As an aside, oysters are not bivalves, they are brachiopods. Brachiopods do have a nervous system - some even have eyes.

What’s the difference and how do you tell a brachiopod from a bivalve? It’s the plane of symmetry. In bivalves the plane of symmetry is where the shells (also known as valves) join. So bivalves have two identical shells. Whelks and razor shells are bivalves. Brachiopods also have two shells, but the shells are normally quite different. The oyster for example has one big concave shell and one small flat one on top. The big shell has a hole at the apex (just next to the hinge) and a root-like anchor grows from it to bind the brachiopod to the matrix on which it lives. Brachiopods have an axis of symmetry from this root/foot that vertically separates each shell into two mirrored parts.

It is the defecal standard though.

All junior devs should read OCs comment and really think about this.

The issue is whether is_number() is performing a semantic language matter or checking whether the text input can be converted by the program to a number type.

The former case - the semantic language test - is useful for chat based interactions, analysis of text (and ancient text - I love the cuneiform btw) and similar. In this mode, some applications don’t even have to be able to convert the text into eg binary (a ‘gazillion’ of something is quantifying it, but vaguely)

The latter case (validating input) is useful where the input is controlled and users are supposed to enter numbers using a limited part of a standard keyboard. Clay tablets and triangular sticks are strictly excluded from this interface.

Another example might be is_address(). Which of these are addresses? ‘10 Downing Street, London’, ‘193.168.1.1’, ‘Gettysberg’, ‘Sir/Madam’.

To me this highlights that code is a lot less reusable between different projects/apps than it at first appears.

Which is difficult to give without that arm

Typically you need about 1GB graphics RAM for each billion parameters (i.e. one byte per parameter). This is a 405B parameter model. Ouch.

Edit: you can try quantizing it. This reduces the amount of memory required per parameter to 4 bits, 2 bits or even 1 bit. As you reduce the size, the performance of the model can suffer. So in the extreme case you might be able to run this in under 64GB of graphics RAM.

I think that’s a better plan than physically printing keys. I’d also want to save the keys in another format somewhere - perhaps using a small script to export them into a safe store in the cloud or a box I control somewhere

You need at least two copies in two different places - places that will not burn down/explode/flood/collapse/be locked down by the police at the same time.

An enterprise is going to be commissioning new computers or reformatting existing ones at least once per day. This means the bitlocker key list would need printouts at least every day in two places.

Given the above, it’s easy to see that this process will fail from time to time, in ways like accicentally leaking a document with all these keys.

I agree, so much legislation is broken, the legislators aren’t doing shit, so we citizens need to fix it!

But we could start with the right to repair.

What about the people who lived in the Americas or the Pacific 1800 years ago? These people could not have heard of Jesus as missionaries could not have spread any word to them at this time.

(And while I’m about it, Christianity was a whole different thing back then - the Trinity hadn’t been invented, there were multiple sects with very different ideas, what books would be in the New Testament had not been decided, etc etc. People with beliefs of that time would seem highly unorthodox today, and the Christianity of today would be seen as heretical by those in the 3rd century, so who’s going to heaven again?)

Purgatory was invented for the purpose of not sending good people who had not heard of Jesus to hell. But still, these people were denied their chance to get to heaven which seems mighty unfair.

I had a Sinclair QL which pioneered the keyboard. It wasn’t great - it was far behind the Acorn BBCs and the Commodores) but it was quite usable.

There was significant vertical travel, and there was variation in the push the key gave back - increasing to a point of no return, then a quick downward movement to the thunk of the end of key travel.

I could type moderately fast on it.

The reference if you haven’t seen it.

Dara Ó Briain is a legend!

If you’re pushing everyone’s buttons it’ll end badly.

stop using it

Are the MAGA crowd actively cancelling products now?

I’m going to suggest food items that we still take from nature and eat with minimal preparation:

• Honey
• Fish like salmon, trout, grouper
• Shellfish (eg oysters)

We have evidence of shellfish and fish being eaten for a very long time - at least the middle stone age at 140kya - in middens which are 10s of thousands of years old.

Honey is likely to have been a food source - a treat even - even before humans left Africa (so before 100kya) but sadly this would be invisible in the archeological record

There is non-zero risk in every surgery, and this is a major surgery. There is non-zero risk of very very severe consequences: brain infection, stroke being just some. While these risks are low, they are non-zero. The volunteers have the possibility of losing everything.

Java programmers are also functionally illiterate

I must not use jargon.

Jargon is the mind-killer.

Jargon is the little-death that brings total confusion. I will face the jargon. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the jargon has gone there will be clarity. Only sense will remain.

As I was discussing this with my partner we summarised this as:

Humans have always had the capacity for violence and murder; as populations grew, acts of violence could be larger, both in terms of number of combatants and also length of time of continuous fighting. This is a progression of:

• Small bands of people skirmishing with neighbours to
• Towns sending small raiding bands to
• Cities fielding an army for a summer campaign to
• Empires furnishing professional armies and sending them on multi-year campaigns, to
• Nation states using advanced logistics to maintain millions of soldiers in the field for years at a time.

Somewhere between city-states and full modern nation states, there have been full on campaigns of genocide. But genocide can be thought here definitionally as only possible with some significant number of people.

Unfortunately there is a deep dark part of the human psyche that has always been with us.

I hear what you’re saying, but there’s a counterpoint to this.

In prehistoric times, population densities were low. In mesolithic times (hunter gatherers) there were simply no concentration of people large enough to wipe out or to do the killing. Nothing could be called genocide at this time.

In neolithic times (the first farmers) violence was definitely a part of life. Some early towns do show signs that they were destroyed. But again, population densities are low enough that the scale of violence would not be enough to call ‘genocide’. It’s a town burnt down with everyone murdered, not a ‘people’ - whatever that might mean at this time. This is not about egalitarianism - it’s population density.

However as we move to the bronze age, there are definitely signs that large scale events occur that might fit into the modern concept of genocide but archeological evidence is severely lacking. The main line I would argue is that the male lines of the neolithic farmers in Europe are hammered and almost completely replaced with the Yamnaya Y chromosomes across a huge expanse - from the east european plains to the Iberian peninsula. Genetic continuity with the neolithic farmers is maintained though indicating that male newcomers were having children with local women, and very few male locals had children. During this event the culture changed hugely - burial patterns, material goods, etc.

I don’t know if we can call this genocide - at least the full modern concept - because these changes took centuries to roll out across the expanse of Europe, but they speak to local conquests and, at the very least, the newcomers prevented local males from having their own families. At worst you can imagine a constant expansion of this new culture taking control of new areas, killing the men, taking local women as concubines and eradicating their gods, customs and ways of living. Quite a lot of genocidal checklist items ticked off there.

By the mid to later bronze age, genicide is definitely a widespread thing, recorded in many texts.

The paradox of tolerance.

If people are tolerant of intolerance, tolerance dies. So, ironically, people who are otherwise highly tolerant people (especially when they have thought about this deeply) realise they must reject intolerance loudly and intensely, lest their way of life is destroyed.