Well, yeah. There are always ways to get around laws. But this is like saying taxes are a bad idea because tax evasion exists.

It's the eternal hacker news debate:

"let's regulate x"

"but surely we can't regulate x because defining x is complicated"

"plenty of things are complex and are regulated, also here is a definition that covers almost all cases and the rest can be left to judicial nous"

"but people will just evade the law anyway"

Honestly pick a post about the EU at random and you'll be able to find some variety of this chain of conversation. It's so general an argument that it could be made about literally any law that's ever existed, making it entirely null if you believe in any regulation whatsoever

I once had the idea to create a HackerNews equivalent to tvtropes called hntropes that crowd sources all of these patterns.

My personal favourite hntrope is how any conversation about a geological feature outside of the US will inevitable turn into one about American geological features and then shortly after it will just descend generic American discussion.

I conceptualize this as something like the Hamming Distance, where you can measure the number of replies the conversation will have before an inevitable pivot to generic American stuff.

So the conversation could start with "Why back in 2013 I had a lovely time fishing in Scotland. The lakes there are remarkable."

"Boy me too that fishing was just great caught such and such fish blah blah blah love those lakes"

"Why that reminds me of the time I went fishing in Kentucky, boy the lakes there let me tell you..."

"Kentucky you say? Why I was just in Kentucky the other day! Boy they sure have < difference in real estate prices | difference in crime rates | differnce in minimum wage... >

and now it's a conversation about Kentucky real estate instead of a conversation about fishing in Scotland.

Do it

Why do companies even do this? It's not like they were prevented from being evil until they removed the line in their mission statement. Arguably being evil is a worse sin than breaking the terms of your missions statement

The author is dead. I think we can consider it as much a cautionary tale about digitised human brains as we can about the other things.

Sam Hughes (qntm) is very much alive, last I checked.

I think they are just making reference to the "death of the author" concept in literary analysis, which basically says that what the author was intending to convey should be ignored when analysing the work: the work stands alone.

And Blindsight. I will recommend Blindsight all day, even if it's not directly to do with uploading.

Worth noting that this is the thesis of Seeing Red: A study in consciousness. I think you will find it a good read, even if I disagreed with some of the ideas.

> During the Second World War, almost every motorised vehicle in continental Europe was converted to use firewood.

How is this the first time me (or anyone else in this comment section) is hearing about this? It seems like a pretty major deal.

From what I gather the conversion wasn't a big deal. The engines of the time weren't picky about fuel, so you just have to find space to mount the wood gas generator (a very simple if bulky device) and pipe the wood gas into the fuel system. And once gasoline was available again those vehicles were easily converted back

If everything is operating correctly then yes it's wonderful. If conditions are poor then you are in for a bad time. There are a lot of things that can cause poor gas quality, often having to do with things like biomass moisture content, mineral content, and material feed. You can get into regimes where pyrolysis and reduction are incomplete and the tar content of the gas is high enough to stick valves and acidify the oil. Gasification is a fickle lover.

Part of the problems with it is likely long term usage because wood is not an entirely predictable fuel. All sorts of hydrocarbon oils and tars can come out of it and the moisture content of wood can be all over the place.

Possibly modern wood pellets would eliminate many of these problems, but if you aren't getting a really good burn, which takes some skill to setup with just random chopped wood pieces, you may end up gunking the engine all up and filling the oil with crap and possibly having some not so great exhaust coming out.

Otherwise you need the skills and an engine simple enough to be worth semi regularly opening it up to clean all the carbon and crap out of it. Something that might not seem like too big of a deal when people already use 1930s cars, but would become a much bigger and bigger deal in the decades after WWII when cars and engines become increasingly complex and people don't expect to be removing major engine components after 5,000 miles.

Some of us had the honor of learning about it from WWII vets... But, to your point, everyone in Europe was busy fighting the war, and there was very little 'driving around'. So not much talk about it.

Called "generatorgas" or "gengas" for short in Sweden. Almost all cars in pictures from the early forties had a little cart behind them. That was the generator.

I had heard stories of these from my Dad. He lived in country Australia (SA) during WWII, and the long-distance buses had been converted over to this.

With germanys lack of petrol, they relied heavily on alternative fuel sources.

trivia: The US had plenty of gasoline during the war, but they had to ration gasoline because they were short of rubber for tires. So it goes.

It's not just the installation process. Being forced to manage or setup automatic management for most parts of your system teaches you a lot. Often it's just as simple as `sudo pacman -Sy yabdabadoo` but its more instructive than it 'just working'.

Surprising no one.

> Grok based transformer

Is Grok not an LLM? Or do they have other models under that brand?

> > Grok based transformer

> Is Grok not an LLM?

Transformer is the underlying technology for (most) LLMs (GPT stands for “Generative Pre-Trained Transformer”)

Right. How is this one based on Grok?

I don't know the answer to your second question, but what about "transformer" makes you think "not an LLM"?

Not the word 'transformer', but I doubt they'd use an LLM as a For You algorithm.

This is not how continuous probabilities work. The probability that a clock is exactly right is zero; hence there is always some error in a measurement of time. Adding additional clocks will always cause the error to be less or equal to the maximum error.