I have a physics degree and I was aiming for a +1, Funny. I guess since we're joking about global warming, it counts as "dark" humour.

It's particularly bad because as we all know, dark surfaces absorb more heat than light ones.

+1 for "Language x isn't just for country x". In my favourite example, I spent a week in Hungary where nobody spoke English (this was a smaller town in the 1990s) but everyone knew German. So my rarely used knowledge of German came in handy, probably more than ever since. It meant I could hang out with the local teens in my off days, instead of hanging on to our guide for translation.

Yep, I once worked with NIR spectrometry in the paper industry around 2000. The company developed a kind of robot that measured various qualities of pulp and paper in realtime at paper mills. I was more on the hardware side, and I was kind of annoyed when they wanted to switch to spectroscopy for everything and ditch our nice old mechanical robots, parts of which I'd developed earlier. But at the same time I was excited about the ML and pattern recognition bits.

I've also been thinking along the same lines. To me, using computers is all about automation, and people in the know have been doing it since before the mainframe era. But to a lot people who got into personal computers in the 1980s and later, a computer is just a fancy word processor, fancy calculator, or a fancy tool for making art. Nothing wrong with those, but it's not exactly automation. To me, automation is something like telling the computer to edit 1000 pictures in a certain way, instead of editing them manually one by one. So in a way, AI is making the scripting/programming part more accessible (though it usually does so very inefficiently).

+(|Funny> + |Insightful>)/sqrt(2)

Are you suggesting that Shor's and Grover's are the only possible quantum algorithms? I'm not holding my breath for commercial QC either, but I don't like being overly pessimistic or conservative either. Quantum computers now are a bit like the early electronic computers of the 1940s — proofs of a concept but not exactly commercial success stories. Sure, with those computers people could do the same old calculations much faster, but the really interesting and useful applications involved a bit more vision, and those didn't appear overnight.

While many people associate QC with breaking cryptography, in the end it's just a faster way to do classical math. There's a whole world of pure quantum problems that are more naturally solved with quantum computers; this is what Feynman meant when he conceived the idea of QC in the early 1980s. So instead of getting hung up on the number of qubits, consider for example what D-Wave is doing.

I started using a standing desk soon after I quit teaching, and I guess there's a connection. But I also have some level of ADHD traits, and I find it easier to work on a computer if I can move around. I guess the commenters that don't understand standing desks have never used one extensively; the idea is not to stand in attention for 8 hours straight, but to allow your body some natural movement.

It also feels nice to sit down for a break, or for things like reading. I don't like the idea of moving the desk down to a sitting position, I'll much rather move myself somewhere else (undocking the laptop if necessary).

Writing userspace stuff in BPF so it can run super fast within the kernel. Starting with systemd.

Embrace stupidity, get tired of winning.

I've got the impression that blowing your nose hard would push mucus into the sinuses. But it's hard to avoid blowing altogether. If I'm badly blocked, I start with neti to get things flowing better. In fact I do Neti every morning anyway, but you can do it a few times a day if needed.

Clearly someone was boned to build an inference engine in 9 months. Training might take a while, but it'll be way more flexible than any GPU.

I recently watched a documentary on the British space program, and I recall someone saying something like "this project needs more engineers and fewer boffins". So "boffin" is specifically a scientist in an ivory tower, much like "egghead" in US slang.

I don't think Microsoft will let something as trivial as primality to get in the way of their quantum computing research. REAL men can roundhouse-kick any number into factors if they so desire.

"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." -- Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (1995)

REAL men kept a web diary before the word "blog" was coined. OTOH, if "blog" means something where others can comment on posts, then to me Slashdot is the original "blog", again a couple of years before the word.