Readit NewsWatching new calves play in spring meadows is one of the most purely joyful things you can ever see. They have best friends and will avoid playing with other calves until their friend comes to play with them.
The esplanade in those days was basically a sullen row of shops, one after the other offering beach-goers refreshments and entertainment, luring every customer in with the promise of fun and cheer .. and every single one of those 8 or so shops had a small Cold War going on against the other, for entertainment devices.
At one end, there was an air-hockey paradise with a side row of electromechanical games, one of which was indeed Killer Shark, along with another airplane bombing game that ran on a big map, rolling underneath the camera through which the player would view and send down their 'light bombs' as we kids referred to them, way back then. My first impression of "Germany", as it were, rolling endlessly in some kind of ethereal, hypnotic landscape. Pinballs and stuff too, almost an overwhelming selection of blinking chaos into which to pour coins. Each shop had its speciality - my Dads' place (MINDERBINDERS, in case there are any sand gropers about) specialised in pinball and stag films in a back room, for those who knew the secret handshake.
Killer Shark was great - it was so clearly a mechanical game that you could never beat, but on occasion the odd punter would score a free game or so. Even more of a treat, the proprietors would sometimes start off the games with 20 credits or so, just sitting there, to attract the teens. There was another electro-mechanical, ocean themed game, something like "SPEAR HUNT", which offered players a few snapper and some stingrays upon which to direct their sun-kissed ire, should they have a remaining 20c or two to waste.
I loved that era of my life (was just a boy starting school) .. 1976 .. the brand new "Breakout" appears suddenly, and it immediately soaked up all the coins from the neighborhood. I remember seeing the service guy open up Breakout and all the coins just came pouring out .. and then, slowly, the rest of the strip went video and computer, Space Invaders arrived, and the electromechanical games slowly phased out, becoming ever more unpopular and under-used as the year rolled over.
My first memory of Killer Shark was fun - my last, sadness, as its faded exterior got loaded onto the truck to be replaced by something brighter, flashier, more challenging. Soon enough there were only 'computer games' and pinballs, and all those delicate machines got replaced, one by one. Eventually, the esplanade itself got replaced with a modern monstrosity, and the era ended with the fervent twang of the 80's arriving, power synth chords and all.
But I still remember the squealing joy of a player, spearing themselves a shark, only to be pissing themselves with laughter/fearjoy once the shark 'recovered' and made them face a frontal attack. It was, somehow, cathartic.
Until a real shark showed up in the surf and bit a kids leg off, during prime surf hour.
That made me the computer kid I still am, today.
I'm a naturally frugal person, but the book helped me formulate new ways of thinking about money and my relationship with it. The major concept being that money is a representation of your life energy. You work X hours a day at an hourly rate of $Y. Knowing those numbers allows you to think about purchases in a new way. For instance, "That new phone will cost me 2.5 days of work" or "If someone offered me $500 or the new phone, which would I take?" If you chose the $500, then you know you don't need to buy the phone.
I would recommend Your Money or Your Life before all other financial "self-help" books. In fact, I think I'm going read it again.
Note that SpaceX is not publically traded, but it represents assets I would like to own.
Here's how it works: you use PopVox to communicate with Congress, sending support or oppose messages which are publicly tallied so all can see which way any given Congresscritter's distric was leaning. This tool then shows you, bill by bill, whether your two senators and congressperson voted the way you told them to through PopVox.
If you contact them some other way, PopVox can't possibly know that (nor can anyone but your congresscritter, so there's no accountability), so it's useless without an account.
To accomplish the goal of knowing how my congresscritter (really?) matches with me, I should not need an account. If I wanted you to contact them for me then OK but to call the site useless without an account just makes it so.
Maybe I am naive, and this is how things really get done, but regardless of which side I might have been on during this meeting, he is no longer trusted.
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/jsp_includes/articlePrint.jsp...
2c, I think the fixation on 4th-Gen, 5th-Gen or whatever is distracting. How fast, how far, How much would be more interesting questions.
Free stuff costs. Not money but there are costs. In the future world he is imagining there will be some who want to pay for their own machines and control the software that runs on them.
Being a parasite means riding a host and giving up some critical decisions about where and how the host lives.
[Edit for grammer]
If volunteer fire fighters are told by the people who they protect that it is ok to watch a house burn (because necessary costs were not covered somehow) then philosophically what is to stop them from not helping when I don't slip them extra money because their labor is volunteer anyway? I think this eats at the soul of the community.
It’s tempting to think of a language model as a shallow search engine that happens to output text, but that metaphor doesn’t actually match what’s happening under the hood. A model doesn’t “know” facts or measure uncertainty in a Bayesian sense. All it really does is traverse a high‑dimensional statistical manifold of language usage, trying to produce the most plausible continuation.
That’s why a confidence number that looks sensible can still be as made up as the underlying output, because both are just sequences of tokens tied to trained patterns, not anchored truth values. If you want truth, you want something that couples probability distributions to real world evidence sources and flags when it doesn’t have enough grounding to answer, ideally with explicit uncertainty, not hand‑waviness.
People talk about hallucination like it’s a bug that can be patched at the surface level. I think it’s actually a feature of the architecture we’re using: generating plausible continuations by design. You have to change the shape of the model or augment it with tooling that directly references verified knowledge sources before you get reliability that matters.