the true measure of AI: does it have fun playing pokemon? did it make friends along the way?

this seems like something that planning would fix. i wonder if that's how it's doing it

like, if it decides to <think> a table of contents, or chapter summaries, rather than just diving in at page 1

to be fair, monster cables do beat coat hangers these days

(the only coat hangers i've seen lately are plastic or wood)

there's a pretty big alternative: they survived by integrating with a larger group

(they could either maintain a subculture, or fully integrate and become indistinguishable. either way, they don't necessarily die off when they make contact)

"Integrating" is an interesting choice of words. From what I've seen of the integration, nothing of their genes really survive. Nothing of their culture survives. I don't think it's survival at all. They're absorbed, surely, but in the same way an amoeba absorbs some prey... little pieces of the prey move around doing what those pieces always do, at least for a little while. But eventually those pieces stop moving, and get broken down into ever smaller pieces, until nothing of them remains. And it's just a big amoeba.

Not sure what word is a better choice though. Maybe someone can reply with one.

do you have any citation for the idea that genes rarely survive?

i don't really have any idea what the ratio is. i do know that there are a ton of traceable groups from ancient times today. i don't know that there isn't an even larger number of groups that didn't make it

at the whitney art gallery (nyc), the ground floor is 1, but the basement is -1. there's no 0 in between

it bothers me way more than it should. i have to tell myself that the point of art is often to evoke emotions, and the rage i feel is included in that

In the Boole Library in Ireland (which has entrances on different floors) they use an algebraic (affine) system. There is a floor designated "Q" and then other floors are labelled relatively, "Q+2", "Q-1", etc.

A possible interpretation....

Using the insight from the top comment that "it all depends on whether u're counting the items themselves (1-based) or the spaces btwn them," the American way of numbering floors is based on counting actual floors (ie, the things you stand on) -- and the one at earth level is one floor. If you go up a flight of stairs, there is second floor to stand on, and so on.

For buildings that go underground, the "-" sign can now act as a signifier of being underground, and the counting works as normal. If you take the stairs down one level, you are on the first underground floor, -1.

Of course, you want to interpret it like a y-axis number line, where 0 is the earth, 1 is "1 floor unit" above the earth, -1 is "1 floor unit" below the earth, etc. This is the "space between" model.

Elegance aside, both can be viewed as logically consistent depending on your lense.

When my badge doesn't scan at work, that is great art

At the University of Arizona (or at least in most of the buildings there), the lowest floor of the building is always 1, even if it’s a basement. So the ground floor is often 2. Maddening.

In the '80s the ground floor of the EE building (Steele) at Caltech was labeled ⏚. Anyone here happen to know if it is still labeled that way?

I'd certainly hope any floor was ⏚'ed.

i think part of it is that if you have one in your project, it's nearly frictionless to have both. the toolchain is the same, and especially if you're using C++, you can and often do have C dependencies

if you permit more density on a small amount of land, the value of that land will go up. there's only a few places to put the new units, so the good land is scarce, and the price goes up

if you do it over a whole city, i'm not sure it still holds. not as much, anyway, since the developers have more choices on where to build

I'm not sure that's an experiment we'd see unfold due to NIMBYism. (Not commenting on whether that's an appropriate reaction, just that it's inevitable.) So I wonder if within realistic constraints it's still a fairly safe assumption?

the city i'm in has done it up to 4 units. it's pretty recent (less than a year, i think), so i don't expect to see much effect yet

NIMBYs did indeed get involved: you can build up to 4 units in basically any residential zone except for the "rich people" part of town

more cities seem to be doing this sort of thing. hopefully we'll have more/better papers on it in the near future. (and hopefully it works)

you can see it pretty often in NYC, coming up from vents/pipes in the road

i don't think it's steam leaking. it's drainage/sewer water being heated by the steam system (and other heat sources down there) enough that it evaporates and rises up to the street, and then condenses into vapor/fog because the street level is cooler

That's what I figured.

if steam leaks out and gets trapped somewhere, presumably that's a breeding ground for mildew and mold

inside the pipe, can much life survive? is there anything to eat in there? has anything evolved specifically to live in NYC steam pipes?

those menus started to slip a long time ago. they got larger, less organized, and got lazier about mentioning the keyboard shortcut. the new MS paint does a good blend of that style and a newer look

the current text editor trend of having a "command palette" is pretty nice. it's got a hard job to do, with the sheer number of commands and extensibility to add more, but search is pretty good for discoverability (as long as people name/tag/describe the commands well)