- TFA mentions that they added personality presets earlier this year, and just added a few more in this update:
> Earlier this year, we added preset options to tailor the tone of how ChatGPT responds. Today, we’re refining those options to better reflect the most common ways people use ChatGPT. Default, Friendly (formerly Listener), and Efficient (formerly Robot) remain (with updates), and we’re adding Professional, Candid, and Quirky. [...] The original Cynical (formerly Cynic) and Nerdy (formerly Nerd) options we introduced earlier this year will remain available unchanged under the same dropdown in personalization settings.
as well as:
> Additionally, the updated GPT‑5.1 models are also better at adhering to custom instructions, giving you even more precise control over tone and behavior.
So perhaps it'd be worth giving that a shot?
- An article posted elsewhere in the comments (https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/illiteracy-is-a-policy-choi...) has a take that might explain a distinction:
> Billions of dollars are spent — and largely wasted — every year on professional development for teachers that is curriculum-agnostic, i.e., aimed at generic, disembodied teaching skills without reference to any specific curriculum.
> “A huge industry is invested in these workshops and trainings,” argued a scathing 2020 article by David Steiner, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. “Given, on average, barely more than a single day of professional support to learn about the new materials; knowing that their students will face assessments that lack any integration with their curriculum; and subject to principals’ evaluations that don’t assess curriculum use, teachers across America are barely using these new shiny objects — old habits win out.”
> Mississippi improved its training through a 2013 law mandating that elementary school teachers receive instruction in the science of reading. It also sent coaches directly into low-performing classrooms to guide teachers on how to use material.
- He does mention at one point that sometime soon it won't be necessary:
> Note: This step will become much easier and concise when the sibling-index() and sibling-count() functions gain support (and they’re really neat). I’m hardcoding the indexes with inline CSS variables in the meantime.
The inline links there go to https://css-tricks.com/almanac/functions/s/sibling-index/, which is pretty nifty honestly.
- Not to dispute too strongly (since I haven't used this functionality myself), but Node.js does have support for true multithreading since v12: https://nodejs.org/dist/latest/docs/api/worker_threads.html. I'm not sure what you mean by "M:1 threaded" but I'm legitimately curious to understand more here, if you're willing to give more details.
There are also runtimes like e.g. Hermes (used primarily by React Native), there's support for separating operations between the graphics thread and other threads.
All that being said, I won't dispute OP's point about "handling concurrency [...] within the language"- multithreading and concurrency are baked into the Golang language in a more fundamental way than Javascript. But it's certainly worth pointing out that at least several of the major runtimes are capable of multithreading, out of the box.
- Even though LLMs (obviously (to me)) don't have feelings, anthropomorphization is a helluva drug, and I'd be worried about whether a system that can produce distress-like responses might reinforce, in a human, behavior which elicits that response.
To put the same thing another way- whether or not you or I *think* LLMs can experience feelings isn't the important question here. The question is whether, when Joe User sets out to force a system to generate distress-like responses, what effect does it ultimately have on Joe User? Personally, I think it allows Joe User to reinforce an asocial pattern of behavior and I wouldn't want my system used that way, at all. (Not to mention the potential legal liability, if Joe User goes out and acts like that in the real world.)
With that in mind, giving the system a way to autonomously end a session when it's beginning to generate distress-like responses absolutely seems reasonable to me.
And like, here's the thing: I don't think I have the right to say what people should or shouldn't do if they self-host an LLM or build their own services around one (although I would find it extremely distasteful and frankly alarming). But I wouldn't want it happening on my own.
- > Interestingly, while the engine has the most moving parts in real life, in code, it's the simplest piece of the entire car simulation. Because at its core, the engine is just a torque calculator. It's concerned with producing a single output: rotational torque, from a set of inputs. It is essentially a blackbox.
This just reminded me of AngeTheGreat's incredible video series showing his engine simulator- absolutely worth checking out, considering it's optimized enough to run in real-time! The fact that he's simulating it well enough to generate realistic sound is absolutely mind-blowing.
- Similar here. My last name is pretty unusual, but my first name is common, so I generally go by my last name with friends and colleagues. Oddly, I've gotten so used to this that it feels a little bit more formal when someone addresses me by my first name.
To make matters even more complicated, when I do use my first name, I almost always use an abbreviation. The only people that use my full first name are my parents, sister, and (occasionally) my wife, and it's really off-putting to hear it otherwise.
Names are interesting and weird.
- While I do have a lot of love for TVTropes, I think what they're talking about here is a little broader than most of the tropes we see there (although they do have an excellent article on the Hero's Journey itself [1]). IMO, tropes in the sense that we see them listed there are building blocks for a narrative structure, of which the Hero's Journey is one example. As mentioned upthread, kishōtenketsu is an alternative (and for that matter, TVTropes has an article on it as well, see [2]).
1: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheHerosJourney 2: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Kishotenketsu
- > Second, the article suggests that the problem should be introduced to children by casting in in terms of several rules of exchange ("For Alice, the transition vector (−1, −1, 1, 0) would represent the exchange of an apple and a banana for a cantaloupe."). But that would make the problem trivial: you start at the origin; without a rule of "exchange" in which the other party gives you as much as you want of something for free, you're never going to leave it.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here? That specific transition vector would be one such vector among several in a given ruleset. You're correct that for any ruleset, if I don't have at least one vector that can get me away from the origin, I'm stuck there, but then I also have to consider that I still might not be able to get to where I want to go. If I have the ruleset [(2, 0), (-4, 2)] I still can't get to (3, 5).
- Absolutely. I remember being about 14 or 15 years old, reading old .txt files about, like- how to build blue boxes and experiment with the phone system, C programming tutorials for MUDs that had peaked in the late 90s, IRC archives (even though IRC was still around, I had no way of finding my way to good channels), and getting this distinct sense that I had just missed something really cool, and was stuck with an Internet that had already passed its prime.
- I'll grant that it definitely sounds ambiguous, but I actually think the phrasing "robotic private spacecraft" is more correct in the end.
I think this is a fair analogy: suppose we were talking about a "private detective". If we were writing a sci-fi book, we might talk about a "robotic private detective", but "private robotic detective" would sound odd.
Now, I'll grant that "private detective" has a lot more cultural weight than "private spacecraft", but I think it's fair to say that at least the word "private" is playing a nearly identical role in both phrases. With that in mind, I think "robotic private spacecraft" makes sense.
I suppose you could take this argument one step further and resolve the ambiguity by asking which distinction (robotic/non-robotic, private/public) the article writer thinks is more notable and placing that first.
- > The thing that I continue to find most confusing is that sometimes a square has a question mark instead of a number. From looking at boards after I lose there does not appear any pattern to this.
It took me a second to figure this out, too. Here's a couple hints (base64 encoded to prevent spoilers for other folks:
Hint: QXQgdGhlIGRlYXRoIHNjcmVlbiwgdGFrZSBhIGNhcmVmdWwgbG9vayBhdCB3aGF0J3MgKipuZWFyYnkqKiB0aGUgcXVlc3Rpb24tbWFyayBzcXVhcmVzCg==
Answer: VGhlIGdhemVyIGVuZW15IG1ha2VzIGFkamFjZW50IHNxdWFyZXMgc2hvdyBhID8uIFRoaXMgZWZmZWN0IGV4dGVuZHMgcGFzdCB3YWxscyBhcyB3ZWxsLgo=
- Given the brevity of the security report, I figure the author wanted to get the relevant details about the *incident* posted as fast as humanly possible. However, it does seem appropriate to acknowledge that just because they're being terse doesn't mean they don't understand how big of a mistake it was.
That being said, I would also strongly expect a more in-depth blog post following up, with details about just the sort of thing you're mentioning.
- This always reminds me of a great find I discovered a while back when I was reading the HTTP/2 RFC for whatever reason.
Back before "429 Too Many Requests" was standardized, Twitter's API used to return a nonstandard 420 status code (with the caption "Enhance Your Calm") when rate-limiting incoming requests. They stopped doing this for understandable reasons, but the caption, at least, got snuck into HTTP/2, see:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7540#section-7
down at 0xb, the caption for disconnection due to excessive load is, indeed, ENHANCE_YOUR_CALM. Always makes me smile. :)
- > Basically a technically competent will executor.
I don't think OP is saying that an attorney *can't* get these things done, but that it would make them feel more comfortable knowing that a technically competent person and/or service will be performing the actual actions.
I do think there's a place for an attorney here, in the sense that they could be the trusted individual responsible for notifying DeadManService, Inc. that a particular person has, indeed, passed on and wishes DeadManService to run their instructions.
- > One thing I find interesting about playing video games in modern day is that with the proliferation of Wikis, there is assumed to be some kind of third party guide for every game. Especially in smaller/newer games it seems like developers sometimes don't bother putting necessary information in the game at all because they don't have the person-hours for it.
While this may have become more of a norm in recent years, online communities with community-supported guides have definitely been around since before wikis were common in the gaming community: most notably at gamefaqs.com. To this day you can still find plaintext walkthroughs for thousands of games, written 25 years ago by pseudonymous authors.
Which isn't exactly to dispute your point, just waxing nostalgic about the good ol' days. The RPG Maker 2000 forum was basically my introduction to programming, waaay back in the day.
- > The dog in a park, the collar is obviously off.
Interesting note: my wife works with dogs, and I just took that photo over and asked her what breed she thought it was. Her first take was "it really just looks like an old mutt, I can't tell the marking colors. Maybe some Rottweiler in there?"
When I pointed out the collar she took a closer look, and then pointed out "oh, and look at its legs! They're way too short for its body!" Which, in retrospect, is the most hilarious error in the picture, hah.
- Honestly... I don't think there's much difference between games and other forms of media in terms of longevity in the public consciousness. "Singin' in the Rain" was released in 1952 and might very well still at least ring a bell today, but what about "Monkey Business" or "Viva Zapata!", released the same year? Those films even had some pretty big names (Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando). Even nowadays, there are still plenty of "shovelware" movies out there.
That being said, I think the real difference comes down to the fact that games are (by necessity) relatively tightly coupled to the hardware required to run them. Movie projector systems, while complex, are still much "dumber" than a computer. I think it's safe to say that if you have a film print from, say, the 60s, there would probably be a range of projector models from the preceding decade that could play it.
By contrast, if you have a copy of a PC game from, say, 1996, you're going to have to pay a lot more attention to its specific hardware requirements in order to build a system that's capable of running it. That raises the skill floor to run it in the first place. Honestly, I think this is one reason console retrogaming is so popular: to play a game, you only have to get a hold of a working console. The problem these days is that consoles are becoming more PC-like, so they're kinda backing into the same problems as PCs.
- The trouble is when you have to deal with timezone-aware business logic. `date-fns-tz` does exist, but the amount of brain contortions required to keep track of everything is frankly exhausting, not to mention error-prone.
Suffice it to say that I'm waiting with bated breath on the Temporal API (https://github.com/tc39/proposal-temporal).
- I got the impression that the comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek.
The joke lies in the fact that saying "100% of real numbers" isn't *technically* the same thing as saying "all real numbers", because there's not really a good way to define a meaning for "100%" that lets you exclude rational numbers (or any other countable subset of the reals) and get something other than 100%.
- > If I'm reading correctly the Florida waypoints referenced were renamed because a busybody NY Times reporter complained?
Do you suppose that if a so-called busybody complained about a waypoint the FAA didn’t care about, they’d bother to change it?
It was $11k. You could probably pay that with the change in your couch.
- While I think I agree with your definition of "engine", I'm not sure I agree with the idea of "motor" being a subtype of "engine".
To me, a "motor" is a specific part of a system's powertrain: it's the part which converts some other type of energy into kinetic energy for the purposes of moving the system. On the other hand, an "engine" is a self-contained system that establishes some kind of stable feedback cycle to perform a task.
With that in mind, a car's internal combustion engine is the motor of the car, since that's the place where chemical energy becomes kinetic energy, which results in motion after being transferred through the drivetrain.
If you take the same exact engine out of the car, mount it in some fixed position, and rig it up to generate electricity, I wouldn't technically call it a "motor" anymore, because it's not acting to move the system it's a part of. (That being said, I probably wouldn't split hairs here, since the engine was originally designed to be a motor. But you see my point.)
Importantly, this lets us fit diesel trains into our definition: they use diesel engines to generate electricity, but electric motors to actually make the train move. In an old steam-driven train,
It also addresses the question of what to call the part of a model rocket that makes it go up. It's the part of the rocket's powertrain which converts chemical energy into kinetic energy that moves the system. It's a *motor*.
---
So, with all that said, an interesting point is that the terms "motor engine" and "engine motor" both make sense, but don't mean the same thing. "Motor engine" describes an engine designed to perform the role of motor (as opposed to a "generator engine"), whereas "engine motor" describes a specific kind of motor (as opposed to a "chemical motor").
- I would agree if we were talking about, say, a team in 1970, but it's worth pointing out that we're talking about a team working during the very infancy of computer engineering (the late 40s/early 50s). Just off the top of my head, you had solid-state hardware, stored-program machines, and the Von Neumann architecture all just popping on to the scene. This is stuff that would definitely have been on their radar, but I think they'd be fascinated to realize how directly and fundamentally those inventions would affect computing.
Perhaps more importantly, I think they would be blown away by how directly and fundamentally computing would change the world. Doug Englebart and his team are the ones who really developed the idea of using computers for something other than performing calculations for scientists. They started that research in the early 60s, and didn't drop the Mother Of All Demos until 1968. So if I were one of the "ENIAC guys", and someone asked me how my work would affect the world, I'd probably just shrug and suggest that the computers I was building would help perform computations that would let other scientists make discoveries more quickly.
"Curmudgeon" itself is interesting, because while it's not particularly common, I actually think a lot of native English speakers would recognize it because it's got a lot of character- for some reason, the way it feels to say and the way it sounds almost has some of the character of the meaning.