Phillip Winn @pwinn@qoto.org
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- he/him
- Pronounce
- like "Quinn"
Love conquers fear
#nerdery #books #puzzles #ttrpg #anime #Christian #feminist #antiracist #photography #sudoku #golang #python #OpenWeb #AIart #GenshinImpact #tfr
Joined Nov 2022
Every night, I pick up a medium soda from a local chain convenience store*. I do this at night because, well, that’s when I have time to leave the house. But I don’t want to drink soda at night, caffeinated as it is. So each night I pick up the next day’s soda.
Since I’m not planning to drink it until the next day, I don’t bother inserting a straw, which is how I’ve come to notice something odd.
The manufacturing tolerance on plastic lids is pretty tight. So tight, in fact, that if I just slap a lid down on a cup full of soda and carry it to my car, the jostling and release of bubbles often pushes up on the lid so much that soda leaks out of the side of the cup.
But wait, what about the hole in the lid? Shouldn’t the gas escape through the hole in the lid, rather than pushing up and creating a dome? It turns out that when I don’t insert a straw, there is no hole in the lid. There are two cuts in the lid, making an X or + into which a straw may be inserted, but if I don’t insert a straw, those cuts are basically sealed tight, tighter than the edges of the cup, for example.
I’ve started to use a fingernail to bend up one of the corners of the straw cut-out, just to let a very small amount of gas escape, so I still have bubbly soda the next day.
Some other time I’ll talk about why I have had as many as four (4) medium sodas in the fridge overnight.
- I said “pick up,” not “buy.” Despite owning only electric cars, I visit a gas station every day. The incentive program at RaceTrac is incredibly effective. Over time I built up enough points that I get a free medium soda or slushee (or a small coffee) every single day. Of course, I go every day, because why not? And since I’m there every day, sometimes I also buy roller grill items (America’s equivalent of Asia’s street food), and sometimes candy. So RaceTrac is giving away a lot of soda–which costs them very little–and managing to keep me as a customer, despite the fact that I will never again need to buy their main product. Pretty impressive!
Phillip Winn
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Phillip Winn
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Judith Love Cohen was the engineer who made Apollo's Abort Guidance System, which was crucial to saving the ill-fated Apollo 13. She finished it while in labor, then (the same day) delivered her younger son -- the actor Jack Black.
This is one of those utterly remarkable #space stories that I stumble over once in a while and it blows my mind afresh every single time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Love_Cohen
Phillip Winn
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On mastodon, I have felt strangely free to post when I think I have something to say, and remain a silent observer when I don’t. This might come as a surprise to some, who wonder why I think I had to say that, or this other thing, but that’s life.
For whatever record anybody is keeping, I support people. I believe in people. LGBTQIA+ people, straight people, people of different ethnic backgrounds, people who believe in different things or nothing, people. I support people living their own lives, making their own choices, loving or not loving whom they wish.
I support anybody willing to to support the same people I do, while allowing people to opt out. Some people opt out by pursuing trans-exclusionary views, or anti-immigrant views, or views that involve the superiority of one ethnic groups and inferiority of others. Believing any of that nonsense is opting out of the amazing wonder of a pluralistic modern society. It’s siding with the bad guys, and nobody should want to be like a nazi, or a confederate, or any other historical losers who also thought they should treat others badly.
Be a winner! Don’t just tolerate people, support people! Love people!
Phillip Winn
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USA the last 1 week:
•Black teen shot for ringing a doorbell
•Two teen girls shot for sitting in a car
•A 7 mo pregnant woman & her unborn child were shot at a Walgreens
•20-year-old woman shot dead for turning into a driveway
•Four young people shot dead at a birthday party
Imagine thinking the solution is even MORE guns.😐
#GunReformNOW
Phillip Winn
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A Japanese man rides his bike carrying Soba noodles on his shoulder in Tokyo, 1935. Colourised by u/vorst17735
#MadeMeSmile
Phillip Winn
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"I know, both from the Sermon on the Mount and personal experience, that true safety comes not from higher walls or bigger guns but from the refusal of weapons and hostility, which can enable trust and friendship whether with neighbors at home or enemies abroad."—Doug Hostetter https://www.friendsjournal.org/higher-walls-and-bigger-guns/
Phillip Winn
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Test your knowledge of probability with the Two-Child Problem:
Question A: Mr. Jones has two children. The older child is a girl. What is the probability that both children are girls?
Question B: Mr. Smith has two children. At least one of them is a boy. What is the probability that both children are boys?
Check out my latest article to see if you get the correct answers.
#math #probability #paradox
https://medium.com/intuition/the-probability-paradox-the-mind-boggling-two-child-problem-explained-fcdeed38f5b1
This is a pretty amazing video that demonstrates the state of the art of the leading LLM.
Wyatt Cheng is a Game Director at Blizzard Entertainment, so his results are based on what is visible in the video, as well as years of experience. Still, he was able to produce a working game without writing any code himself, relying on the Unity toolchain, ChatGPT-generated code, and his own experience and understanding.
As he says in the video, we’re still not quite at the point were someone with no ability or experience can create a game using Chat-GPT, but we’re very close. More to the point, I think this opens news doors for someone who “thinks like a programmer,” but maybe lacks C# experience and has therefore felt intimidated by Unity.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising that this seems to support my priors, but I continue to see these amazing LLMs more as productivity enhancers than as job destroyers. Not to say some jobs won’t be destroyed! Enhancing the productivity of developers means that any large enough team now needs fewer developers. It’s also more clear than ever to me that those who can communicate clearly and completely have an advantage in dealing with LLMs.
I think it’s reasonable to be concerned about the developer pipeline when junior-level work can be accomplished almost as easily as it can be described. How will junior developers ever become senior developers if they can’t get jobs doing junior development and building experience? I’m interested in how we will solve this challenge as an industry.
In the meantime, I’m enjoying having ChapGPT write shell scripts and simple Go functions for me.
Phillip Winn
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Jon Cooper on Twitter: I hear from people regularly out here in New York who say “I don't know if I want to go to a red state right now because they’re not safe."
The map shows the number of gun deaths per 100,000 people in each state in 2020. As you can see, the number of gun deaths is much higher in red states than in blue states.
For example, the number of gun deaths in Mississippi, a red state, is 28.6 per 100,000 people. The number of gun deaths in New York, a blue state, is 5.3 per 100,000 people.
This data shows that there is a clear correlation between gun ownership and gun violence. States with more guns have more gun deaths.
Phillip Winn
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We are 100 days into 2023.
Today’s mass shooting in Louisville, KY has left 5 people dead & is the 146th mass shooting of 2023.
We don't have to live like this.
Republicans have loudly admitted, "We're not going to fix this," proving once again that Republicans claim government doesn't work, then get elected & prove it.
Vote the GOP out. Vote in Dems who will pass actual and proven gun safety legislation. Protect our nation.
Phillip Winn
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North Dakota politicians just raised their meal reimbursement to $45 while rejecting a bill for free school lunch, which costs only $3 per meal. That means, for the price of one politician's lunch, you could feed 15 low-income kids — socialism for me, but not for thee.
I don’t think there is anything profound I can say about the ongoing, escalating, heart-breaking nightmare in state legislatures around the United States. In Florida and Tennessee, it seems to be an all-out war against American children, joining and escalating the ongoing racism still present in this country.
I thought we were in a low-trust society before, but it’s clear our trust in institutions can–and should–be even lower.
I stand with people trying to live their lives without fear. I stand with trans people, gay kids, women, Black people, and poor people. I stand against those who care more about their comfort or hobbies than human lives.I can’t believe this isn’t the position of every thinking human, but apparently we live in a heartless world.
Or at least a heartless country.
Phillip Winn
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My daughter, who has had a degree in computer science for 25 years, posted this observation about ChatGPT on Facebook. It's the best description I've seen:
This is a really great summary of almost everything I’ve typed on the subject of LLMs in the last week or three, but the writer was much more concise: https://confusedbit.dev/posts/how_does_gpt_work/
From memory, and reasoning: you take the hoje across first, since it can’t be trusted with either the blurple or the mantiple. You return alone.
Then you take over either of the others, let’s say the blurple. But this time you bring the hoje back with you.
Now you take the other one, the mantiple across, leaving poor voracious hoje alone. You return alone again.
Finally you take the hoje across again, but this time to stay, since you’re there to protect the blurple and mantiple.
That’s it, four steps, done. The hoje was never left alone with either the blurple or the mantiple, and all are safely across. I guess now you know I’m not an LLM, at least until LLMs are trained to answer this one correctly.
- Pronouns
- he/him
- Pronounce
- like "Quinn"
Love conquers fear
#nerdery #books #puzzles #ttrpg #anime #Christian #feminist #antiracist #photography #sudoku #golang #python #OpenWeb #AIart #GenshinImpact #tfr
Joined Nov 2022
