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Comment Use it sometimes for work (Score 1) 239

I needed to do a few presentations on technical topics the last few months.
The last time I thought, let's see if Chatgpt has some extra suggestions on the topic. I gave it the text of my presentation. It answered, "your presentation is already reasonably well structured, and I will make the text flow a bit better" - being not native English I appreciated the edits; and then it suggested some extra slides as I had asked. I checked with chatgpt and using google on these; and found them niche yet quite well spotted, even if not always all that important for my exact goals. I did use some of that material.
On the previous topic, I had more urgent things to do and was not so interested in making that presentation, it was just a job, so I asked a detailed question, it gave me the text of a presentation, and I kept refining my query over a few more iterations. In the end it came with a pretty ok presentation, with some errors present. I went through every slide, sometimes correcting here and there, sometimes dropping a slide or adding one. I had a reasonable presentation in 2h that would have taken me a good day.
Based on this experience I find it a great productivity enhancer, IF you read its output critically and accept that you will need to do some error correction.

Comment Re:"fighting to secure one of the limited spots" (Score 1) 27

>> It sounds like they need more universities.

They are apparently working on that.
check the table
https://journals.sagepub.com/d...
And google AI summarised (though I couldn't quickly check if fully correct): "China adds around 100 to 200 new universities each year, primarily focusing on expanding capacity and improving the quality of higher education. The total number of higher education institutions in China has seen significant growth in recent decades, reaching 3,074 in 2023. "
Top universities are expanding enrolment:
https://www.globaltimes.cn/pag...
https://www.reuters.com/world/...

In 2021 in Guangdong (Shenzhen is that province), they were opening 11 more universities. But might have been difficult to fill in teacher positions on time.
https://www.universityworldnew...

Comment Hypercard could have been basis of internet (Score 1) 53

Steve Jobs made a lot of good future-oriented decision for the first Mac. But he didn't build in networking from the start, which eh later acknowledged was an oversight.
Similarly, Hypercard was a fascinating single user experience for hyperlinked content. I did some early hobby programming on it and was impressed how you could make something cool with it. But imagine if it would have offered seamless connection to other hypercard stacks on remote computers from the beginning, it could have changed the way we see the internet.
Atkinson was indeed a genius... MacPaint, Quickdraw routines, Hypercard. Impressive!

Comment Re:Adobe Tax (Score 1) 65

if you buy a top digital camera and leave it in jpg then you are not getting the best out of it. Pro photographers and ambitious amateurs shoot raw because it captures all details and because of the great flexibility it gives in post production. I had alas dropped my GRIIIx but before that, it was amazing how it could capture single hairs in RAW mode.

Submission + - New evidence for Planet 9 at fringes of our solar system (earthsky.org) 4

Tablizer writes: The case is growing that a Neptune-sized planet – Planet 9 – hides deep in the outskirts of our solar system. Researchers from Caltech, Universite Cote d'Azur and Southwest Research Institute shared a pre-print paper on April 17, 2024. In it, they argue that a group of little bodies beyond Neptune bunch together due to Planet 9’s gravitational influence.

These distant solar system bodies aren’t spread equally in their orbit like the rocky boulders of the asteroid belt. Instead, they form clumpy groups. So, the researchers think that a larger, more distant, object is gravitationally herding them into this pattern. And, in fact, that’s how planet eight – Neptune – was discovered. Neptune was yanking on Uranus’ orbit.

Two of the four authors on the new paper, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of Caltech, are the originators of the theory of Planet 9. In fact, Mike Brown wrote a book about his life and research in the far edges of our solar system, including the re-classification of Pluto. The book is titled How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. But these researchers believe there’s an object much larger than Pluto farther out in our solar neighborhood. This planet would be the size of five Earths (about the size of Neptune) and lie 400 to 800 times farther from the sun than Earth.

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