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vrandecic, to Cat
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

This bag is giving its third day of joy

vrandecic, to Disney
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

We're watching Spy x Family on Disney Plus with Little One, and they're showing ads for alcohol all the time. The beer mixed with fruit juices stuff, and other beer drinks. That doesn't feel right.

vintprox,
@vintprox@techhub.social avatar

@vrandecic Arrrrr

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Wikipedia is about verifiable facts from reliable sources. For Wikipedia, arguing with "The Truth" is not effective. Wikipedians don't write "because it's true" but "because that's what's in this source".

It is painful to see Katherine Maher viciously and widely attacked on Twitter, also for a quote restating how Wikipedia works.

I have worked with @krmaher
We were lucky to have her at Wikipedia, and NPR is lucky to have her.

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Are you a front end or full stack engineer and want to work with me on Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions? Then we are a looking for you!

Feel free to share.

https://boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jobs/5850672

vrandecic, to scifi
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Rainbows end.

The book, written in 2006, was set in 2025 in San Diego. Its author, Vernor Vinge, died yesterday, March 20, 2024, in nearby La Jolla, at the age of 79.

Rainbows end explores themes such as shared realities, digital surveillance, and the digitisation of the world, years before Marc Andreessen proclaimed that "software is eating the word", describing it much more colorfully and rich than Andreessen ever did.

1/3

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Great story about how YouTube helped with moving away from IE6.

"Our most renegade web developer, an otherwise soft-spoken Croatian guy, insisted on checking in the code under his name, as a badge of personal honor, and the rest of us leveraged our OldTuber status to approve the code review."

I swear that wasn't me. Although I would have loved to do it.

https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

luis_in_brief,
@luis_in_brief@social.coop avatar

@vrandecic great story indeed

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

My knowledge about Gödel was very incomplete. This fascinating article helped a lot!

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00644-1

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Software issues around leap day 2024: https://codeofmatt.com/list-of-2024-leap-day-bugs/

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Interesting link:

https://apple.com/hypercard

magnusmanske,
@magnusmanske@wikis.world avatar

@vrandecic "HyperCard was created by Bill Atkinson following an LSD trip"

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

We were wondering what the line "One a penny, two a penny" means, as it sounds paradoxical, and so we asked Google, and it generated the following code (!) as the answer:

def one_a_penny_two_a_penny_meaning():
"""
This function explains the meaning of the phrase "one a penny, two a penny".

Returns:
A string explaining the meaning of the phrase "one a penny, two a penny".
"""
1/4

mduvekot,
@mduvekot@vis.social avatar

@vrandecic from A dictionary of archaic and provincial words by James Orchard Halliwel (Vol II), 1847

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

You have a chatbot on your site, you are responsible for what it says. Sounds good to me.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-honor-refund-policy-invented-by-airlines-chatbot/

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Translate text to Morse code

https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z10944

(Trying to get the search engines to index the function pages, which initially were accidentally set not to. Feel free to boost and help with that.)

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Great interview with Erik Brynjolfsson on the potential impact of AI on the economy.

"In particular, if the technologies are mainly used to [...] replace humans with machines, it is likely to lead to lower wages and more concentration of wealth and power as capital substitutes for labour. But, if we use the technology mainly to augment our skills, to do new things, then it is more likely to lead to widely shared prosperity and higher wages."

https://www.ft.com/content/b71759fe-397b-4688-bc81-b082edb25f31

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

And also: "Current tax policy and investment credits encourage capital over labour. Marginal tax rates on capital are about half of what they are on labour [...]. That biases entrepreneurs towards trying to find capital-heavy solutions instead of ones that involve labour. I do not see a public policy reason for having that kind of a bias. That is just one example of where the policy needs to take into account what it is doing and how it is shaping the trajectory of technological advances."

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

AI² releases OLMo, a truly open source LLM. 7 billion parameters, 2 trillion tokens of training text. All training data, all weighs, all code, and even checkpoints.

Thank you, AI²!

https://www.fastcompany.com/91021305/ai2-new-open-source-llm

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

If you're a bit older, you might remember 3.5” disks, and that they had a capacity of 1.44 MB (two sides, HD, PC).

But what did that MB stand for? How many bytes was that? Do you think it was

a) 1.44 x 1000 x 1000 = 1,440,000
b) 1.44 x 1024 x 1024 = 1,509,949

Answer in reply.

18+ vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Answer: neither. It was 1.44 x 1000 x 1024 = 1,474,560 bytes.

The reason was that the standard density single sided 3.5” disk took 360 KB, back then when KB usually meant 1024 bytes (the IEC standardized KB to be 1000 bytes only in 1998). This doubled to 720 KB when the disk was used double sided, and it doubled once again to 1440 KB when HD was used. And then 1440 KB was turned into 1.44 MB, thus mixing the 1000 and the 1024.

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