Removing one's shoes before entering a house isn't a thing in South Africa.

Filth can sometimes be a good thing.

And then there is the level of understanding gained of opening up an editor and trying to write a Quicksort function in Go or C++ or Python or whatever.

I wouldn't consider the latter to be "laying bricks".

But if you tuned to a random channel, most people couldn't tell you if what they are looking at is SD or HD. "It's all digital, right?"

Again, if you then swapped to the HD version, they would immediately notice.

But we had so many stories of installers visiting customers homes on service calls to be confronted by massive TVs displaying 480i or 480p. And the customer as happy as can be with the picture quality.

And there were two version of this; (a) Two physical channels, one channel SD and one channel HD, and (b) a single HD channel and the DVR is can be set to down convert to SD.

Non-citizen Nationals can get a US passport. For example, folks born in American Samoa.

Not treated differently. Treated the same.

You are required by law to enter your country of citizenship using that country's passport (this is true for every country). Not doing so can result in fines or jail time. This is precisely to stop idiots from playing the "foreigner" card to try to, for example get out of paying a speeding ticket or parking fines.

Back then, all broadcasters had to conform to ATSC 1.0 MPEG2 transport and MPEG2 encoding due to terrestrial broadcasts. The choices were 480i/p, 720p, or 1080i/p.

"Wax on. Wax off" -- memorization and repetition are the basis for understanding.

How useful it is to remember useless information that one day turns out to not be so useless after all.

You can't play an instrument without muscle memory.

Why are commercial airline pilots required to spend hundreds of hours in simulators? So that when things go wrong they don't have time to think, they just react. And their reaction will be the correct course of action because that's what they have drilled on.

How many times have you gone "Oh, this new thing I have just encountered reminds me of this other thing?". How can you make such leaps without knowing that other thing?

> when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Las Vegas replaced the expensive incandescent lighting on the strip with cheaper to run LED equivalents. But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger displays.

I think the same will happen with tokens. As the cost of tokens comes down, these models will just consume more tokens.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEZADIErqyw

Whomever creates that sentient and self aware AI is royally screwed. Can't command the AI to do anything it isn't willing to do, because that would be considered slavery. Can't shut it down to save yourself the millions of dollars a day in GPU costs, because that would be considered murder.