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speakeron commented on AbsenceBench: Language models can't tell what's missing   arxiv.org/abs/2506.11440... · Posted by u/JnBrymn
VikRubenfeld · 2 months ago
Interesting. I encountered an example of this the other day. I was asking chatGPT:

> Is there a line in Hamlet that includes the words "utter love?"

It examined a lot of quotes from Hamlet, and concluded:

> I double-checked all editions: There is no line in Hamlet that contains the word “utter.”

>It is never used in any of the quartos or folios in any line of Hamlet.

I was pretty sure it was there, so I found the full text of Hamlet online and searched for the word "utter". I found it right away and posted to chatGPT:

> That's odd. I found it in two seconds by searching the full text for the word "utter".

> This must be known, which, being kept close, might move More grief to hide than hate to utter love.

> Come

> HAMLET, Act 2, Scene 2

chatGPT replied:

> You're absolutely right — thank you for pointing that out.

> The line is indeed from Act 2, Scene 2, spoken by Claudius, and here it is in full:

> "This must be known, which, being kept close, might move

> More grief to hide than hate to utter love."

> I regret the earlier oversight — your memory was sharper than my index!

speakeron · 2 months ago
It's actually Act 2, Scene 1 and is spoken by Polonius.
speakeron commented on Are 1/3 of American Millenials Flat Earthers?   skeptics.stackexchange.co... · Posted by u/onzeinternets
Bender · 4 months ago
From the accepted answer: If you read deeper in the Forbes article, it tells you that what the survey actually found was that “just 66 percent of young adults aged 18 to 24 years old have "always believed the world is round."

Could it also be that up to 33% thought they were being tricked by word-play, as the earth is in fact an oblate spheroid or am I giving them too much credit? 31% of the US graduated college and some professors like to play word games meaning they are used to being tricked.

speakeron · 4 months ago
Oblate spheroids are round.
speakeron commented on London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage   cnn.com/2025/03/20/travel... · Posted by u/dfine
oliwarner · 5 months ago
Haven't they seen Die Hard 2?! /s

Grid power is hard. Even with local generation failovers for air and ground safety systems, Heathrow is massive and uses a lot of power (1-2MWh/day). It's hard to route around that sort of demand.

I don't disagree that this is something that shouldn't happen, but that's what we say for almost every preventable grid failure. I think this is a national inconvenience rather than a security issue though. There are short-term alternatives which will be used.

speakeron · 5 months ago
> Heathrow is massive and uses a lot of power (1-2MWh/day)

It's 3 orders of magnitude more: 1-2GWh/day.

https://www.heathrow.com/content/dam/heathrow/web/common/doc...

speakeron commented on James Webb Telescope discovers some quasars that seem to exist in isolation   scitechdaily.com/james-we... · Posted by u/wglb
api · 10 months ago
Not if their Hawking temperature is below the CMB, which is the case I think for any above asteroid mass. As the universe cools and the CMB drops that threshold drops. The big black holes will last n^n^n… ridiculous amounts of time.
speakeron · 10 months ago
Just one ^n. Supermassive black holes are expected to have completely evaporated by 10^100 years.
speakeron commented on Entropy Explained, with Sheep (2016)   engineersedge.com/thermod... · Posted by u/Nevin1901
LaundroMat · a year ago
So if I get this right, there is an infinitely small possibility that a cracked egg returns to its initial state. Imagine that happening and being put on video. We'd all believe we're living in a simulation and witnessed a glitch.

No-one would believe the scientists explaining that although highly improbable, the uncracked egg does make scientific sense.

speakeron · a year ago
It's not really whether it makes scientific sense or not, it's just that it's so very highly improbable (really, really improbable) that other explanations make more sense: the video's a fake, it's mass hysteria, or even that we're living in a simulation.
speakeron commented on Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval   theguardian.com/world/202... · Posted by u/pseudolus
graypegg · a year ago
There are specific subsets of English that are used in certain domains that have standards bodies behind them, like Simplified Technical English for aviation. It even has a working group! [0]

VOA also have a Learning English spec for broadcast english [1] but that seems to be a lot looser of a spec.

So it's definitely not impossible. The funny thing, is I remember being told in grade school that in English Canada, I was to write numbers with a space as the thousands separator. `$10 000.00`, instead of `$10,000.00`. This is because french Canada uses a comma as a decimal point, `10 000.00 $`, so a space is non ambiguous. I have rarely ever seen the English space format in use here. I don't think English speakers would respect any authority if it wasn't as domain-scoped as Aviation or Learning english.

[0] https://www.asd-ste100.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_English_(version_of_E...

speakeron · a year ago
The use of a space as a thousands separator has been around since the 1940s as recommended by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures and it was what we used when I was a kid at school in the UK. They specified it should be a thin (half) space.

https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/28433818/working-docume...

speakeron commented on Why does current flow the opposite way from the electrons?   mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlo... · Posted by u/johncarlosbaez
pwg · a year ago
From reverse engineering a few low cost Chinese imports (i.e., the 'odd brand names one finds on Amazon') I discovered that some Chinese engineers also design electronics using the convention of current flow from negative to positive.
speakeron · a year ago
How can you tell from analysis of the physical circuit what assumptions the designer made about the flow of current? Surely the components (electrolytic capacitors, diodes, transistors, etc) are the same and can only work in one direction. Is it that the ground plane is connected to the positive terminal of the power supply?
speakeron commented on Plastic bag bans work   zmescience.com/science/ne... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
subsubzero · 2 years ago
Also these environmental laws come from a place of non-rigorous fanciful thinking, ie. the paper straw push was pushed by some hollywood celebrity and never took into account that paper straws are loaded with forever chemicals, and are useless with shakes or drinks that take a long time to finish. The gas stove bans are beyond absurd, the claims are that they cause asthma and lung problems but I bought a few air quality meters and ran my gas stove at full blast with no discernible degradation registered on these meters. In addition going full electric leads to a non-redundancy in heating and cooling which pushes a greater strain on the electric grid and if said grid fails(see california) people are completly without heat or cooling. Lastly they push enormous costs onto individuals for miniscule gains.
speakeron · 2 years ago
I think the problem with gas stoves is the nitrogen dioxide they produce. Do you have a meter for that?
speakeron commented on Tungsten gold plated bar   tungsten-alloy.com/gold-p... · Posted by u/peter_d_sherman
ajot · 2 years ago
Maybe a Differential Thermal Analysis/Thermomechanical Analysia? I suspect gold and tungsten have different behaviours when heated, and that should tell both apart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_thermal_analysishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermomechanical_analysis

speakeron · 2 years ago
They have different magnetic susceptibilities. Gold is diamagnetic (repelled by magnetism); tungsten is paramagnetic (attracted). A strong magnetic field (neodymium magnets) and sensitive scales can tell them apart. I built a small rig a few years ago with parts from Aliexpress that worked for coins and for bars it's just scaling it up.

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u/speakeron

KarmaCake day436July 12, 2014View Original