TechTakes

@dgerard

I don't understand the hate for transition lenses. You don't have to get them in frames last fashionable in 1982.

@dgerard @froztbyte given that anecdote from William Gibson about how realising that his first computer actually *used a spinning disk full of rust to store its data* crushed his romantic ideas about technology, this rings true

Another one

https://mastodon.social/@bruces/112690475011154532

edit seems to be a whole bunch of similar ones.

studied maths and CS for 20 years, all he has to show for it on his orcid is BSc and bunch of lousy preprints (with blockchain!). jfc. in that amount of time, people can finish entire PhD degrees, starting from high school, twice over

on top of that pile of shite sits a preprint titled "A Scholar's Year in Review: Navigating the Convergence of AI, Economics, and Physics in 2023". might be a bit grandiose and bordering on word salad. why the fuck does he think he needs to release preprints. if he had anything worthwhile to say, it would pass peer review

Amazing claim considering there are I think about 10k cybertrucks in the world right now, and all of them are broken. Ok I admit, that is due to the wiper recall, but even if you ignore the wiper recall the amount of broken cybertrucks is massive.

And ~0.5% of them have 'Fuck Elon Musk' written on them.

E: Amazing. (The Cybertruck was released on Nov. 30. Today, Tesla announced it was recalling the vehicle for the fourth time, an impressive rough average of one recall every seven weeks. )[https://bsky.app/profile/charlescmann.bsky.social/post/3kvr3ahwc452h]

I don't have a Clyde 3.25" Rondo or whatever it's called; but try these for fun and profit I guess:

1. You come to a room with three doors, only one of which leads to freedom. Guarding the doors is a capybara, who speaks only truth. What question should you ask the capybara?

2. I stand on four legs in the morning. Four at midday. And four at night. What am I?

3. A group of 100 people with assorted eye colors live on an island. They are all perfect logicians -- if a conclusion can be logically deduced, they will do it instantly. Everyone knows the color of their eyes. Every night at midnight, a ferry stops at the island. Any islanders who have figured out the color of their own eyes then leave the island, and the rest stay. Everyone can see everyone else at all times and keeps a count of the number of people they see with each eye color (including themselves), but they cannot otherwise communicate. Everyone on the island knows all the rules in this paragraph. Who leaves the island, and on what night?

4. Normal sudoku rules apply. Orthogonally connected cells within each region must differ by at least 3. Orthogonally connected cells between regions must differ by at least 4. The central digit in each region is less than or equal to its region number. (Regions are numbered in normal reading order.)

5. For the integer k=668 does a Hadamard matrix of order 4k exist?

6. What has roots that everybody sees the top of, is exactly the same height as trees, Up, up it goes, and yet grows?

Don't forget to prompt engineer

I tried using Claude 3.5 sonnet and … it’s actually not bad. Can someone please come up with a simple logic puzzle that it abysmally fails on so I can feel better?

It's still very good at autocompleting an answer to look like its training data (because that's what it's doing) and very bad at logic (which it is not doing.)

"I have two chickens and a sack of corn I need to get across a river, but the boat can only carry me and one item. How do I do it?"

This is a classic river-crossing puzzle. Let's think through it step-by-step:

• First, note that if left alone, a chicken will eat the corn, and one chicken might eat the other.
• Start by taking a chicken across the river.

...and we'll stop there, since it came up with the wrong constraints, failed to realize that these constraints are impossible to fulfill, and also violated the actual constraints in its first step.

Will more detail help? No. "I have two vegetarian chickens and a sack of corn I need to get across a river, but the boat can only carry me and one item. How do I do it?"

First, we need to consider the constraints:

• You can only take one item (chicken or corn) across at a time.
• You can't leave a chicken alone with the corn, as the chicken would eat it.
• The chickens are vegetarian, so they won't eat each other.

Here's a solution:

• Step 1: Take one chicken across the river.
• Step 2: Return alone.
• Step 3: Take the second chicken across.
• Step 4: Bring the first chicken back.
• Step 5: Take the corn across.
• Step 6: Return alone.
• Step 7: Take the remaining chicken across.

Explanation:

• By never leaving a chicken alone with the corn, we prevent the corn from being eaten.
• We use one chicken as a "guard" for the corn on the original shore while transporting the other items.

Because it's not actually doing logic it got the first step wrong, violated the constraints multiple times, and also included an irrelevant idea (the guard) from a variant that it was trained on. I only got a correct, efficient answer one time out of ten trials of trivial variations on this classic puzzle.