That would be the short story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut.

Yeah, this is what I was going to call out. Calling it “100% solvable by humans” and saying “if human scores were included, they would be at 100%” when 20-60% of humans solved each task seems kinda misleading. The AI scores are so low that I don’t think this kind of hyperbole is necessary; I assume there are some humans that scored 100%, but I would find it a lot more useful if they said something like “the worst-performing human in our sample was able to solve 45% of the tasks” or whatever. Given that the AIs are still scoring below 1%, that’s still pretty dark.

I built one, but it was a (top-down) resin printer, so I don’t think I have any useful advice to offer. Also, I kinda burnt out on the project after I came in one morning and found the resin had melted the vat and leaked onto the floor–somehow I just totally failed to consider that the solvents in the resin could obviously dissolve a lot of plastics. Huge mess, huge pain to remediate. At least it was a concrete floor. I got a replacement vat in glass, but I never worked up the will to work on it again. It did basically print before that, but I had a lot of off-layer curing and didn’t get to do much work on tuning that in before the accident.

username checks out

Yep. I’ve only got three APs, and one is by the modem and router, so it’s really just two long wires, and one of those is to my office, which is also where my main desktop PC is, so I needed that wire anyway. The other one was annoying, and I had to drill a couple holes for it as well as exploit a laundry chute, but all that was ten years ago, and having pretty complete wifi coverage since then has been worth it.

The one weak spot is the kitchen, where there’s coverage, but it tends to be a bit slow. I just decided to upgrade my bedroom AP to Wifi 6 (from AC), though, and I might try switching the old unit over to mesh mode and mounting it to cover the kitchen. Mesh involves two wifi links so it’s a bit slower, but the connection strength will probably make up for that. It’s worth the experiment, at least.

I turned off wifi on my router and instead use multiple wifi access points connected to the router by ethernet. It’s way easier to get good coverage and speeds that way.

There’s also Ignosticism. They believe the question is underspecified because “God” isn’t well-defined.

Yeah, agreed. I must have misunderstood your original comment.

I’m not sure I totally understand your comment, so bear with me if I’m agreeing with you and just not understanding that.

“let me prioritize PRs raised by humans” … but why? Why do that in the first place? If bots/LLMs/agents/GenAI genuinely worked they would not care if it was made or not by humans, it would just be quality submission to share.

Before LLMs, there was a kind of symmetry about pull requests. You could tell at a glance how much effort someone had put into creating the PR. High effort didn’t guarantee that the PR was high quality, but you could be sure you wouldn’t have to review a huge number of worthless PRs simply because the work required to make something that even looked plausibly decent was too much for it to be worth doing unless you were serious about the project.

Now, however, that’s changed. Anyone can create something that looks, at first glance, like it might be an actual bug fix, feature implementation, etc. just by having the LLM spit something out. It’s like the old adage about arguing online–the effort required to refute bullshit is exponentially higher than the effort required to generate it. So now you don’t need to be serious about advancing a project to create a plausible-looking PR. And that means that you can get PRs coming from people who are just trolls, people who have no interest in the project but just want to improve their ranking on github so they look better to potential employers, people who build competing closed-source projects and want to waste the time of the developers of open-source alternatives, people who want to sneak subtle backdoors into various projects (this was always a risk but used to require an unusual degree of resources, and now anyone can spam attempts to a bunch of projects), etc. And there’s no obvious way to tell all these things apart; you just have to do a code review, and that’s extremely labor-intensive.

So yeah, even if the LLMs were good enough to produce terrific code when well-guided, you wouldn’t be able to discern exactly what they’d been instructed to make the code do, and it could still be a big problem.

But then you’ve got a space that’s 5’ 7 3/8" and you need a clearance of 7/32" on each end, so your piece should be…uh… 5’ 6 15/16" long. So much easier than metric, right?

In metric it would be 1711mm (or 1.711m) and you’d need to take 5.5mm off each end, so it’s 1700mm. (For the record, I picked random numbers in imperial and only did the metric conversion afterwards, I just lucked into the nice round number here.)

I dunno. You need how many sig figs you need in whichever system, but switching between a factor of 12 for the feet, base 10 for the inches, and the equivalent of binary decimals for the partial inches sure does take getting used to. I’ve finally gotten used to it enough that I can do it in my head, but I prefer to work on metric for most things.

I acknowledge that machinists just use thousandths of an inch, which does greatly improve working with that system, but it also introduces a third kind of measurement that can’t easily be interconverted with the other two. I dunno. It just feels like we’re doing way too much work propping up this archaic system when literally everyone else in the world is using something simpler and we could just be on the same system.

Yeah. I think none of us really understands how valuable all our data really is.

Most of the “commercial” TVs, the ones intended for businesses, don’t have this. They also don’t have streaming services and whatnot not built in. They’re just a display with a few inputs, and maybe a tuner.

Haha, that’s giving me way too much credit. I was a high school student and was still figuring out what the GUI bits did, like the ArcBall widget, so I practically couldn’t do anything useful on the GUI itself on days when I didn’t have a GUI machine. I could do some of the behind-the-scenes linear algebra stuff, though. Like, there was an array that held a 3d vector at every point in space that represented the flow field, and they wanted to be able to visualize cross-sections, so for that I needed to make a 2d grid of 2d vectors on a single plane. That sort of thing basically had to be done blind anyway.

Oh man, I had to use the orange ones sometimes at my first programming job. They were VAX/VMS dumb terminals. It sucked getting stuck with one of those, because the job was making a visualization GUI for some data, and these ones literally couldn’t run the GUI; they were text-only. Eventually they started reserving one of the GUI-capable machines for me.

I gave a quick try of meshtastic and quickly switched over to meshcore, which has a much smarter routing algorithm that makes it more useful in cities. I’m also reticulum-curious. In the medium-term I’m looking at possibly putting up a solar “roompeater,” which acts as both a “room” (basically allows asynchronous chat between two client nodes that aren’t always online at the same time) and a repeater (basically a router). It has some disadvantages over running the two separately, but since I want both to have power in the event of a disaster, the cost savings of doing both on one node outweighs those for me right now.

I suspect they know something we don’t about a future XBox ARM handheld.

https://gifs.cackhanded.net/invader-zim/the-nightmare-begins/worse-or-better.gif

Through the modial interaction of magnetoreluctance and capacitive diractance… https://youtu.be/Ac7G7xOG2Ag

I mean, it’s talking about people thinking that “energy, frequency and vibration are just mystical nonsense.” People don’t think that if you talk about an FM station broadcasting on a particular frequency, or about the frequency of light absorbed by particular atomic orbitals. They think that if you’re explaining that you’ve slept much better since you placed jasper and amethyst on the ley lines near your bed to absorb the negative frequencies.

The implication in the meme that anyone who is using these terms cannot be indulging in mystical nonsense, because these terms can also apply to real things. In fact, though, mystic cranks have been coopting scientific terms for ages, and they show no signs of slowing down. It’s a real problem that people confuse crap with science.

This is what I don’t like about the top meme, though. Like, yes, energy, frequency, and vibration are all things. Obviously. But the top meme is implying that everyone should believe that those things work in the specific ways that the woo practitioners say they do, and that’s a very different demand. More, it’s implying that people who doubt those effects are ignoring obvious evidence, when in fact the people who doubt those effects do so because nobody has been able to demonstrate reliable evidence for them. It has a nasty gaslighting overtone to it.