You say that like anyone knows how Fahrenheit even works.

It took maybe 10 minutes or so for a 256 GB hard drive for me, if I remember correctly.

That was an SSD, though, so yeah, mileage would definitely vary on an HDD.

Hmm, what does that full format do? Write zeros over everything?

Personally, I would run shred on the root filesystem. It’s a tool specifically intended for properly deleting data (overwrites it with random data multiple times).

I don’t think, there’s currently any plans to introduce a non-JS API for accessing the DOM. It would just take an insane amount of implementation work + documentation.

But frameworks can generate access code for you, so you don’t actually need to write any JS yourself. Rust is quite far ahead in this regard, thanks to the wasm-bindgen library.

I mean, so far, all of them require tons of humanly produced data.

Discriminative AI (deep learning et al) requires humans to label data for hours on end, per use-case.
And generative AI (LLMs et al) require just insane amounts of human works to copy from, albeit not necessarily limited to individual use-cases.

I guess, what I’m saying is that the ratio of how much labor humans (involuntarily) invested into AIs, compared to the labor these AIs actually perform, is likely a lot higher than 70%.

It’s a thing here in Europe. I’m guessing, because our walls are generally concrete, we usually either throw on decorative plaster or a wallpaper, to make it feel a bit warmer and have a uniform surface which accepts paint more readily.

It’s even quite common that if you rent an appartment, that the walls have wallpaper on them, which is painted with a fresh coat of white paint every time someone moves out and the next folks move in.
And then some people, after they move in, will just paint (some of) the walls in a different color, if they feel like not living in pure white…

I guess, the real question is: Could we be using (simplistic) LLMs on a phone for predictive text?

There’s some LLMs that can be run offline and which maybe wouldn’t use enormous amounts of battery. But I don’t know how good the quality of those is…

You’re in the No Stupid Questions community. Think about rule 7 in particular.

Ah, true. Thanks.

Theoretically, it was supposed to be pseudo-code, secretly inspired by Rust, but I did get that one mixed up.

And I am actually even a fan of the word unwrap there, because it follows a schema and you can have your IDE auto-complete all the things you can do with an Option.
In many of these other languages, you just get weird collections of symbols which you basically have to memorize and which only cover rather specific uses.

I enjoy this:

return a.or(b);

But yeah, that requires an Option type rather than null pointers…

And you wouldn’t have to reverse causality to travel backwards in time. You would just have to travel faster than the speed of light.

If you can travel faster than the speed of light then you can arrive at a destination before you left.

I know practically nothing about all the wormhole theories, because I just don’t consider them relevant, but from a logical standpoint, the above does not feel correct to me.

The thing is, you would arrive at your destination before the light would arrive there from where you started. So, you could take out your telescope and potentially watch your own launch.

But that doesn’t actually put you into the past. It just looks like it when looking into the direction you came from. Light from the other direction will look like you’ve fast-forwarded through time, because you now get more recent imagery.

I don’t have another explanation why someone might think, this might put you into the past…

Hmm, but why do you think these things haven’t occurred yet?

As far as I can tell, the speed of causality means things can have occurred in a certain location in the universe, but it takes time until the effects have permeated into the rest of the universe.

So, it’s like a shockwave from an explosion. The explosion happens, but it takes a few seconds until you feel the shockwave.
Well, with the difference that you can see an explosion before the shockwave. When we’re at the speed of causality, literally no evidence will have arrived in your position until it does.

So, one could go meta-philosophical with basically “If a tree falls in a forest and no one has heard it yet, did it actually already happen?”, but yeah, I don’t think that’s terribly useful here.

And well, if we treat it like a shockwave, let’s say you detonate some TNT and step through a wormhole to somewhere 20 km away. You would know that the shockwave will arrive soon, but does that matter? The shockwave will still just continue pushing on.

And I guess, crucially, it did already happen, so you can’t do the usual time travel paradox of preventing that it would happen.

That’s actually not as obvious as it might sound. The thing is, as far as we know, light seems to have no mass¹. No mass means no inertia. So, if it accelerates at all, it should immediately be at infinite speed. But for some reason, it actually doesn’t go faster than what we typically call the speed of light. And we assume, that’s the case, because that’s actually the speed of causality.

So, it’s reversed. It’s not that light is just the fastest thing and as a consequence of that, nothing can be transmitted faster. No, it’s actually that there appears to be a genuine universal speed limit and light would be going faster, if it could.

¹) Light is still affected by gravity, e.g. can’t escape from black holes. We do assume that gravity is just a ‘bend in spacetime’ because of that, meaning even any massless thing are affected by it, but yeah, we’re still struggling to understand what mass actually is then.

Well, I’m going to give the party-pooper response, even though science fiction and pop-science love to fantasize differently:

The past and the future are theoretical concepts. They don’t actually exist in the sense that you can ‘send’ something to them.
Obviously, you can write data to a hard drive and then read it out after a week has passed, but presumably that is not what you had in mind.

But that’s also the essence of the time travel that the theory of general relativity allows. You can travel forwards more slowly along the time axis by travelling more quickly on the space axis (close to the speed of light), which means you might just need to spend 5 perceived years to end up in the year 2200.
Similarly, you could take a hard drive onto this journey and it wouldn’t have fallen apart in that time.

Travelling back in time makes no sense in general relativity. You would need to reverse causality for that, which is on an entirely different level from merely slowing causality down.

General relativity would mathematically allow for the existence of wormholes, but that’s pushing the theory to extremes where it might simply not be applicable to reality anymore. We certainly have no actual evidence for wormholes.

So, what’s the yellow stuff for? To keep the bags from sticking together?

I genuinely just thought that’s what it was. I had not heard of them rebranding…

Type erasure sure does go brr…

In this thread: Trying to guess the programming language based on a single keyword and angle brackets. 🙃

“Open-source” is not up for interpretation. The word was coined by this definition being made public: https://opensource.org/osd/