Sam Hughes (qntm) is very much alive, last I checked.

I think they are just making reference to the "death of the author" concept in literary analysis, which basically says that what the author was intending to convey should be ignored when analysing the work: the work stands alone.

And Blindsight. I will recommend Blindsight all day, even if it's not directly to do with uploading.

Worth noting that this is the thesis of Seeing Red: A study in consciousness. I think you will find it a good read, even if I disagreed with some of the ideas.

> During the Second World War, almost every motorised vehicle in continental Europe was converted to use firewood.

How is this the first time me (or anyone else in this comment section) is hearing about this? It seems like a pretty major deal.

From what I gather the conversion wasn't a big deal. The engines of the time weren't picky about fuel, so you just have to find space to mount the wood gas generator (a very simple if bulky device) and pipe the wood gas into the fuel system. And once gasoline was available again those vehicles were easily converted back

If everything is operating correctly then yes it's wonderful. If conditions are poor then you are in for a bad time. There are a lot of things that can cause poor gas quality, often having to do with things like biomass moisture content, mineral content, and material feed. You can get into regimes where pyrolysis and reduction are incomplete and the tar content of the gas is high enough to stick valves and acidify the oil. Gasification is a fickle lover.

Part of the problems with it is likely long term usage because wood is not an entirely predictable fuel. All sorts of hydrocarbon oils and tars can come out of it and the moisture content of wood can be all over the place.

Possibly modern wood pellets would eliminate many of these problems, but if you aren't getting a really good burn, which takes some skill to setup with just random chopped wood pieces, you may end up gunking the engine all up and filling the oil with crap and possibly having some not so great exhaust coming out.

Otherwise you need the skills and an engine simple enough to be worth semi regularly opening it up to clean all the carbon and crap out of it. Something that might not seem like too big of a deal when people already use 1930s cars, but would become a much bigger and bigger deal in the decades after WWII when cars and engines become increasingly complex and people don't expect to be removing major engine components after 5,000 miles.

Some of us had the honor of learning about it from WWII vets... But, to your point, everyone in Europe was busy fighting the war, and there was very little 'driving around'. So not much talk about it.

Called "generatorgas" or "gengas" for short in Sweden. Almost all cars in pictures from the early forties had a little cart behind them. That was the generator.

I had heard stories of these from my Dad. He lived in country Australia (SA) during WWII, and the long-distance buses had been converted over to this.

With germanys lack of petrol, they relied heavily on alternative fuel sources.

trivia: The US had plenty of gasoline during the war, but they had to ration gasoline because they were short of rubber for tires. So it goes.

It's not just the installation process. Being forced to manage or setup automatic management for most parts of your system teaches you a lot. Often it's just as simple as `sudo pacman -Sy yabdabadoo` but its more instructive than it 'just working'.

Surprising no one.

> Grok based transformer

Is Grok not an LLM? Or do they have other models under that brand?

> > Grok based transformer

> Is Grok not an LLM?

Transformer is the underlying technology for (most) LLMs (GPT stands for “Generative Pre-Trained Transformer”)

Right. How is this one based on Grok?

I don't know the answer to your second question, but what about "transformer" makes you think "not an LLM"?

Not the word 'transformer', but I doubt they'd use an LLM as a For You algorithm.

This is not how continuous probabilities work. The probability that a clock is exactly right is zero; hence there is always some error in a measurement of time. Adding additional clocks will always cause the error to be less or equal to the maximum error.

That seems very odd - if it's possible to make those optimisations without any additional type data then why wouldn't GCC do that anyway? The benefit of stricter type rules is that more information is available to the compiler. Using a different compiler doesn't inherently increase the amount of type information.

I believe the claim is more precisely stated as "Many C programs are valid C++ and are faster when compiled as C++" - i.e., even though the text of the program didn't change, the rules for interpreting that text changed, and it's that difference in interpretation that permits better optimizations.

theoretically the C++ compiler needs to consider things like exceptions which don't exist in C, so I'd even tend to the opposite

But why was _name the naming syntax for reserved keywords, specifically?

I suspect, when the specification was created, "_" was already popular for private/reserved members in many programming languages. In C++, for instance, you can only start an identifier with a letter or an underscore. So it seems like a natural, intuitive choice. Whether anyone can find any corroborating evidence would be interesting.

Probably inspired by C and C++ which reserve names starting with an underscore for the implementation (more precisely, they reserve names starting with `_[_A-Z]` everywhere, and all other names starting with `_` in the global scope only).

I nice factoid: in Erlang, `_` if functional. It means "I don't care about this variable". When pattern matching you can put `_` to not bind value in function or pattern to anything or prepend a variable with `_` to tell compiler that you won't be using it, but it's there for "documentation" purposes. For example `[A|_]=List` will extract first element of list into A and ignore rest of list. Underscore has some other uses too.

Yes, many languages use `_` as a placeholder name, and at least in Rust any name starting with `_` is considered intentionally unused.

Aside: many IRC clients would auto-append _ when registering a nick if the desired nick was already registered. Why _? Who knows.

Probably because it has no specific meaning and being almost whitespace is the easiest to mentally ignore out of the set of valid nickname characters. `-` is another candidate but a programmer used to C-like languages will likely intuitively pick `_` just because it’s valid in identifiers unlike `-`.

>But why was _name the naming syntax for reserved keywords, specifically?

As with so many things in software engineering, the answer comes down to "some programmer in the 70s working on a UNIX system had to make an arbitrary decision about something, and no one ever had a good reason to change it again."

Most other characters you would use aren’t valid HTML, and originally you could say things like target=foo (no quotes) and it would work.