Hebrew and English. I have tried once or twice to learn a third language but I just don’t have the discipline for it.

Hebrew is my native tongue, and English I speak pretty much at a native level simply by lots and lots of being online and watching TV from a young age, and often chatting with my sister in English for no real reason. I’ve even got a pretty convincing American accent. In hindsight I would have preferred most British accents, but I can’t seem to change it now (refer to the aforementioned discipline issue).

I still regularly talk to two of my friends in English, still for no apparent reason. We just switch between Hebrew and English arbitrarily.

Yeah, of course. I think I was misunderstood, which is probably why I got so many downvotes.

Most tasks are possible (and often trivial, given access to the right library) with traditional programming. If it’s possible to do them this way, this is by far the best approach.

Of the things that are not reasonably doable this way, like determining whether a photo is of a bird as in the comic, quite a lot of them are possible nowadays with machine learning (AKA “AI”), and often trivial given access to the right pre-trained model. And in this realm, I would say success rates are very often higher than that. Image recognition is insanely good.

What I’m asking is, what’s a task that’s virtually impossible both with programming and with machine learning?

“Mission critical” tasks which require very high and provable reliability, such as autonomous driving cars, technically fit this question but I think it’s ignoring the point of the question.

And if you were going to mention counterexamples where specially crafted images get mislabeled by AI: this is akin to attacking vulnerabilities in traditional software, which have always existed. If you’re making a low-stakes app or a game, this doesn’t matter.

It’s more logical than Linux’s version numbering system:

Does the major version number (4.x vs 5.x) mean anything?

No. The major version number is incremented when the number after the dot starts looking “too big.” There is literally no other reason.

https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html

What would be a “nearly impossible” task in this post-AI world? Short of the provably impossible tasks like the busy beaver problem (and even then, you would be able to make an algorithm that covers a subset of the problem space), I really can’t think of anything.

This is the pedantry I came here for. 5/5

I’ve been rewatching Community recently and it definitely fits the bill. It has incredibly good writing.

But more than that, Community gives me the impression that is has an infinite budget. Not a ridiculously big budget like some shows and movies do… an infinite budget. The difference being that they don’t waste a cent. There isn’t a single thing on screen that doesn’t serve a purpose. No ridiculous effect or expensive crane shot added in just to flaunt their budget. But if an episode’s script actually called for a particular shot to be done, they would move heaven and earth to make that happen. That’s what it feels like.

In my head I compare it to having unlimited vacation days at work. Case studies have shown that workers take fewer vacation days when they can take as many as they want, compared to when they have a set number per year. So in the analogy, a show with a set ludicrously high budget will use every last cent of it even for pointless frill, whereas a (hypothetical) show with an unlimited budget would only use however much money is necessary to create the show. Somehow, Community became that show. … It probably has to do with how frequently they actually went way over budget in practice.

I fucking love Community.

I generally like what he does, but sometimes he crosses lines that I can’t really forgive. Cheating in a multiplayer game against unaware players is not acceptable. https://youtu.be/os4DcbpL0Nc

He literally describes it as “bullying some nerds”, and you know what, that’s 100% accurate and I hate it.

To the best of my knowledge he never repeated this stunt, so maybe it’s forgivable, but he still did it while obviously completely aware of how wrong it is. Gross.

His other videos that I’ve watched are fine.

OP posted the two pages in the wrong order, so you (and I) saw page 2 before page 1.

Well, sort of. They’re not for secutiry, that’s for sure. They were originally about making it harder for automated bot requests to go through and overload the server. ReCAPTCHA then started turning it around to make OCR better using machine learning, which is commonly agreed to be a Good Thing since it helped digitize old books and things like that. But of course, this in turn made it possible for bots to get past the CAPTCHA, and everything spiraled from there.

At some point everyone kind of forgot the real point of a CAPTCHA, and it’s now much more of a free training data generator and much less of an obstacle for bots. But it still can prevent complete rookies from making thousands of requests per second with a simple python script, so it does serve a little bit of that original purpose.

Love this webcomic. Original source: https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/miniFantasyTheater/014.html

It’s an open-source comic. The Krita project with all the original layers is free to download, and the SVG and text for the speech bubbles is hosted on git so it can be translated to many other languages. I’ve never seen a webcomic do this before, it’s really neat. And of course, the artwork is just beautiful!

It’s an awesome comic.

Pretty much all of them, up to and including biting me. 🥰

that is without a doubt the liquidest cat I’ve ever seen

Your message might be correct (maybe) but the way you wrote it could not be wronger.

For starters, it’s not an unusual problem at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loneliness_epidemic?wprov=sfla1

Secondly, your whole comment is really aggressive, from “Um, excuse me?” to “you should work on it asap” it’s all just attacks as if it’s as simple as that.

I got a (very cheap) Thinkpad from my university. It had that proprietary Ethernet port. It came with a ThinkPad-branded USB to Ethernet adapter. The adapter came with the laptop and still didn’t use the proprietary port!

Now, there is a chance that the university IT which set stuff up before giving it to me, is responsible for disappearing the proprietary adapter. But because the USB adapter is branded with ThinkPad, I really think it’s just what it came with.

That’s great. That’s not the world we live in.

That’s nonsense.

That’s why patents are relatively short. A patent grants exclusivity for the inventors, which incentives people and companies to invent in the first place. But it’s limited in time so that the whole world benefits eventually. Everything that was invented over 20 years ago is now public domain. This includes a ton of safety mechanisms, some in cars, that never would have been invented if there wasn’t a financial incentive for it.

I don’t like this all that much from a moral standpoint, but this is a good compromise for the world we live in. To say it would have been better if it didn’t exist it all is just plain wrong.

Same video on Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/practical-engineering-the-hidden-engineering-of-runways/ (16m36s, presumably because it skips a sponsored segment)

I’m actually surprised he doesn’t look to Nebula from the blog post version of the video.

Man, I really need to binge that show. I only saw some episodes as a kid.

Unimportant nitpick: Linux Mint 22.3 was released this week. There is no Mint 23 yet.

(it was OP’s mistake but they at least added “(?)” to indicate they weren’t sure)

I don’t know the technical details, all I know is that if I click Shut Down while I have unsaved work open, it tells me about it and doesn’t just kill everything.