Feinman was a curious character.

I suspect that with even a modest breadth of knowlegde a deep investigation of anything brings associations with existing knowledge (interest), unexpected connections and exceptions.

(Tags could be made to differ by, e.g., XORing a limited amount of global history with the hash of the address.)

It is also possible that the AMD Zen 5 and Apple M4 have similar unused predictor capacity and simply have much larger predictors.

I did not think even TAGE predictors used 5k branch history, so there may be some compression of the data (which is only pseudorandom).

It might be interesting to unroll the loop (with sufficient spacing between branches to ensure different indexing) to see if such measurably effected the results.

Of course, since "write to buffer" is just a store and increment and the compiler should be able to guarantee no buffer overflow (buffer size allocated for worst case) and that the memory store has no side effects, the branch could be predicated by selecting either new value to be stored or the old value and always storing. This would be a little extra work and might have store queue issues (if not all store queue entries can have the same address but different version numbers), so it might not be a safe optimization.

Modern CSS (and some newer HTML features) also reduces the need for scripting.

I very much doubt that "Enabling scripting was a necessary step for interactive websites." (emphasis added). It may well have been the most convenient and fastest way to get the functionality to the most users. With Javascript each website could provide functionality without waiting for such to be implemented by all browsers.

However distribution of power also leads to more complex trust relationships (even if one is confident that sandboxing is effective). Independent implementation also leads to more complexity overall.

[1] https://alexanderpetros.com/triptych/

That video did not really include self-medicating (except as screen time can be self-medicating for boredom and tiredness); I tend to self-medicate anxiety by simple logic games (picmi, sudoku, kmines — all but the last also avoid failure) which wastes a lot of time. (Drinking water seems to be a somewhat less harmful form of self-medication; it has similar sensory benefits to eating — not as attractive as sweet, salty, fatty foods but it seems somewhat similar — and distraction but overdrinking water seems more difficult.)

Written from my allroom.

(I thought the acknowledgement of life when killing a mosquito was an interesting cultural aspect.)

I did kind of wish that a monastic-like community (or university?) had been presented as seeking more benefit from the City of Mind. Unlike the tribe that asked how to make airplanes (which failed in their military objective), the monks/scholars would train to ask good questions, seeking to restore the land and encourage communication and cooperation among humans. Having even a small bunch of humans interested in such larger issues would have been more optimistic (and perhaps realistic as the existence of an actual Oracle might encourage some people to be scholars, making connections and asking questions). Of course, a ten volume novel would have been even less popular, and LeGuin clearly was motivated to write a more gritty novel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_88000 (under "Registers": "32 80-bit (88110 only)")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_precision (see section titled "IEEE 754 extended-precision formats")

The eucharist is more "ritual" than "overt teaching" but it is meant to call to mind one loaf -> one body and the cost of forgiveness.

The earlier poster's point was more "with similar goals in mind" (i.e., "to create a shared understanding of the world, a nation") rather than emphasizing the mechanism (I think). "Marketable skills" is different from social/civic skills/responsibility.

Other ways of reducing value are possible such as reducing quality control effort, reducing quality of inputs, and reducing manufacturing costs in ways that are known to reduce product quality.

Pushing costs to effectively underregulated externalities can also avoid price increases.

It is also sometimes possible to increase efficiency. Even a long term commodity can have potential for efficiency improvements that were considered not worth exploring under stable pricing pressures. (I suspect value reduction is easier and much faster than efficiency improvement.)

Sadly, reducing value can have a disproportionate cost to consumers. Reducing manufacturing costs for a Watchman's boots by 20% may reduce the lifetime of such by 30% and reduce the quality of use by 50% (which may be related to Samuel Vimes' theory: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory ).

Just an expectation that something will be easy (without a strong tie to identity/sel-worth) can make failure more painful.

Easy successes can also lead to not developing progress-enabling skills when in a "friendly" environment (e.g., an academically gifted person not learning study skills and disclipline before college). When the innate skill and casual training is no longer enough to meet expectations, there is not the emotional reserve and external support to develop the meta-skills.

Failure aversion and lack of self-discipline is somewhat independent of "work ethic"; a person terrified of failure can work very hard at easy tasks or tasks with results that lack internal or peceived external judgment in part because such feels so much better than not really trying.

Sadly, a "safe" activity can be "ruined" by a person's well-meaning compliment, that introduces expectations to the activity. (Weirdly, indirect compliments seem significantly less problematic; "these decorations look really nice" can feel acceptable even when the person knows one did them while "you did a really good job on the decorations" can feel crushing by setting a new higher baseline of expectations and/or introducing self-doubt because the person is just being nice.)

Her smile tilted. "Mark, you don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one."

"I'm not sure that seems fair."

"The family economy evades calculation in the gross planetary product. It's the only deal I know where, when you give more than you get, you aren't bankrupted—but rather, vastly enriched."

B&H Photo seems to have a similar (even greater?) customer service drive. More than one poster here has commented that being closed on Jewish holy days (including Shabbat) is not a major deterrent given the quality of customer service and products.

Keeping one's word even when it hurts is a mark of virtue and integrity means such virtue is expressed in a breadth of life activity. Miracle on 34th Street hints on the advantage of "having a heart", even if Mr. Macy saw it as a corporate gimmick.

A McDonalds being closed one day a week because the managers like outdoor activities that day (or to try to achieve a Chick-fil-A effect) would see the ethos behind that behavior informing other behaviors.

Marketing can support a false reputation, but trust is important to social function. Betrayed (or mistaken if you are Roj Blake) trust wounds society.

Even more recent translations seem to retain significant similarity in a lot of "famous" texts (e.g., the Beatitudes — people also seem to use the archaic pronunciation of "blessed" as two syllables), presumably to ease acceptance of the change. This hints that some commonality is preserved. (Some words are also jargon, so not modernizing the word is more reasonable.)

Story outlines and concepts can also be preserved even though the "poetry" of earlier versions is lost in translation. Yet as contexts change even concepts may be less understandable and shared; "go to the ant thou sluggard" may be unclear not merely from language but from unfamiliarity with concepts. Aesop's "The Ant and the Grasshopper" has lasted thousands of years, but is not a fundamentally human metaphor and even the human concepts diligence and foresight can have different cultural tones.

"A sluggard is someone who does not work hard." "Oh, you mean someone who works smarter not harder?" "No. It means someone who does not accomplish much." "Oh, you mean someone who is burnt out?" "No. It means someone who chooses not to do things that are profitable." "Oh, you mean someone who has recognized the futility of striving for accomplishments and has learned to be content with a simple life?" "No!"

The stately feel in "Sleepytime" may have fit the solar system motif and provided contrast to the earthy elements of the story.

I liked "Sleepytime" in part from the expression of letting go while being faithful. Bingo's letting her rabbit go did not mean a complete separation but an expansion (as a few additional rabbits came to help later) similar to a parent allowing a child to grow up and leave while affirming that the child is loved.

Bluey also has some similarity to Calvin and Hobbes in that some fantastic elements are not explained. E.g., in "Sleepytime", do Bluey and Bingo have a psychic connection such that they shared part of the dream or is there imagination/unreliable narration or some third option?

From what little I understand of LLMs, the weight network developed by training on a large collection of inputs is similar to human knowledge in that some things will be clearly derived (at least in part) from a limited number of inputs but others might have no clear contributor density. If I wrote a human "superiority" science fiction story, I could be fairly confident that Timothy Zahn and Gordon R. Dickson "contributed"; however, this contribution would not be considered enough to violate copyright and require licensing. Some LLM outputs clearly violate copyright (e.g., near verbatim quotation of significant length), but other outputs seem to be more broadly derived.

If the law treats LLMs like humans ("fairly"), then broad derivation would not seem to violate copyright. This seems to lead toward "AI rights". I cannot imagine how concepts of just compensation and healthy/safe working conditions would apply to an AI. Can a corporation own a computer system than embodies an AI or is that slavery?

If the law makes special exceptions for LLMs, e.g., adjusting copyright such that fair use and natural learning only apply to human persons, then licensing would be required for training. However, attribution licenses seem to have the above-mentioned loophole. (That this loophole is not exploited may be laziness or concern about admitting that following the license is required — which makes less openly licensed/unlicensed works poisonous.)

If the purpose of copyright is to "promote the useful arts", then the law should reflect that purpose. Demotivating human creators and the sharing of their works seems destructive to that purpose, but LLMs are also enabling some creativity. Law should also incorporate general concepts such as equality under the law. LLMs also seem to have the potential for power concentration, which is also a concern for just laws.

Perhaps I am insufficiently educated on the tradeoffs to see an obvious solution, but this seems to me like a difficult problem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_vaporization#Other... [2] https://cerebras.ai/product-system/

With vast discretionary spending, people would be able to sacrifice some pleasures for pleasures related to achieving a long-term impractical goal. Space travel does not have to be the most efficient means of enjoying life to be a human choice.

A colony in Antarctica would be much more practical than one on the Moon, but a Lunar colony is more romantic.

If material trade is not worthwhile, conquest may be somewhat discouraged. (Some people might wish to rule all of humanity or convert/exterminate all heretics, so no distance would be perfectly safe, but a perceived threat in Antarctica would be easier to eliminate than a perceived threat on the Moon or in the Large Magellanic Cloud.)