The only significant difference flavor-wise I’m aware of from burr size is that a larger burr has more mass, and is more resistant to heating up from friction during use, with that accompanying expansion changing the grind characteristics. Tbh though, I think you need to be going either high volume at a commercial scale, or be trying to perfectly nail some ultra-precise extraction recipe for an award-winning cup of coffee for the thermal expansion to become relevant.

Given the distance required, what kind of economic payoff could be possible from such an expensive project? It’s not like overland would be a cheaper transport option than Pacific shipping routes or anything. It’s not just the Bering Strait being the problem with connecting the two after all, but the fact that there’s nothing in NE Siberia or NW Alaska to bother connecting together. Are we making it for the polar bears maybe? Or are people going to drive the thousands of miles from Juneau to Vladivostok to sightsee?

When the Generative Agents system was evaluated for how “believably human” the agents acted, researchers found the AI versions scored higher than actual human actors.

That’s a neat finding. I feel like there’s a lot to unpack there around how our expectations are formed.

In my experience it’s usually the whole factory farming thing that bothers them the most. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone complain about someone else having a pet dog, unless they weren’t taking care of it or something.

Would be interested to see a poll on how they feel about ethically raised livestock, if that’s more acceptable than most of the stuff you find in a supermarket.

No clue, I don’t know what its mechanism of action is. Probably one of the less-likely possibilities though.

The numbing agent they apply has a very short duration. So usually in my experience when you’re feeling the bite, it’s not the moment of bite you’re feeling, but the moment that anesthetic wears off. They’ve hung on too long, basically.

So, it could be a difference in the mosquito population, but it could also be a difference in you, either in how quickly your blood can be sucked up by the mosquito, or how quickly the numbing agent gets processed.

You can explore this yourself pretty easily if you ever visually spot one before it bites. You can just let it bite, and then count how long it takes before you feel it. It’s not long at all.

Reminds me of a scene in the Lone Wolf and Cub comic I read when I was younger.

I don’t remember all the details, but there’s a panel where the two most dangerous samurai in all of feudal Japan are camping out before a fight, and some rando is astonished that these high bred, noble, elite warriors are cooking their own rice. One of the two rips into him about self-sufficiency and how there aren’t always servants to do your cooking for you, and what kind of warrior would just starve when he has no servants around?

Not off the top of my head. Cooking is frequently a recreational hobby though, it’s essentially an art form. So I think it’s about equally likely that dancing, painting or making music fade away.

Whatever. Yo momma so fat every step she takes gets picked up by LIGO.

lol Now I’m going to spend the rest of the day trying to think of a good general relativity based yo momma joke…

tbf, “manipulating time and space” is a pretty low bar to clear. You’re manipulating time and space sitting in your chair, given that under general relativit,y spacetime warps around any mass present.

Neat, thanks.

Can a solar sail get something from Earth to Mercury?

The issue is less that it’s the hardest to land on and more that it’s the hardest to get to, to arrive at and orbit. It takes less fuel to get to Pluto than it does Mercury.

Mercury actually isn’t tidally locked, it has a 3:2 resonance, so does have a day/night cycle.

It’s expensive and the conditions are harsh.

The daytime side gets hot enough that a rover would be difficult to operate for long. You’d also be getting big swings between daytime hot and nighttime cold, so thermal expansion would probably be annoying.

Then it’s unusually expensive because orbital mechanics make it very difficult to approach the sun. We’re currently all flying sideways with respect to the sun, so if you launch something, it just wants to continue that orbit. In order to get closer, you’d need to shed most of that momentum, which takes a whole bunch of energy since inertia in the vacuum of space just means everything keeps going forever.

Exactly. It’s sort of like a massively scaled up example of the blind man and the elephant.

Yeah I caught that too, I’d be curious to know more about what specifically they meant by that.

Being able to link all of the words that have a similar meaning, say, nearby, close, adjacent, proximal, side-by-side, etc and realize they all share something in common could be done in many ways. Some would require an abstract understanding of what spatial distance actually is, an understanding of physical reality. Others would not, one could simply make use of word adjacency, noticing that all of these words are frequently used alongside certain other words. This would not be abstract, it’d be more of a simple sum of clear correlations. You could call this mathematical framework a universal language if you wanted.

Ultimately, a person learns meaning and then applies language to it. When I’m a baby I see my mother, and know my mother is something that exists. Then I learn the word “mother” and apply it to her. The abstract comes first. Can an LLM do something similar despite having never seen anything that isn’t a word or number?

Predicting the next word vs predicting a word in the middle and then predicting backwards are not hugely different things. It’s still predicting parts of the passage based solely on other parts of the passage.

Compared to a human who forms an abstract thought and then translates that thought into words. Which words I use has little to do with which other words I’ve used except to make sure I’m following the rules of grammar.

Agreed. Great voice acting is one thing. Quality voicing a cast that gigantic is another. I first noticed with that frog in the hag’s area. You don’t even get it if you don’t cast speak with animals and talk to this random frog hopping around, but if you bother to, you get this short, amazingly acted dialogue.

The attention to detail is just off the charts.