wrzuteczka (u/wrzuteczka)

wrzuteczka commented on Late night pizzeria nearby The Pentagon has suddenly surged in traffic twitter.com/PenPizzaRepor... · Posted by u/nomilk

lukan · a month ago

A slight difference is, Ukraine was armed and trained by Nato in the years before.

Venezuela was supported a bit by Cuba, which is very poor as well. Russia did not help them. (I believe because of a deal with Trump)

wrzuteczka · a month ago

Russia has been literally selling Venezuela all kinds of military equipment for decades.

If they hadn’t helped Venezuela militarily this time, it’s probably because they are a little busy losing thousands of troops per week in Ukraine.

wrzuteczka commented on The Shroud of Turin: History and Legends michaelshermer.substack.c... · Posted by u/royalroad

tsimionescu · a year ago

That study [0] is published in a non-peer-reviewed journal with a very low impact factor, Heritage. Additionally, their findings suggests the shroud was kept within a very narrow range of temperatures to support the 1st century hypothesis, which makes it even more suspect.

Additionally, their findings contradict a very well established C14 dating technique, in an extremely well documented and thought out study, using 8 different world class laboratories, for which their only explanation is "contamination" (ignoring the fact that the sample is pristine by comparison with many artifacts routinely dated using C14).

Also, if you want to cite a study, maybe find the link to the study, not a Daily Mail article.

[0] https://www.mdpi.com/2571-9408/5/2/47

wrzuteczka · a year ago

These 8 laboratories shared the same sample collected from a corner of the shroud. The priests handling the shroud would always hold it by its corners. So the explanation is not as weak as it may sound.

wrzuteczka commented on Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval theguardian.com/world/202... · Posted by u/pseudolus

xdennis · a year ago

> Romance languages [...] evolved in the past due to the influence of "Vulgar Latin."

Minor correction: they are derived, not influenced by Vulgar Latin.

That's why so many words are different from Classical Latin, but similar between Romance languages. Like how Latin for house is "domus", but Romance languages use casa/casă/chez because common people referred to their house by the word "casa".

wrzuteczka · a year ago

Weird twist: Slavic languages use words very similar to "domus" for "house", for example, "dom" in Polish or "дом" in Ukrainian.

wrzuteczka commented on Google Search is indexing has halted twitter.com/rustybrick/st... · Posted by u/alpb

aelmeleegy · 2 years ago

I'm not a search expert but is the index halted, or is there an issue with serving the results? so there are results in the database but for some reason the query that it sent times out or something and nothing comes back.

wrzuteczka · 2 years ago

How are we supposed to know, being outside of Google?

wrzuteczka commented on The laptop that won't die clivethompson.medium.com/... · Posted by u/ShikhaM

wrzuteczka · 2 years ago

My Bose QC 35 headphones are like that. I just replace the ear pads every few years and they are like new.

wrzuteczka commented on A coder considers the waning days of the craft newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/jsomers

steveBK123 · 2 years ago

That's been my experience both with Tesla AP/FSD implementation & with LLMs.

Super neat trick the first time you encounter it, feels like alien tech from the future.

Then you find all the holes. Use it for months/years and you notice the holes aren't really closing.. The pace of improvement is middling compared to the gap to it meeting the marketing/rhetoric. Eventually using them feels more like a chore than not using them.

It's possible some of these purely data driven ML approaches don't work for problems you need to be more than 80% correct on.

Trading algos that just need to be right 55% of the time to make money, recommendation engines that present a page of movies/songs for you to scroll, Google search results that come back with a list you can peruse, Spam filters that remove some noise from your inbox.. sure.

But authoritative "this is the right answer" or "drive the car without murdering anyone".. these problems are far harder.

wrzuteczka · 2 years ago

With the AI "revolution," I began to appreciate the simplicity of models we create when doing programming (and physics, biology, and so on as well).

I used to think about these things differently: I felt that because our models of reality are just models, they aren't really something humanity should be proud of that much. Nature is more messy than the models, but we develop them due to our limitations.

AI is a model, too, but of far greater complexity, able to describe reality/nature more closely than what we were able to achieve previously. But now I've begun to value these simple models not because they describe nature that well but because they impose themselves on nature. For example, law, being such a model, is imposed on reality by the state institutions. It doesn't describe the complexity of reality very well, but it makes people take roles in its model and act in a certain way. People now consider whether something is legal or not (instead of moral vs immoral), which can be more productive. In software, if I implement the exchange of information based on an algorithm like Paxos/Raft, I get provable guarantees compared to if I allowed LLMs to exchange information over the network directly.

wrzuteczka commented on Hard-to-swallow truths they won't tell you about software engineer job mensurdurakovic.com/hard-... · Posted by u/thunderbong

shmde · 2 years ago

> Legacy codebases can be fun.

"Legacy codebases" and "fun" should not appear in the same sentence.

wrzuteczka · 2 years ago

Discovering how a large system works can be fun. Even if a codebase is old, but the design is good, it can be gratifying.

wrzuteczka commented on Google Bard waitlist bard.google.com/... · Posted by u/tfsh

rcarmo · 3 years ago

Well, I'm in Portugal and we don't have true, bona fide, first-party Apple stores. And I've been complaining about that for twenty years...

wrzuteczka · 3 years ago

We don't have that here either, but I'm satisfied with the Apple premium reseller network.

wrzuteczka commented on Google Bard waitlist bard.google.com/... · Posted by u/tfsh

rcarmo · 3 years ago

Yeah, I suspect folk who reside in perfectly civilized countries without any geopolitical hindrances to be locked out for a long while--which, given Google's usual inability to reach out across Europe, may mean we'll only have access when it's about to be cancelled.

wrzuteczka · 3 years ago

Still better than Apple! I pay the full price for Apple One but Apple thinks I shouldn't have access to Fitness+. Or Siri, which still doesn't support my language (Polish, 40M speakers) and has problems recognizing my English accent (whereas Google speech recognition works fine).

wrzuteczka commented on What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes? blog.interviewing.io/what... · Posted by u/leeny

alasdair_ · 4 years ago

Timezones and IP and labor laws mostly.

Having a team completely unavailable during the USA working day is a real pain for collaboration and it's hard to sue people in other countries that "borrow" your source code to make their own version. Also, knowing exactly how to pay (say) a German developer and how taxes work and what the labor laws are is always an issue.

Aside: The very best contractors I ever hired were Ukranian. So many absolutely fantastic talents at around $30 an hour. Then Russia invaded (the first time) and annexed Sevastopol and the USA made it illegal to pay them any more.

wrzuteczka · 4 years ago

Ukrainians were given full employment rights in Poland after the Russian invasion, so they can just move to Poland (at least the female ones, as males aren’t allowed to leave Ukraine for now).