Person I’m responding to said this was common in continental Europe

Wouldn’t this be blatantly in conflict with the EU cookie law? Like I’m not from Europe but my understanding was that it needs to be equally easy to accept or reject all cookies. Dark patterns aren’t allowed

How is this a “Mercator-style projection”?

Also, people figured out the Earth was round long ago exactly because of these sorts of discrepancies. There just wasn’t a lot of value in being hyper accurate since the purpose of a map before the invention of ocean ships was just walking from one city to another along roads.

Seems like it’s very specifically chosen to preserve distances and reduce distortion along the longitude lines closest to China. Perhaps it is useful in that capacity but it introduces distortion for the entire rest of the world.

I guess it really puts the 中 in 中国 (中 means middle, 中国 means “middle country” and is the Chinese name of China)

Ah. I see, so reducing the resolution was more about sending frames to the monitor faster, not about optimizing the tube hardware’s behaviour

Yeah I didn’t think it would make the “pixels” smaller, but the beam would need to pulse less often and therefore could travel more. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what they did.

It makes sense you’d be able to get a much higher refresh rate on a tube if you reduce the resolution, since you would be reducing the beam’s travel.

The Turing Test says that any person could have any conversation with a machine and there’s no chance you could tell it’s a machine. It does not say that one person could have one conversation with a machine and not be able to tell.

Current text generation models out themselves all the damn time. It can’t actually understand the underlying concepts of words. It just predicts what bit of text would be most convincing to a human based on previous text.

Playing Go was never the mark of AI, it was the mark of improving game-playing machines. It doesn’t represent “intelligence”, only an ability to predict what should happen next based on a set of training data.

It’s worth noting that after Lee Se Dol lost to Alphago, researchers found a fairly trivial Go strategy that could reliably beat the machine. It was simply such an easy strategy to counter that none of the games in the training data had included anyone attempting that strategy, so the algorithm didn’t account for how to counter it. Because the computer doesn’t know Go theory, it only knows how to predict what to do next based on the training data.

Don’t worry about WW3. The more inevitable thing that will destroy us is climate change.

But seriously, why worry about stuff you can’t change? If they launch the nukes, then you’ll be dead and so it won’t matter if you worried about it or not. So you might as well just not worry.

Are these basically like “dumb blonde” jokes in America?

“Courses” is a strong word for what Duolingo offers. It just shows you flashcards, but never explains grammar/syntax rules. Lingodeer is far superior.

It’s fun to put “I’m not racist but” in front of totally innocuous statements.

I’m not racist but there’s a blue Hyundai parked outside my building.