It's fascinating to me that we went from "embedding important information in QR codes is silly because they look ridiculous and no one will ever use them" ( https://picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com/ ) all the way to "sweet, I can read the whole menu online and order and pay when I'm ready, this is great" in like 3 months.
Readit Newsmherdeg commented on Please don't make me use another QR code restaurant menu thewalrus.ca/qr-code-rest... · Posted by u/laurex
mherdeg commented on The Miele Dialog: cook a fish in ice without melting the ice reviewed.usatoday.com/ove... · Posted by u/mckn1ght
https://reviewed.usatoday.com/ovens/features/we-tried-an-ove... is a much better writeup.
It seems to be a directional microwave, where it monitors how much microwave gets reflected back as a proxy for how much is being absorbed by the food in each spot, so it can ramp up/down the power as necessary to deliver the requested amount of energy. Pretty neat.
Was this the premise of the pilot episode of 30 Rock? The trivection oven?
mherdeg commented on Post Office lied and threatened BBC over Fujitsu dev whistleblower bbc.co.uk/news/uk-6788474... · Posted by u/johndunne
I highly recommend reading Private Eye's special report, Justice Lost In The Post
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justi... [PDF]
Private Eye were one of the few people reporting on this regularly. I've been reading about it in there for close on ten years, and am still astonished that it's taken this long to really hit home what happened to these individuals. Bravo to the makers of the recent show that's brought it back into the spotlight. It's truly shocking what the Post Office and Fujitsu did, and one can only hope prosecutions arise from this.
For anyone working in IT, there are lessons to be learned here about what impact software can have on individuals' lives, and bravo to any whistleblower that came forward to speak out.
Yeah. It's baffling to me that Private Eye covered this in explicit, specific detail a decade ago and there were essentially no consequences for many years after.
(I have the same feelings as mhh__ in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38967529. Just a remarkable and extremely slow miscarriage of justice.)
Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" posits a network of very fast, very long moving walkways which could be used for mass transit (you'd ramp up speed on slower ones then hop over to a fast one). Wikipedia says that moving walkways had been in sf for decades by that point, but Heinlein also almost incidentally invents the Segway in the story -- just a little treat.
I love peoplemovers (like the Hong Kong Central-Mid Level escalators and the delightfully bouncy SFO walkways) and always wondered what would have to be different for us to get super-fast ones for transit.
In Boston, IMO they would be at least as good as the Green Line :)
When has Apple ever sued over patent infringement? There was the Samsung case [1] but that was a design issue.
Apple, Google, Meta and other big tech companies have used patents defensively not offensively. That is, as mutually-assured destruction.
The real villains in this story are the patent holding companies that sue in East Texas to get in front of one judge that, at a time, heard a quarter of all US patent cases, all brought by NPEs (non-practicing entities aka patent trolls). IIRC there was at a time another judge and I heard a story that a popular law firm employed a relative to conflict out the second judge so they could get the judge they wanted.
Apple aren't the bad guys in the patent mess.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Samsung_Electron....
Would you accept weaponized trademark infringement as a sibling to patent law? The behavior described here seems odd -- I wouldn't call it "good" or "bad" in a moral sense just technically impressive: https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2023/10/26/apples-trademark-ex... and https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/14/21436760/us-customs-state....
mherdeg commented on Long context prompting for Claude 2.1 anthropic.com/index/claud... · Posted by u/typest
On a constructive note, these things will trickle down into the models. Bing for example already does "thinking" step that is hidden from the user.
Also see this quote from Ethan Mollick on twitter:
> I have a strong suspicion that “prompt engineering” is not going to be a big deal in the long-term & prompt engineer is not the job of the future
> AI gets easier. You can already see in Midjourney how basic prompts went from complex in v3 to easy in v4. Same with ChatGPT to Bing.
https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1627804798224580608?lang...
Gosh I think I'll be a little sad about that future? I'm reminded of how we used to know really fun tricks for squeezing another bit of performance out of our assembly code -- "The Story of Mel" -- and then compilers started doing all the work for us.
The past year or so of published literature on LLMs has been kind of hilarious because there is a substantial chunk of stuff whose contribution is "putting this extra English sentence into the input produces measurably better output".
It's like watching alchemists puzzle out chemistry, or like watching wizards fill their spellbooks. What a cool time.
I forgot most of what little I learned in semiconductor physics and analog design courses in college, but I remember enough to know that nothing about computers is magic. Nothing. That knowledge gives me confidence that I can figure out anything having to do with computers given enough quiet time.
On the other hand, I don't really know much about cars. If I had a 2024 model year car and something went wrong with it, I'd very quickly run up against a wall of arcane-seeming knowledge that I don't have easy access to. I don't know where I would start to learn everything about cars from scratch like I did with computers.
There might be a name for this, but I don't know what it is.
> nothing about computers is magic
In this vein I think about nelhage's "Computers Can Be Understood" from time to time - https://blog.nelhage.com/post/computers-can-be-understood/ .
mherdeg commented on Long context prompting for Claude 2.1 anthropic.com/index/claud... · Posted by u/typest
I would play a 2023 entry in the Enchanter/Sorcerer/Spellbreaker series where you have to learn and use phrases like "Here is the most relevant sentence in the context:" or "Take it step by step."
I hated Brutalism before playing Control. Just look at how intimidating the Boston City Hall fortress is, as it looms over you, while you try to even find the entrance.
But Control's architectural and furnishings atmosphere was very appealing, and it warmed me towards the Boston and Cambridge buildings that I'd previously disliked.
Screenshots: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/art/the-real-buildings-that-in...
Boston definitely makes it hard to love.
Some of the best ambassadors for Brutalist architecture I've experienced are the Barbican in London and the Bonaventure in Los Angeles. They make good spaces for people.
Huh. What happened with the lot of 2000 seized OnePlus Buds? ( https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/14/21436760/us-customs-state... )
Did the company just write off that shipment and keep selling them?