Anyone interested in a fictional take on this period could consider Pynchon's "Against the Day", although it is no light challenge. It takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the years following WW1 and, appropriately, tells a sprawling, disorienting story that feels overwhelming at times.
Readit Newscgh commented on 1910: The year the modern world lost its mind derekthompson.org/p/1910-... · Posted by u/purgator
cgh commented on AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing rakhim.exotext.com/ai-is-... · Posted by u/ambigious7777
> AI is impressive
Ok, but Google's result summary got the answer wrong. So did Gemini, when I tried it (Lion, Sierra Leone). And so did ChatGPT when I tried it (Lion, Sri Lanka).
So... it's impressive, sure, because the author is correct that a search engine can't answer that question in a single query. But it's also wildly wrong.
I also vaguely agree with the author that Google Drive sucks, but I wish they'd mentioned that the solution to their problem - using search! - also fucking sucks in Google Drive.
I saw a quote somewhere to the effect of “LLMs are lossy compression of the internet” and it seemed about right.
cgh commented on Providing ChatGPT to the U.S. federal workforce openai.com/index/providin... · Posted by u/gmays
Should be fine as long as these government workers never have to use it for basic arithmetic. After all, when do governments deal with actual numbers?
What is 10,286x953751?
ChatGPT said: 10,286 × 953,751 = 9,817,342,086
cgh commented on The Big Oops in type systems: This problem extends to FP as well danieltan.weblog.lol/2025... · Posted by u/ksymph
> The secondary point is that the Clojure system may be more malleable - if you want to add a new state, you just directly add some code to handle that state at the appropriate points in the process.
That's all certainly possible. But the same could be said of Python or JS. So if the big point here is "we can model business decisions as code!", I fail to see the innovation because we've been doing that for 50 years. Nothing unique to Clojure.
You could even do it Haskell if you want: just store data as a Map of properties and values, emulating a JS object.
Yes, the point wasn’t “Clojure rules, Haskell drools”, it’s that at a high enough level of abstraction, encoding business rules with static types is brittle. It’s not some huge revelation; enterprises have done this for decades with SQL and gasp stored procedures.
cgh commented on At 17, Hannah Cairo solved a major math mystery quantamagazine.org/at-17-... · Posted by u/baruchel
cgh commented on At 17, Hannah Cairo solved a major math mystery quantamagazine.org/at-17-... · Posted by u/baruchel
Can you explain this in more detail? The idiot bottom rate contractors that come through my team on the regular have not been helped at all by LLMs. The competent people do get a productivity boost though.
The only way I see compensation "adjusting" because of LLMs would need them to become significantly more competent and autonomous.
There's another specific class of person that seems helped by them: the paralysis by analysis programmer. I work with someone really smart who simply cannot get started when given ordinary coding tasks. She researches, reads and understands the problem inside and out but cannot start actually writing code. LLMs have pushed her past this paralysis problem and given her the inertia to continue.
On the other end, I know a guy who writes deeply proprietary embedded code that lives in EV battery controllers and he's found LLMs useless.
cgh commented on VHS, VCDs, and Laserdiscs in Southeast Asia rubenerd.com/vcds-and-las... · Posted by u/mikece
Were bootlegs popular?
The first time I traveled outside the western part of the world, I was (naively or not) surprised by the sheer amount of bootleg tapes sold in regular stores. Same with DVD when that time came around.
In Thailand in the ‘90s, there were street vendors selling every dvd and cd you could think of, all bootlegs, complete with copied artwork and packaging. It was completely out in the open.
> Along this road is also the farthest north point you can travel on a road in eastern Canada.
Not to belittle the remoteness of this road, but I just find it interesting that the farthest north point you can travel on a road in eastern Canada is further south than most of Sweden (not to mention Norway or Iceland, which also have very extensive road networks). Another reminder of how important the Gulf Stream is for the climate of Europe...
Re your Gulf Stream comment: Whitehorse, Yukon is roughly at the same latitude as Bergen, Norway. Bergen’s climate is temperate and similar to, say, Vancouver: rainy, a bit of snow in winter, rarely staying below freezing for long. The coldest temperature recorded is -17° back in 1987.
Whitehorse’s average daily low in winter is close to -20°, with common drops to around -40°. When I was a kid up in that area, I remember walking to school at around -30 to -40°. We also played outside in those temps, which seems a bit mad now.
Here’s the fun part: Whitehorse has the warmest climate in the Yukon.
I get that there are other factors, like coastal vs inland environments, but regardless, any disruption to the Gulf Stream is bad news indeed for Europe.
I know i will get downvoted for this but i feel HN is losing its intellectual side over such elitist crap. The original article is from a well-known racist / eugenist and people here keep going on posting more dubious content that tries to paint towards political policies to keep the masses out of higher education.