One of my projects was using a RRD database to store 10-second samples from 20 data streams with a RRD time of 1 year, which works out to around 82 million entries. I display this interactively on a raspberry pi and I used to use RRDTool in python, but switching to my own code leveraging mySQL (and using some judicious rollup tables) means that instead of a larger time span taking ~5 seconds to update, it is now fast enough to give me 20fps no matter the viewed range.

Not sure DuckDB will provide any benefit to my specific case, but I'll check it out.

I really did not want to change from 7 to 10. I did it begrudgingly partly because "It is the last version of windows".

Well, they were right in one sense. It is the last version of windows I will have. I now have an old box set up with Linux Mint, so I can get familiar with it before switching over all my main PCs

I found Fedora Workstation 'mature' and an easy thing to switch to - there are a few Gnome conveniences like taskbar and menus that can be easily turned on (Claude helped me there).

Exactly my turn. Win 10 is clearly the last Windows for me. For private I still use Win 7, for work I used Win 10, but the driver support for my old dell laptop(2014) is so shitty, that it's overheating and throttleling as soon it has to do some normal things.

When the last bastion of Windows, the driver support is falling, I can switch to Linux. Since 2 month I use openSuse on this device and be happy. No running fan, no problems. Windows is dying.

Which distro do you run?

That's what they did with Hubble. Of course the CIA bought them to point downwards...

The way humans beat AI, at least until AGI, is to innovate conceptually. If what you do is simply rearrange existing concepts then your work will likely get replaced by AI. Coding is a good example of this, you put documented commands, with known behaviours, in sequences that produce defined outcomes. That is the perfect job for AI, if we can solve their irrational desire to please and hallucinate along the way.

AI is simply not able to innovate, only combine.

I have Instagram installed, and it has a self-regulating feature for me. I sometimes load it up and see if any posts from the dozens of accounts I follow show up in the first 10.

When they do not, and I just get 10 random tiktok style slop videos from accounts I do not follow, I close the app and try again in a few months.

I am so glad they put in this feature that stops me scrolling further.

Idk whether I fall into the former or latter bucket, but "smarter minds see further, judge better" and "there is a soul that taps into a cosmic godhead" are one and the same statement to me

So you think "smarter minds see further, judge better" == "there is a soul that taps into a cosmic godhead"

Good golly, that's the silliest statement completely ignoring that our ancestors wiped most large mammals off the planet by seeing further and judging better by using tools, traps, and the environment around them because of their larger brain size.

Humans have "wiped off the planet" maybe a few hundred mammal species over the last 300K years. Meanwhile we are discovering 30-60 new mammal species every year.

Right, maybe in a million years they'll evolve into the large animals we wiped out. Unless you're just fine with anything larger than a dog being dead.

We discover 1-2 new large mammals every year out of those 30-60 total. They're not gone, they're just different.

Genesis 1:28 Fill and subdue the earth

I would propose that it is very likely to have zero effect. Your argument supposes they are all working together, like many connected computers calculating primes.

It only takes one of them to do it and they are not sharing information. If the 1 you remove from N is the one that will discover it, then it will dramatically affect when AGI happens. If it is not, then it will have zero effect.

The latter is far more likely if N>2

I did recently read an article about how, due to better training data, an AI writes better code in Rust than most other languages.

How that translates to the number of bugs, I don't know.

I would think that existing bugs would be caught, but new bugs would be introduced. The problem remains, but at least it has a new name now.

I’m developing three codebases right now where all of the code is written by AI (Swift, Python, Rust) and the Rust codebase requires the least pruning and has the fewest wtf moments.

I suspect it is the feedback from the stricter compiler, not differences in training data between python and rust

One thing that will have thrown the author off the trail is that he is holding a fossil of the organic parts of the snail and that is essentially a cast of the animal, not the shell. They are known as Steinkerns (stonecore).

The insides get replaced by minerals, which harden, the shell dissolves, then the only fossil remaining is a mould of the inside of what used to be the shell.

So on a fundamental level, the headline is wrong. He did not find any sort of shell...

I've been told by a friend -- a wierd thing -- in many places you can dig a hole and it will fill with water. And at some point in the future fish will be swimming in it.

with a "pond sized" hole, I have read that fish eggs arrive on the feet of ducks and other waterfowl attracted to the new pond. (I have never looked up whether this is a myth)

There are also fish that can walk overland to find new ponds. Weird, but real, with obvious implications for the origin of land tetrapods.

Or trilobites?

The iterative narrowing approach works well for broad research queries.

True, but I actually had no idea that it was the soft parts rather than the hard parts that had been fossilized. (I haven’t verified it yet.) Either way, it didn’t read like a bad faith interpretation/comment.

It wasn't written to be one. If the author went to the trouble of making a 3D space filled with many shells, knowing the actual shell was most likely a different shape would be something they would probably want to know, so the position of their fossil could be placed more accurately in the graphed space.

No, a layperson doing a bunch of math but barking up the wrong tree theory-wise is actually super instructive for this forum of autodidacts.

And I say that as one of the autodidacts.

Reads to me like a fascinating and relevant distinction.

how is that splitting hairs? it’s an actual interesting point