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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Er, not really… for instance:

    “…back in the day?”

    Which ‘day’? Before digital mapping? Before cartography as a formal practice? Before the invention of the compass? Before the standardization of the meter? Before the printing press? Before Galileo? Before Eratosthenes?

    The time period of the question is potentially the entirety of human history. That’s quite broad.

    What methods were used to scale down in world, to paper distances?

    In which part of the world? In which culture? For what purpose? (e.g. navigation? coastal, inland, international? crop planting? city planning? determining property lines? etc)

    This is not a straightforward question in any way. A complete answer would be an undergraduate degree with a double major in history and geography.






  • Why do those things cause cancer? Why do some smokers not die of cancer? The reason it’s so vague is because we don’t actually know what causes cancer.

    Ah, I see the misunderstanding now.

    Just because a natural process contains some inherent randomness does not mean that we do not know how it works. Knowing exactly how a thing occurs does not make the action of that thing deterministic. Just because it is unpredictable on an individual scale does not mean it is mysterious, or beyond our understanding.

    Some people exposed to a carcinogen will develop cancerous cells. Some will not. Some of their immune systems will remove the cancer cells before they cause problems. Some will not. Some will develop tumors from those cells. Some of those cells will die and get filtered out by the kidneys or liver before they reproduce and form tumors. Some of those tumors will grow enough to be lethal. Some will become benign before they cause significant health problems.

    The outcome depends on many factors like age, health, exercise, diet, exposure, genetic background, etc. There are more variables than we can possibly track for any given person. Even if we could get all of that information, we are ultimately talking about the interactions of certain molecules with proteins in cells - meaning that quantum effects are relevant, so there is some probability involved.

    We know what is associated with cancer, but not what causes it.

    We know what causes cancer. Genetic mutations during cell reproduction cause cancer. We don’t know every possible thing that can provoke genetic mutations (that would require infinite knowledge), nor do we know if a specific individual will develop cancer in response to a specific carcinogen. The outcome is probabilistic.

    Again, just because there is some inherent randomness does not mean that we don’t understand how it works. Understanding something does not make it deterministic.






  • We don’t know what causes cancer. It’s the oncogenic paradox.

    Hmm, this is not really true though…

    We know that cancer is caused by genetic mutations during cell replication, resulting in malformed cells which behave abnormally. If these cells then replicate successfully they can produce tumors. We know that this can happen with basically any cell type, though some animals have very low cancer rates.

    Mechanically, we know that a lot of different sources can provoke genetic mutations in cells. We have identified many, many such influences (radiation, various chemicals, viruses, etc). Asbestos fibers can interfere with chromosomes mechanically during mitosis:

    There is experimental evidence that very slim fibers (<60 nm, <0.06 μm in breadth) tangle destructively with chromosomes (being of comparable size). This is likely to cause the sort of mitosis disruption expected in cancer.

    We know many causes of cancer. We don’t know every possible thing that might provoke cell mutations. We know that it’s not any one specific thing.

    We also know that cellular mutation is part of the evolutionary process. It might not be possible to “cure cancer” in the sense of preventing cellular mutations, as this may be a built-in function of what we are as a species. Preventing mutation might also not be a good long-term strategy for the survival of the species.


  • I wonder how much of this depended on the differences in device screens. In 2015 there was a lot more variability in display technology, lower resolutions in general and worse color fidelity. OLED was uncommon and expensive, you probably only had an IPS display if you worked in graphic arts, and a lot of people were still using standard LCD monitors backlit with fluorescent tubes, which meant that the black depth was limited and the detail in dark regions of an image was frequently not visible on the screen.


  • Bacon fat can be used as a replacement for cooking oil in a pan or anywhere you would use grease while cooking. One of my favorite things to do with it is grease a cast iron skillet and bake cornbread in it (you get smoky bacon flavor crust). It also works great as a butter replacement for frying eggs or hash browns. You can also use it as a fat base to make gravy.

    If you run the bacon fat through a coffee filter while it’s still hot & liquid (into a glass jar) it will be shelf stable at room temperature. Cone coffee filters are convenient for this.

    If you don’t filter it you must store it in the refrigerator, or else the leftover bits of meat in the fat will go rancid and start to rot.





  • No, we’re talking about companies scraping hundreds of millions if not billions of labor hours of output to train their models for the sake of developing software products which they then sell for profit.

    Every model that was trained on legally acquired free public data and open source code should be freely publicly available and open source.

    Every model that was trained on not legally acquired public data (e.g. Meta’s models) should be taken out of production until all of the lawsuits are concluded, and hopefully the parties responsible are put out of business.

    I’m not talking about future, potential labor that AI might replace. I’m talking about the labor which was stolen to produce these models in the first place.

    But, please use AI.


  • Please identify the issues with the LLM generated code.

    Why would the issues be obvious and easy to point out? Most issues with code aren’t. If they were, we wouldn’t have Patch Tuesday, a direct code review would prevent issues from shipping in the first place.

    Throwing this out as if it means LLM code is acceptable and ends the argument is ridiculous. Do you have any grasp of how software vulnerabilities are discovered at all?