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• Post #4462456

  The following two paragraphs are notable; I don't know the probability that the coming elections in Israel will bring about significant political change. «A new law was proposed earlier this year that would have transferred control of archaeological sites to the Israeli heritage ministry from the Civil Administration, which operates under military authority, and given it sweeping powers to seize land for archaeological preservation across the West Bank. That bill passed its first reading i...

• Post #4441634

  This characterization of Expertise in Popular Economics is still very apt, I think; it was written nearly two centuries ago. (The original is at the bottom of the post.) ... in Adam Smith was his diploma; our deep economist had got the gift of recognizing what a nation’s wealth is, what augments it, and how a country lives, and why it needs no gold if a supply of _simple product_¹ supplements it. His father failed to understand and took a mortgage on his land. This is from Pushkin's _Eugen...

• Post #4430307

  The more emphatic the denial of something, the greater the suspicion that it is in fact true. Not to mention that the following two sentences don't go together well. «"The U.S. has massive amounts of 'munitions,' especially of certain types," Trump posted on Thursday morning. "Additionally, large amounts are being manufactured and shipped to the US as needed."» And then the final five words below mean overpaying for munitions, which doesn't become a presiden...

• Post #4426035

  As others have noted, and in my opinion, the recently advertised “tests” of the capabilities of several LLMs to crack computer security defenses are to a large extent publicity stunts. Simplistically: I. XYZ-1, Inc.: “Our AI is dangerous.” II. XYZ-2, Inc.: “Our AI is more dangerous than yours.” However, if those models can indeed be “tested” only by letting them out into the Internet, they begin to resemble the weapons of the so-called Star Wars project of the early 1980s, which could only be “...

• Post #4422258

  mixed feelings (idiomatic phrase) You see your worst enemy in a car heading to a precipice. Then you notice it's your car. (Traditional)

• Post #4406083

  «Musk said he expects [Starlink] to grow exponentially in the coming years.» "Exponentially". Does Musk really believe the _actual_ meaning of that? If yes, what base of exponentiation is he thinking of? «Musk said during the call: "Data centres are a trivial problem compared to making reusable rockets."» It is unthinkable that he himself might underestimate the problems around data centers, isn't it? BBC report: SpaceX shares sink after first earnings report reveals...

• Post #4129909

  The Greek alphabet has two rarities: a small small letter and a small big letter. U+03BF GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON U+03C9 GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA (Also, as the White Knight might say, we have here two letters, what the letters are called, names of the letters (the codepoints), and what the names of the letters are called.) --␠ There is but one Unicode and the Consortium is its master.

• Post #4121017

  RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@divyaranjan/116986347908354119 MetaNB: the final sentence: «Hopefully this never happens again.»...

• Post #3985364

  Half a century into the Information Age and a significant part of humankind seems to be in sorcerer's apprentice mode, with no sorcerer in sight to set things right in the end. A rather uncomfortable thought... Don't skip the classes on the Neolithic Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. They all teach many direct lessons for today. Also uncomfortable. 🙁🙁🙁 #InformationAge #InformationRevolution

• Post #3984510

  RE: https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/116931490270096063 Right. This is definitely Not Too Long, Do Read (up to and including the final paragraph), but the most significant parts for me are the 2+4 bullet points. NB: the _technical_ aspects (kernels vs. microkernels, etc., etc.) are not the most significant part of this.

• Post #3908409

  What is the difference between vibe coding and voodoo programming?

• Post #3908408

  Dusty Springfield Bits and Pieces Reality is yours to deny ... You ask yourself what good are your dreams In a world where nothing is what it seems _________ The song from The Stunt Man (1980), a movie about making an (anti)war movie. Directed by Richard Rush, starring Peter O’Toole as a film director and Barbara Hershey as a film star. <https://youtu.be/54VwTjT5VoE> #DominicFrontiere #DustySpringfield #FilmMusic #FridayMusic #RichardRush

• Post #3908407

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@randahl/116934509807068880 I am shocked, of course. *** Putin was asked once (perhaps in late 2016): "Did you interfere in the presidential elections?" He replied matter-of-factly: "In which country?"

• Post #3908406

  The Moscow Kremlin is glad. BBC article: Ukrainian soldiers criticise removal of popular defence minister <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg8w4dpjkwo>

• Post #3905940

  On the subject of `common-lisp:loop’, I offer an exercise at the intermediate level (or maybe a little more than intermediate). How would you implement a `for’ subclause extending the loop facility with a way to step through a sequence (of the generic kind, i.e. a single subclause that works for both lists and vectors)? Would adding such a subclause be a good idea or not, and why? #CommonLisp

• Post #3735159

  Learning to recognize artificial pseudo-photographs is a very interesting domain (if "interesting" is the word). Again, repetition is the mother of learning, naturally. Myself, I failed the sample tests (four and four images) in the article. I partitioned them into two classes mostly correctly (real vs. artificial), but I swapped the classes. BBC article: See if you can spot an AI deepfake with our test #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #FakeImageRecognition #FakeImages #ImageRecognition...

• Post #3483933

  Unlike cameras, thermometers don't lie. We got to the point when it's 20°C at _dawn_, and it's only June. That is at an altitude of about 600 m and at about 42° North, the central part of the Balkan Peninsula. _________ 9t/5 + 32 d / 0.3048

• Post #3367560

  «Writing to his brother Theo from Arles in [1888], Van Gogh ... committed himself to conjuring "a sense of the infinite".» It seems to me now that we can think of Van Gogh as a spiritual cousin of the narrator of Pirsig's _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_. In a way. #Mathematics #QualityWithoutAName #Urania BBC article: Café Terrace at Night: Five details that unlock the genius of Van Gogh's original 'starry night'

• Post #1377858

  An easy puzzle about mathematical terminology. Name a language that uses the _same_ word for BOWSTRING and SINE. Context: A BOWSTRING is a well-known concrete example of a _chord_ (of a circle). The SINE function is immediately related to a _chord's_ length. _________ As a spoiler of sorts, ↓ ↓ ↓ and for extra credit, ↓ ↓ ↓ recall how the word SINUS, Latin for FOLD, GULF, POCKET (all rather different from bowstrings), came to be used to name that function. --␠ My other bowstring is a...