also on my fav book torrent tracker - even has an audiobook version!
whoah that looks interesting, how can I access it (semi-)legally?
The FDA is a response to people just making shit up and selling cough cures full of opium. "Raw milk" pushers are cut from the same cloth.
I don't wanna pull national stereotypes here but aren't Germans really quite open about stuff like homeopathy? "be your own pharmacist" sounds like right up that alley
Governments have criminalized the practice of managing your own health. Despite the fact that for most of human history bodily autonomy, and self-managed health was the norm, it is now required that most aspects of your health must be mediated by an institution deputized by the state.
JFC
go back 200 years before the "gubmint" got involved in public health and tell me that average life expectancy was better than now
before the pandemic it was possible for people to believe that libertarianism was an answer to everything, turns out if it was a tiny minority would have hoarded all the PPE while the people they were gonna sell it to died of the plague. libertarians have not been able to square this circle since
It's a wrap!
One of the easier years imho. Better than last year in any case.
I get the feeling that this is Eric's way of saying goodbye, and that this might be the last year, but I might be wrong.
Puzzles by difficulty (leaderboard completion times)
- Day 21 - Keypad Conundrum: 01h01m23s
- Day 24 - Crossed Wires: 01h01m13s
- Day 17 - Chronospatial Computer: 44m39s
- Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
- Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
- Day 20 - Race Condition: 15m58s
- Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
- Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
- Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
- Day 22 - Monkey Market: 12m15s
- Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
- Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
- Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
- Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
- Day 18 - RAM Run: 05m55s
- Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
- Day 23 - LAN Party: 05m07s
- Day 25 - Code Chronicle: 04m43s
- Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
- Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
- Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
- Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
- Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
- Day 19 - Linen Layout: 03m16s
- Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
congrats! I still have 6 stars to go, but I still think this was easier than last year.
day 23
this is one of those days when it’s all about the right term to google right
Advent of Code 2024 - the home stretch - it's been an aMAZEing year
current difficulties
- Day 21 - Keypad Conundrum: 01h01m23s
- Day 17 - Chronospatial Computer: 44m39s
- Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
- Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
- Day 20 - Race Condition: 15m58s
- Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
- Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
- Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
- Day 22 - Monkey Market: 12m15s
- Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
- Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
- Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
- Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
- Day 18 - RAM Run: 05m55s
- Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
- Day 23 - LAN Party: 05m07s
- Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
- Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
- Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
- Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
- Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
- Day 19 - Linen Layout: 03m16s
- Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
so many off by one errors
also first time I had to run the code on a desktop machine because my VPS was too slow
Skipping this for now, there are only so many grid maps I can take.
FWIW I just got an email from GitHub announcing that Copilot is now free for my account (a very basic one).
day 18
bit of a breather episode
As long as you ensure A* / Dijkstra's (is there a functional difference if the edge weights are constant?) you'll get the shortest path. Part 2 was just simulation for me, if I started in the state of part 1 it took a minute to run through the rest of the bytes.
re: p1
I literally created different test inputs for all the examples given and that found a lot of bugs for me. Specifically the difference between literal and combo operators.
I honestly had no idea of the original Russian meaning of the gloss. To me "refusenik" implies some sort of hard-left hippie.
Edit finally went and read the linked article.
Schneier and Sanders:
We agree with Morozov that the “refuseniks,” as he calls them, are wrong to see AI as “irreparably tainted” by its origins.
Morozov:
Meanwhile, a small but growing group of scholars and activists are taking aim at the deeper, systemic issues woven into AI’s foundations, particularly its origins in Cold War–era computing. For these refuseniks, AI is more than just a flawed technology; it’s a colonialist, chauvinist, racist, and even eugenicist project, irreparably tainted at its core.
But the original term was not for people refusing to take an action - it was the state refusing to allow their actions! It's done a 180, but considering no-one now remembers the plight of Soviet Jews attempting to emigrate to Israel it's not that strange.
Doctor Parkinson declared, "I'm not surprised to see you here
You've got smokers cough from smoking, brewer's droop from drinking beer
I don't know how you came to get the Bette Davis knees
But worst of all young man, you've got industrial disease"
Advent of Code Week 3 - you're lost in a maze of twisty mazes, all alike
Problem difficulty so far (up to day 16)
- Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
- Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
- Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
- Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
- Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
- Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
- Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
- Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
- Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
- Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
- Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
- Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
- Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
- Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
- Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
- Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
I am geniunely shocked that Elsevier had this journal under its imprint.
re: day 14 part 2
I had nfc how to solve this but someoone on the subreddit mentioned that miminizine the "safety score" was the way to go too ... I guess your explanation is the correct one. Also the way the puzzle is generated is to start with the tree and go "backwards" a couple of thousand steps and use a number of of those as starting positions. Probably throw in some random robots as noise.
Diamond Age is an interesting idea, the original Primer was for the elite and used distributed encryption to farm out the qualified work to skilled artisans. In the end though, a cut-down primer (using some sort of AI? it's been a long time since I read it) is used to educate and train the girl army used by one of the faction in the final battle.
It's not really explained but I suspect the OG Primer had a robust payment model that ensured that the service oculd be kept solvent.
Assuming the company will last 5 years is awfully optimistic.
Advent of Code 2024 Week 2: this time it's all grids, all the time
The previous thread has fallen off the front page, feel free to use this for discussions on current problems
Rules: no spoilers, use the handy dandy spoiler preset to mark discussions as spoilers
Person who exercises her free association rights at conferences incites ire in Jameson Lopp
Razzlekhan, who conspired to launder tens of thousands of bitcoin, told attendees she was searching for work as a crypto consultant.
Butters do a 180 regarding statism as Daddy Trump promises to use filthy Fed FIAT to buy and hodl BTC
After Arkham Intelligence announced a $150,000 bounty for anyone who could prove the identity of the person behind a Donald Trump memecoin called $DJT, blockchain sleuth zachxbt quickly rose to the occasion. He submitted evidence that Martin Shkreli, the "pharma bro" who spent years in federal priso...
This season's showrunners are so lazy, just re-using the same old plots and antagonists.
In an attempt to secure the libertarian vote, Trump promises to pardon Dread Pirate Roberts (while calling for the death penalty for other drug dealers)
Trump: Donald Trump promised to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the online illegal drug marketplace Silk Road, in a raucous speech before the Libertarian National Convention on Saturday night. “And if you vote for me, on Day One, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht,” t...
“The problem with AI is the people who use AI. They don't respect the written word,” the founder of Bards and Sages said.
> “It is soulless. There is no personality to it. There is no voice. Read a bunch of dialogue in an AI generated story and all the dialogue reads the same. No character personality comes through,” she said. Generated text also tends to lack a strong sense of place, she’s observed; the settings of the stories are either overly-detailed for popular locations, or too vague, because large language models can’t imagine new worlds and can only draw from existing works that have been scraped into its training data.
AI grifters con the US gov that AGI poses "existential risk"
The U.S. government must move “decisively” to avert an “extinction-level threat" to humanity from AI, says a government-commissioned report
The grifters in question:
> Jeremie and Edouard Harris, the CEO and CTO of Gladstone respectively, have been briefing the U.S. government on the risks of AI since 2021. The duo, who are brothers [...]
Edouard's website: https://www.eharr.is/, and on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/edouard-harris
Jeremie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremieharris/
The company website: https://www.gladstone.ai/
"The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I." - hackernews discussion
HN reacts to a New Yorker piece on the "obscene energy demands of AI" with exactly the same arguments coiners use when confronted with the energy cost of blockchain - the product is valuable in of itself, demands for more energy will spur investment in energy generation, and what about the energy costs of painting oil on canvas, hmmmmmm??????
Maybe it's just my newness antennae needing calibrating, but I do feel the extreme energy requirements for what's arguably just a frivolous toy is gonna cause AI boosters big problems, especially as energy demands ramp up in the US in the warmer months. Expect the narrative to adjust to counter it.
Elon Musk’s greatest legacy will be as a provider of inane law school exam hypotheticals.
Yes, I know it's a Verge link, but I found the explanation of the legal failings quite funny, and I think it's "important" we keep track of which obscenely rich people are mad at each other so we can choose which of their kingdoms to be serfs in.
Some interesting tidbits in this ElReg story about "AI Dean Phillips"
Biden's challenger model shot down despite super PAC support
Apologies for the link to The Register...
Dean Phillips is your classic ratfucking candidate, attempting to siphon off support from the incumbent to help their opponent. After a brief flare of hype before the (unofficial) NH primary, he seems to have flamed out by revealing his master plan too early.
Anyway, apparently some outfit called "Delphi" tried to create an AI version of him via a SuperPAC and got their OpenAI API access banned for their pains.
Quoth ElReg:
> Not even the presence of Matt Krisiloff, a founding member of OpenAI, at the head of the PAC made a difference.
> The pair have reportedly raised millions for We Deserve Better, driven in part by a $1 million donation from hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who described his funding of the super PAC as "the largest investment I have ever made in someone running for office."
So the same asshole who is combating "woke" and DEI is bankrolling Phillips, supposed to be the new Bernie. Got it.
cannot login using mobile Firefox
Anyone else have this problem? It’s been bothering me for a while and is the last thing keeping me using mobile Chrome.
On the login page , after entering username and password, the “login” button does nothing. It might slightly change color but I am not directed to the site logged in, nor do I get an error.
platform: iOS
The username and password are entered automatically via either Firefox’s password store, or iOS’.
Looking for: random raytracing program
Years ago (we're talking decades) I ran into a small program that randomly generated raytraced images (think transparent orbs, lens flares, reflection etc), suitable for saving as wallpapers. It was a C/C++ program that ran on Linux. I've long since lost the name and the source code, and I wonder if there's anything like that out there now?
The official awful.systems Advent of Code 2023 thread
Rules: no spoilers.
The other rules are made up as we go along.
Share code by link to a forge, home page, pastebin (Eric Wastl has one here) or code section in a comment.
Any interest in an Advent of Code thread?
The wider community is still on Reddit, I wonder if there’s an interest to have a small alternative?
If not, what’s a good Lemmy instance for these things?
ScottA is annoyed EA has a bad name now
"All you do is cause boardroom drama, and maybe some other things I’m forgetting..."
In a since deleted thread on another site, I wrote
> For the OG effective altruists, it’s imperative to rebrand the kooky ultra-utilitarianists as something else. TESCREAL is the term adopted by their opponents.
Looks like great minds think alike! The EA's need to up their google juice so people searching for the term find malaria nets, not FTX. Good luck on that, Scott!
The HN comments are ok, with this hilarious sentence
> I go to LessWrong, ACX, and sometimes EA meetups. Why? Mainly because it's like the HackerNews comment section but in person.
What's the German term for a recommendation that's the exact opposite?
We don't even have Universal Basic Income yet but libertarians are already arguing it's too large
[this is probably off-topic for this forum, but I found it on HN so...]
Edit "enjoy" the discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38233810