duh, it’s part of the IEEE 754 standard. every language that handles floating point numbers has NaN handling, and in every language NaN is a float. the only reason this is brought up as a javascript thing all the time is that js doesn’t have separate float and int types (aside from special structures like typed arrays and dataviews), it just defaults to float64 for simplicity and calls it number, which lines up with the “NaN is a number? nani???” joke.

you don’t like it? consult the sorry excuse of thinking sand in the device you’re reading this on, because this is etched straight into it. every FPU capable of handling float32 and float64 numbers knows what NaN is and handles it the exact same way.

this is one of the many things that sound unintuitive about programming but if you bother to understand the context you realise that if it wasn’t this way, it would be way worse. one of the most important skills in our field is to understand computers for what they are, rather than be puzzled that they aren’t what you thought they were, and it especially comes out in edge cases like this.

fun fact, ohio has the highest number of astronauts per capita. something about it really makes you want to leave the planet

afaik the original “they stole the porch” meme is from cincinnati too, detroit just stole it

unsure, tbh. technically he did activate more money to chase his cards while keeping prices high for large-scale customers, so it would be really difficult to claim he did not act in nvidia’s best financial interest this particular time. sure it’s an evil move, but it’s pro-corporate evil, which is explicitly encouraged under securities legislation.

a magic link is not 2FA if it doesn’t also require a password. it’s 1FA, they just replaced the one factor.

honestly i really hate websites that do that and yet don’t allow password-only 1FA. like sure, i understand that the average user’s password discipline is crap, but as a power user i’d really like it if all my accounts weren’t tied to all my other accounts sometimes.

¯\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\_(ツ)\\\\\\\_/¯

i typed ¯\\\\\\\_(ツ)\\\_/¯ to render as ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ to communicate that if you type ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ it renders as ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

there isn’t. the only real protection is if you find your own clients and build your own relationships with them. but that’s so difficult these days that you might as well just get a regular job in the same field.

idk the “official” definitions, but imo the main difference between the gig economy and a freelance job is the gig economy happens through a platform that often exploits you. for example, for the previous user’s field, it would probably happen through fiverr, which takes 20%, actively pushes your competitors, and punishes for any attempt at communicating off-platform. for more “mainstream” gig work, you have platforms like uber and doordash, where everything is integrated so deeply that off-platform work might as well not exist.

part of the reason i think is that we just don’t have well-known platforms that aren’t exploiting both workers and clients, so both are having difficulties avoiding the exploiter in the middle.

unrelated, but the correct format is ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯, you need to escape both the backtick and the underscores. technically you can leave the second underscore unescaped but it might couple to a random other one and turn half your comment into italics

anyway, hope the mushrooms are nice

i’m afraid that’s already taken by microslop word

lmao

y’know, i used to think that we would get android girlfriends because jensen huang is 62 and you know he wants to bang a robot while he still can. i didn’t expect that the way this would lose its relevance is through him losing his position as ceo, but it’s indeed a very jensen way for him to do it

although now that he’s not saddled with managing nvidia, he can go and focus on it. like he’s still a billionaire

…there has been a third?

mostly by having the market run out of money to shovel into the ai companies. which is already happening in parallel to this, it’s just difficult to tell how long it’s gonna take.

afaik the anthropic ipo next week is the next potential trigger point

that’s musk, not jensen

tbh i have a theory that the ai bubble itself is what’s holding us up. the llm angle has been explored deeply and optimised to ridiculous levels. what we got out of it is an incredibly powerful tool, but it’s not agi yet. it does have the ability to absorb a lot of skills though, both with deliberate training and with incidental exposure during training, so teaching it new tricks is probably going to be a thing all the way until we reach agi, but imo we’re not getting to agi just by building larger llms.

but the problem is, that’s literally the only thing that’s happening today at any reasonable scale. llms have become the same kind of safe investment slop that reboots and sequels are in media, sure it’s guaranteed to be mediocre (in this case, by being expensive to run and having relatively little advantage over existing stuff) but at least there’s very little chance they will fail outright. real r&d, on the other hand, is inherently risky, but it’s how real progress gets made.

after the crash, hardware will be (relatively) cheap and plentiful, both to own and to rent online, and we’ll see investment sour on llms. that will finally open the door for moving past them and finding the next thing. and if agi will ever be made, that’s how it will be made, not by training ever larger llms just to distil them back to the same scale as before with minor tweaks to how attention works. which is pretty much what has been happening in the past 2-3 years.

personally i do consider it a slur and avoid it accordingly, but i think the difference with this one is that colloquial usage took it over entirely. i’m fairly sure the average person does not think of down syndrome when they hear that slur, they just think of a particularly stupid person. which is also how the words “idiot” and “dumb” stopped being slurs over time, even though those also used to refer to medical conditions.

this might differ between cultural backgrounds, i suspect that’s why it was categorised as a slur in contemporary internet culture. but it’s pretty hard to find another slur that doesn’t unambiguously, inseparably refer to a particular group it degrades. with the r-slur, some people do appear to separate it, i think that’s why they insist it’s okay to use.