1. gweinberg Jan 2, 2026 parent

   Can't we just leapfrog to IPv7? or 8 for that matter?
2. 4 points Jan 1, 2026

   Public Domain Day 2026

   1 comment gweinberg copyrightlately.com
3. gweinberg Dec 22, 2025 parent

   I have fun, but I probably wouldn't if the AI was right all the time. Or if I was helpless when it was wrong. But for now I'm still in the centaur zone.
4. gweinberg Dec 17, 2025 parent

   Are you seriously saying that, because a point distribution may well make sense if the point in question is zero (or 1) other points are plausible also? Srsly?

   The nonsense isn't just that they're assuming a point probability, it's that, conditional on that point probability not being true, there's only a 2% chance that theta is .5 += .01. Whereas the actual a priori probability is more like 99.99%.

5. gweinberg Dec 17, 2025 parent

   How is "more than 100" people "rallying" even remotely newsworthy? What's the threshold, three?
6. gweinberg Dec 17, 2025 parent

   I don't understand why anyone thinks self-reported happiness scores mean anything at all. I don't see how they possibly could. If someone says he's a 10 on his personal scale I guess that means he can't imagine being much happier, but I don't see how that means he's particularly happy.
7. gweinberg Dec 16, 2025 parent

   I read the page on Lindsey's paradox, and it's astonishing bullshit. It's well known that with sufficiently insane priors you can come up with stupid conclusions. The page asserts that a Bayesian would accept as reasonable priors that it's equally likely that the probability of child being born male is precisely 0.5 as it is that it has some other value, and also that if it has some other value that all values in the interval from zero to one are equally likely. But nobody on God's green earth would accept those as reasonable values, least of all a Bayesian. A Bayesian would say there's zero chance of it being precisely 0.5, but it is almost certainly really close to 0.5, just like a normal human being would.
8. gweinberg Nov 29, 2025 parent

   Yeah, it may seem like a "better" (because stronger) conclusion to the author that if you have more pigeons than pigeonholes you must have more than one pigeon in a hole even if negative or irrational numbers of pigeons. But you're pretty much only invoking the pigeonhole principle in discrete math, where "more than one" means "at least 2".
9. gweinberg Nov 22, 2025 parent

   For a fingerprint to be useful it must not only be unique but also persistent. If I have a process that randomly installs and deletes wacky fonts, I'm unique at any given time, but the me of today can't be linked to the me of tomorrow, right?
10. gweinberg Nov 22, 2025 parent

    You seem to be confused about the difference between "less" and "more". In general a yes-no question gives less than 1 bit of information if yes and no are not equally likely. There is no way it can be expected to give more.
11. gweinberg Nov 22, 2025 parent

    The commutation problem has nothing to do with matrices. Rotations in space do not commute, and that will be the case whether you represent them as matrices or in some other way.
12. gweinberg Nov 21, 2025 parent

    Right, just monkeys, and they only had 200 study monkeys in the first place. Pretty much a bacon double nothingingburger.
13. gweinberg Nov 21, 2025 parent

    Well, I had to write it down, but I have to write down everything these days. But from the way the problem was phrased, it was obvious you don;t have to actually find to numbers.
14. gweinberg Nov 9, 2025 parent

    They're prone to genetic issues because they're inbred.
15. gweinberg Nov 4, 2025 parent

    I understand the assertion perfectly. I understand why people might feel it intuitively makes sense. I don't understand why anyone purports to believe that saying "Chinese characters" rather than bit sequences serves any purpose other than to confuse.
16. gweinberg Nov 4, 2025 parent

    I don;t understand why people have any respect at all for Searle's"argument", it's just a bare assertion "machines's can't think", combined with some cheap misdirection. Can anyoneone argue that having Chinese characters instead of bits going in and out is something other than misdirection? Can anyone argue that having a human being acting like a cpu instead of having an actual cpu is something other than cheap misdorection?
17. gweinberg Oct 28, 2025 parent

    It's really pretty stupid. Your encryption is there in case your laptop gets stolen. If you have people willing and able to kidnap and torture you to get your data, you have much bigger problems than the fact that they'll probably get it.
18. gweinberg Oct 22, 2025 parent

    Okay, but this is the average temperature of a big cloud of hydrogen with oxygen yet to be invented right?
19. gweinberg Oct 18, 2025 parent

    Your understanding is silly. Inflation or no inflation, you'd like to maximize your roi.
20. gweinberg Oct 9, 2025 parent

    πthon
21. gweinberg Sep 30, 2025 parent

    Why not? Too wide? Sharp edges?
22. gweinberg Sep 30, 2025 parent

    The sears catalog was all selling sears stuff, there were no third party sales. Branding as assurance of quality can actually work pretty well.
23. gweinberg Sep 27, 2025 parent

    That's not unreliable narrator, it's alternative history. Like when his heroes kill Hitler and end the war early saving millions of lives.
24. gweinberg Sep 26, 2025 parent

    Phish has a helpful song explaining how to deal with laser ahrassment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YpLTljxq6M&list=RD2YpLTljxq...
25. gweinberg Sep 26, 2025 parent

    In the flick Tarantino made it seem like Lee was all bluff, that he could just talk tough and make some fancy moves and much bigger guys would all back down. The world doesn't work like that.
26. gweinberg Sep 21, 2025 parent

    I don't understand why anyone would try to invent a new screensaver when we already have flying toasters.
27. gweinberg Sep 8, 2025 parent

    Abandon is too strong a word. I imagine most people who are still using 32 bit operating systems aren't too concerned about getting the very latest version of firefox either.
28. gweinberg Aug 26, 2025 parent

    It takes more than 20 years for a kid to provide net economic benefit to a country. So unless they're just looking at countries whose population has been declining for well over 20 years, this "data" is bullshit.
29. gweinberg Aug 23, 2025 parent

    Well, one of the first posts I saw was just a repeated ethnic slur, so not all "bad words" are prohibited.
30. gweinberg Jul 30, 2025 parent

    Exactly. The article is kind of sneaking in the claim that the LLM ought to be ignoring the "irrelevant" facts about cats even though it is explicitly labelled as interesting.

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