It’s the emperor’s new brand.

Check out lambda calculus—it was created by Turing’s doctoral advisor in 1936, and thus predates real-world programming languages.

We can always say “back in the second millennium”.

Neurodivergent people have always been subject to misunderstanding and preemptory judgement—maybe “cancel culture” is the current framework within which that issue appears to manifest itself, but it’s not the cause.

Wait til the crows and seagulls learn they can follow the drones for free food.

If you can run multiple applications, you can run multiple servers—a server is just an application with a network interface.

For one thing, it maximizes the amount of information the census contains: if you’re splitting a group into bins, the splitting with the lowest entropy is the one with equal-sized bins. If the bin sizes fluctuate with time (as a proportion of the overall population), the amount of information the census captures will vary as well. If your definition of lower-income includes 100% (or 0%) of the population, then assigning someone to a category tells you nothing about them you didn’t already know.

Yeah, that sounds like the usual mechanism (going back at least to this “survival of the flattest” paper from 25 years ago).

I just got the impression from the abstract that they might have found something significantly different.

similar flatness-seeking implicit biases have been discovered in other stochastic optimization algorithms; here we reveal their different underlying mechanisms despite similar outcome, demonstrating the unique properties of evolutionary dynamics.

The paper’s behind a paywall, but from the abstract it seems like the main claim is that they found another mechanism for an already well-established result (essentially, that drunkards develop an aversion to strolling near cliffs). It doesn’t really suggest how their findings differ from earlier studies of quasispecies models, though.

OpenAI Discloses 6 New Incidents of Concerning OpenAI Behavior.

I hesitate to call myself a feminist because it seems like there is a presumption of understanding women’s experiences

Being a woman is the only thing that gives someone access to women’s experiences, but being a woman doesn’t automatically make someone a feminist. Neither thing presumes the other.

Instead of directly editing the server configuration, put the commands to make the edits in a dockerfile that gets performed on a newly-installed container.

My theory is that the federal nature of the US leads to a default popular attitude of hostility toward any policy that originates above the state level, unless there are commercial interests willing to pay for the marketing and campaign contributions to sell it to the people and/or legislators. And businesses aren’t that interested in an improvement that only marginally affects their profits.

Alpacas, crows, and jaguars.

Apple said his office received a tip Friday from an outside source that Moore was using a Flock camera to track a former acquaintance, and an internal investigation began immediately.

I wonder who the outside source was. Was it someone at Flock, or another third party able to monitor law enforcement searches? Or was Moore bragging to her friends about illegally stalking her ex?

• Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting
• Iain Pears’ Arcadia
• Jo Walton’s Or What You Will
• Iain M. Banks’ Surface Detail
• Neal Stephanson’s Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
• Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi

“It’s not priced in by the markets,” BlackRock’s Louise Kooy-Henckel said at an event in Hong Kong on Monday. “But it is potentially also the chronic risks where institutional capital can come in because of the investment horizon.”

Does institutional capital price in the risk of scenarios in which the institutions cease to exist?

The Mercator projection is a legacy of people needing a world map in which local regions preserve accurate directions and proportional distances (i.e., people who need a map for navigation instead of a global dick-measuring contest).

The Mercator map, which has been in common use since the 16th Century, has come in for criticism as it shows Africa as similar in size to Greenland, even though it is 14 times larger.
Critics say this leads to the development needs and potential for countries near the equator to be minimised.

I think that’s got more to do with the systemic legacy of colonialism than with which world maps people look at.

several sound-responsive structures could be built into a single flexible device, with each one reacting to a different sound frequency. “This would allow specific parts of the device to move, bend or vibrate, potentially leading to aerodynamic robotic devices that can change shape in response to sound,” he says.

I’m picturing Yondu’s whistle-powered dart.