icehawk

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• Commented on Pass or Fail
  “ Yes, I agree that some 'affirmative action' is still necessary, though it isn't the 1950s any more, ” The test came from a 4-panel cartoon in the late 80s, where a character said she didn’t go to Hollywood movies...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Oh, this leads to Consultancies. We’ll hire bright young overconfident people, preferably from outside the field of mathelogical demonology, pay them peanuts, and contract them to you to projects like yours at outrageous fees. And if they make a few...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Edinburgh -> Wellington is notably “further” than London -> Auckland I’m doing Wellington-> Europe this week, my first overseas trip since the pandemic started. London-> Auckland or vice versa is hard, but it’s the connections either end that add up....
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  The turnpike trusts helped too. Their tolls went on maintaining the roads: and given a lack of general govt maintenance that was a big deal. It also let them effectively regulate to stop people doing things that damaged the roads....
• Commented on Minor updates
  "Make Hogwarts the worst possible version of the worst possible English public school." That would be Naomi Novik's "A Deadly Education". Which I'd strongly recommend. She starts with the idea that you have a magical school like Hogwarts, where kids...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  "Unlike the last few patches of high inflation we've had, this patch is attributable mostly to increased corporate profits (under the guise of 'supply chain problems')." I'm not sure there is a "mostly". Inflation is what you get when the...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  Except the one defining characteristic of 20th century automation was that profit from productivity gains was 100% confiscated. I believe that claim is false. The defining characteristic of early and mid 20th century automation was that profit from productivity gains...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  Earlier Laundry books tended to each invoke a particular type of spy novel. Is there something similarly referential to a particular subgenre in this novella?...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Surely in the computational horror of the Laundryverse it would be The Silence of the Lambdas...
• Commented on Place your bets
  "So a legend about a disastrous tactical mistake -- the British soldiers were marched slowly into machinegun fire and barbed wire -- turns out to have been less a case of stupidity and more the outcome of an intelligence failure."...
• Commented on Place your bets
  US presidential candidates have run from in jail before. Because a hundred years ago the USA used to jail left-wing politicians fairly regularly. Socialist Party of America candidate Eugene Debs won 6% of the vote for president in 1912 while...
• Commented on Place your bets
  "If you asked me to build a drone capable of taking out a mach-ish bizjet at 20km altitude I could definitely do that, given the necessary resources and 90% by buying COTS parts. Bruce Simpson caused a few ructions a...
• Commented on Place your bets
  “ The reason for its inability to answer your question is therefore quite straightforward: there are probably no accounts on the internet of Lincoln's life which explicitly list his body parts in conjunction with his going to Washington.” I think...
• Commented on Place your bets
  So what if we built an actual robot and hooked it up to these machine learning algorithms. It starts by "learning" (for want of a better word) to control its limbs, and eventually to walk. It interacts with both people...
• Commented on Place your bets
  "I wasn't talking about the theoreticians, who were usually away with the fairies (*), but the practioners - including a great many people in unexpected fields (e.g. psychology, linguistics and social sciences)." I think the big turning point back from...
• Commented on Place your bets
  As someone who had an actual AI/A-Life job back from the 90s I can tell you it's very easy to make AI do something interesting. It's far, far harder to make it do something useful. VC pitches only need the...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  To each their own. I find a backlit e-ink kindle much better for reading than my IPad mini. Notably lighter, much better very dim light use for reading at 3am (especially in ‘dark’ mode) and enough battery that I can...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  "can't do much of anything above sea state 4, that is, in 1.5-2.5 metre waves: in sea state 5 it can only make 5 knots," The local car ferry from where I am to the South Island typically runs in...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  "Swinney is going to turn 59 before the vote is held, which makes him a bit old for a new leader" Hmm. Here in NZ we just had 42-year-old PM Jacinda Ardern retire from being PM, replaced by 44-year old...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  ChatGPT also reliably suggested 'Thumper' as the name of the hero rabbit whenever there was a named rabbit in the various plots I asked for. I think that's it being a mashup of common cultural tropes, and shows how strong...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Create the plot of a nonexistent video game by Charles Stross about rabbits Same question to ChatGPT about Ursula Vernon gets a co-operative survival game in a beautiful magical land, or a happy bunny-squad game. So I'm trying various SF...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Honestly, I'd expect something a lot less generic. But then I did ask an AI. Create the plot of a nonexistent video game by Charles Stross about rabbits ChatGPT: Sure, I'd be happy to help create a plot for a...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  "Since basically every city in the western world is short on housing, I would say that the obvious resolution to this is a lot of office towers getting converted into open-plan apartments." You can do fantastic conversions of 1890s office...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Shockingly, my nearly 200 year old apartment is in a tenement block (that predates indoor plumbing, never mind elevators and electricity) with shops/restaurants at ground level. Nothing new in the world, it seems. As was standard in Rome 2,000 years...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  I think you’d do better to focus on what Markov chains are really good at. (This is about ChatGPT type tech rather than it necessarily) Start with an simple example: If you want a character to sound more like Paul...
• Commented on WTF
  “ Then explain how you are going to pass every riverine city who thinks they are entitled to passage fees from river traffic.” A lot of the “Industrial Revolution” economic boom was transport. And a lot of that was political...
• Commented on WTF
  “Which didn't work too well - after the Prussians had left in 1871, did it?“ Quite. Haufmann’s urban design was to aid troops with cannons in suppressing a rioting ‘Paris mob’. I suspect that was the problem. Paris commune seems...
• Commented on WTF
  Urban geography designed to make it easier to oppress the proles is not always awful. Haufmann’s Paris - with wide straight boulevards that you cannot barricade easily breaking up the medieval maze - was designed to let troops control the...
• Commented on WTF
  “But the insurance rates make it a terrible thing to do in new construction. Especially for low rise buildings.” A lot of the high-density new residential construction here is mixed use (shops on the ground floor). Not so common in...
• Commented on WTF
  Regards POTS vs VOIP: experience here in NZ after both earthquakes and floods is that you're usually better off with a mobile. POTS goes down when the wires go, just like the power does. The cell towers have big batteries,...