You mean xAI?

I am joking

It’s possible to make a rasterized pdf - that would just be an image with specs for printing. I think teachers need to specify their expectations. Submit a plain text file? Submit a markdown document? Submit a Word doc? Is hand-written okay? What about a type-writer?

A pdf is just a digital version of paper, and since paper is obsolete, the pdf is probably a bit archaic for somebody who has no intention of printing it.

I learned to type from instant messaging: ICQ and AIM. I know I did Mavis Beacon too but that was the practice that solidified it.

Hopefully my rough estimate of 1995 was not too exclusive. I’m sure there’s not a hard cutoff, and the same goes for pre-1975. But being right in the middle of that range, it was pretty cool to use the full spectrum of PCs, and all the game consoles, and see the internet bloom and explode and decay.

Lol screenshot, pdf, what’s the difference really?

I believe the most computer proficient people were born between 1975 and 1995. Before that and they were too old to figure it out without a lot of effort. After that they grew up with touch screens and it’s all just magic. Right in the middle we were able to grow along with advancements in computing.

I was teaching a class with mostly students born after 2000. One of them had never used a computer with a keyboard and mouse. Never used folders and files. Kind of blew me away.

Here is the full transcript of Hancock’s (@DaveHan06) post on X/Twitter:

Is anyone surprised that Kyle’s far-right political handlers ensured this particular detail didn’t make it into his book? (Referring to photo of email detailing how Rittenhouse was banned from ever applying to the Marine Corp again due to failing the entrance exam so terribly)

Regarding his online high school diploma, we had to force him to complete the four years of credits in just ten months, which he did using the “Google machine.”

We invested significant effort to craft the image you witnessed during the trial. We outfitted him in new suits, arranged for his haircut every weekend during the trial, and dedicated over 200 hours to prepare him for direct and cross-examination. We employed the world’s leading jury consultant and conducted extensive research through three mock trials to identify the ideal jurors and the most effective approach for his testimony.

Transforming a middle school dropout who was “angry at the world” with a history of violence and an unhealthy obsession with guns and killing into a respectable young man with a desire for higher education and a promising future was no easy feat.

It was a meticulously crafted facade, which we sincerely hoped he would grow into. Instead, he squandered a full scholarship to study any subject at any university in the country to become a divisive douchebag and antagonize black Americans on college campuses. Kyle failed to learn a single thing. He remains the same uneducated, arrogant, and antagonistic individual, incapable of telling the truth.

Now, he genuinely believes he is the show pony we created and has surrounded himself with sycophants who fuel his inflated ego because they prioritize their political agenda and Christian Nationalist worldview over his well-being.

Despite my efforts to guide him toward a better path in life, the allure of notoriety triumphed over the prospect of putting in the hard work of pursuing an education. Kyle is ill-equipped to offer advice to young people. I regret my role in shaping him into whatever he has become. If I had known what I know now about Kyle’s history, I wouldn’t have been involved.

Sound and light don’t propagate well through changes in media. The reason rainbows exist is because light does not travel in a straight line through drops of water, across the full spectrum. Radar is used to sense how hard it’s raining so it obviously gets returns from rain (and through it). But it will depend on the processing they do from the sensors. But just so we’re clear, cameras also work in the rain and snow. I don’t think one is clearly better than others.

Radar and Lidar also get a lot of noise from heavy rain or snow. Fog can be just as bad. Some conditions just aren’t safe to drive in, regardless of who’s driving. I don’t think either of them are trying to design a system for those conditions.

On a personal note, I have no interest in getting a ride in a self driving car. I do have an interest in an empty car that can drive itself. Drop myself off at the airport, valet parking downtown, easier to share one car per household, river shuttling, through hike shuttling - I would use it a lot. I understand the more profitable goal is taxi services, but I don’t want that. So in my narrow use case, I hope Tesla succeeds since that approach can be used on personal vehicles anywhere while Waymo is strictly city taxis, which I don’t use.

Chess is a very complex rules game, while Checkers is quite simple. Waymo has a complex approach to self driving:

• Expensive suite of sensors
• High resolution maps of operating areas
• Remote operators standing by

While Teslas approach is simple:

• Capture a bazillion miles of camera footage, feed into AI, profit?
• Unpaid volunteers teach the AI safe driving
• Car has only a basic map for routing, the rest is inferred in real time from cameras

Waymo’s successful approach scales linearly. They have to high-res map every city they want to operate in, and they can gradually bring down the cost of the sensors. They will require fewer remote operator interactions over time.

Teslas success is more difficult, but it scales exponentially. They already produce vehicles at scale and full control over all the equipment on board. The existing fleet would be able to participate as well. If they succeed, they may want to offer buy-backs for customers who didnt buy FSD - the cars would be worth more to Tesla than the owner.

In both checkers and chess, the player gains super powers for reaching the other side of the board. Time will tell who reaches the other side of the board first. They are playing different games on the same board. Okay that’s fair.

Interesting, my rake makes some sounds when I use it. It’s pretty loud on hard surfaces.

My takeaway from that article is mostly that primate research is a big emotional topic for some people, and maybe tech writers shouldn’t write about medical research. Do you think it would be so interesting if it was done on mice? The primate research center in Davis has been there since 1962, and it’s always been controversial. Do you think they’ve just been twiddling their thumbs for 55 years waiting for Neuralink to come along? No, that shit is routine for them. They keep doing it because primate research is still an important step before human trials.

There is no need to ethically green light a medical procedure that is voluntary, of sound mind, and of one’s own will. It’s not your body. It’s not your life. People implant beads and magnets into their bodies and tattoo their faces. People hang themselves from meat hooks for fun. People get circumcised, and pierced. It’s all none of your business.

I don’t think it’s obvious at all. This is a sample size of one, and it is still working after 3 months.

Globally, a staggering 310 million major surgeries are performed each year; around 40 to 50 million in USA and 20 million in Europe. It is estimated that 1–4% of these patients will die, up to 15% will have serious postoperative morbidity, and 5–15% will be readmitted within 30 days. An annual global mortality of around 8 million patients places major surgery comparable with the leading causes of death from cardiovascular disease and stroke, cancer and injury. If surgical complications were classified as a pandemic, like HIV/AIDS or coronavirus (COVID-19), developed countries would work together and devise an immediate action plan and allocate resources to address it.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7388795/

Implants are rejected by the immune system. Stents fail. Hip and joint replacements fail. Does that mean we shouldn’t do them?

Are you suggesting that the FDA gave Neuralink special treatment in the approval process? Or are you suggesting that the government should specifically shut down anything Musk tries to do, like SpaceX?

Nobody is making you get a brain chip. Noland did the research, talked about it with his family, and wanted to proceed in spite of the fully disclosed risks. Bodily autonomy is a fundamental human right - if you want to do something or have something done to your body it’s not the governments place to stop you. Safeguards are necessary, and they do exist. You don’t need laws to make sure everybody has the same risk tolerance as you. I can’t fully imagine what it would be like to have no use of my body and no hope of recovery. But I wouldn’t want people like you or me who aren’t in my shoes deciding what I can and can’t do. Honestly if he wanted to have a lethal injection, I believe he should be allowed to make that decision, but he can’t. I’m happy he was able to make some kind of decision, and regain some autonomy, if only temporarily, and not just be a vegetable head in a bed for the rest of his life.

No use of your body is a pretty desperate situation. Before the procedure he had to yell for his parents that he wanted to use the computer, they’d come sit him upright and put a joystick in his mouth, leaving him unable to speak. And he was often very uncomfortable in that position, so he couldn’t do it long. Now, he can use the computer fully laying down, without anyone’s help. The next logical step would be to have some robotic helper arms.

Anyway he can’t shoot himself. He can’t hold a gun or anything else. There’s little reason for this to be about Musk at all other than money. This is the culmination of decades of research from many medical professionals. It’s about a lot more than one person.

An app called Lamucal can make them for you, lyrics and all.

An older app (now defunct), can be found on archive.org, called Riffstation, can do the chords.

Once you have a version of your song you can put it in an app called JustChords. This app will store, display, and transpose your songs. It also has a search feature to pull tabs from other sources.

I agree with your criticisms of BitTorrent vs older P2P sharing. The closest successor I know of might be Tribler. I haven’t used it so I don’t know how the uploads are - and it still has many drawbacks/inefficiencies relating to hashing/duplication because it’s torrent-based. But it does contain search, and the ability to share without a website indexing it. It’s kind of like eMule: torrent/tor edition?

It’s safe as long as nobody breaks the rules. If law enforcement or copyright holders really wanted a login they could probably get an invite from somebody. The weak link in security is always going to be a person.

Once they infiltrated a private tracker, they’d either have to hack them or download every torrent they want to and track down the seeders. 90% of the seeders would probably be in a different country so, is it really worth their effort? They’re not going to get the people ripping the shows and movies.

So yes, I think getting caught on a private tracker is possible. Perhaps not probable.