Posts tagged computer

Or, the bullshit singularity.

Or: do not outsource your mind.

Here is a way of ensuring it is, at least, very hard to recover an account you’ve used on some social media platform where either you want the old content to remain publicly visible or the platform doesn’t let you delete accounts in any reasonable way.

is not as glorious as you probably think.

The dead internet theory is a conspiracy theory, which in itself is enough reason to doubt it. Like many fashionable conspiracy theories it originated in regions of the internet frequented by people with really unpleasant views, which is another.

But.

In late 2018, when I still worked at the Met Office, I sent a document to some people there which explained why I thought AI would come to dominate weather forecasting, and why weather forecasting organisations should be looking at AI, urgently. Today, the 28th of July 2023, there is a leader on the subject in The Economist as well as an extended article in its Science and Technology section.

The various Stack Exchange sites, and specifically Stack Overflow, seem to be some of the best places for getting reasonable answers to questions on a wide range of topics from competent people. They would be a lot better if they were not so obsessed about closing duplicates.

There are apocryphal reports that Apple M1 systems are not as fast as people have been led to believe for general-purpose programs. That’s unsurprising.

People learning Lisp often try to learn how to write macros by taking an existing function they have written and turning it into a macro. This is a mistake: macros and functions serve different purposes and it is almost never useful to turn functions into macros, or macros into functions.

People sometimes ask which is the best Lisp dialect? That’s a category error, and here’s why.