alamos.

alex_young · a month ago

This was the third core: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

alex_young commented on NIH is cheaper than the wrong dependency lewiscampbell.tech/blog/2... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

jeffhwang · a month ago

And here I thought I was going to read a novel defense of the British healthcare system.

alex_young · a month ago

NHS?

alex_young commented on Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries' wired.com/story/sam-altma... · Posted by u/spenvo

alex_young · 2 months ago

It’s kind of rich that he’s complaining about Facebook paying engineers ’too much’, given the history here.

A decade ago Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Adobe all had anti poaching agreements, and Facebook wouldn’t play ball, paid people more, won market share, and caused the salary boom in Silicon Valley.

Now Facebook is paying people too much and we should all feel bad about it?

alex_young commented on The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million calvin.sh/blog/fed-lie/... · Posted by u/c249709

jmkni · 2 months ago

Kind of off-topic, but I've always thought a good way to suss out what sort of background somebody comes from is to ask them to visualise $1million dollars.

People from a "working class" background tend to see a massive pile of money, more middle class, a smaller pile, upper class maybe a cheque or a small stack of $100 bills or a bank transfer.

It's maybe one of the weirdest parts of the JBR ransom note (getting really off-topic now), "$118,000 dollars be placed into an "adequately sized attaché" consisting of $100,000 in $100 dollar bills and $18,000 in $20 dollar bills."

That would take up a really small amount of space, but if you're never seen that amount of money you might not know that (especially in 1996, pre-internet)

alex_young · 2 months ago

IDK, a strap of $100 bills is $10k, so $1M would be 100 of them. Seems sizable. Looks like a strap is about .43 inches tall, so that would make your $1M about 3 and a half feet high or more than a meter tall for the non-imperial afflicted amongst us.

alex_young commented on JWST reveals its first direct image discovery of an exoplanet smithsonianmag.com/smart-... · Posted by u/divbzero

perlgeek · 2 months ago

It would be really cool to have an array of space-based telescopes spaced out evenly in the Earth's orbit around the sun, and use each as relay for the others that cannot directly communicate with Earth, because the path is blocked by the Sun.

Then you could do observations outside the solar system's orbital plane with a 2 AU synthetic aperture. And maybe even do double duty as a gravitational wave observatory.

(And yes, this is currently more science fiction than science, but it's at least plausible that we can build such a thing one day).

alex_young · 2 months ago

If you can put an ugly sports car in an earth / mars orbit, surely you can put a few telescopes in some large orbit and figure out a timing source. Seems very much inside the realm of the possible.

alex_young commented on JWST reveals its first direct image discovery of an exoplanet smithsonianmag.com/smart-... · Posted by u/divbzero

ycui1986 · 2 months ago

i don't think modern semiconductor device will last more than 100 years, even without all the radiation. making something last more than a few decades is very hard.

alex_young · 2 months ago

Considering that the longest continually operating computer is in Voyager 2 and has been running for nearly 50 years I would be surprised if this was actually a problem. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/635980-lo...

alex_young commented on Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos you haven’t yet shared techcrunch.com/2025/06/27... · Posted by u/absqueued

thanatos519 · 2 months ago

I like how the headline is truncated. I was thinking of 'seen' or 'taken' but turns out it ended with 'shared'.

alex_young · 2 months ago

Could be more fun options:

  - Photos you haven’t yet known you’re in. 
  - Photos you haven’t yet deleted. 
  - Photos you haven’t yet thought better about taking.