Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 13/10/2026What, like haversine and exsecant? Then they wouldn't be *new* functions. Also, I feel like I have a pretty solid idea of what cocosine and negtan are. 000
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 13/10/2026theonion.com/nation-s-mat...theonion.comNation’s Math Teachers Introduce 27 New Trig FunctionsAll Graduating Students Must Master Gamsin, Negtan, Cosvnx, 24 Others 100
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 13/10/2026existing worms come with a baked-in list of exploits to try, and patching those exact exploits stops the worm. a worm with an embedded AI model could keep examining things and cooking up new approaches basically forever. 000
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 13/10/2026Virtually everyone I've seen responding to this article seems to be misunderstanding what it's saying. It's demonstrating that anyone, anywhere in the world, with no help from AI companies, could build a worm that comes with an internal AI model it uses to compromise other devices on the network. 030
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 13/10/2026Never having heard of this and going off of these pictures alone In going to guess it's a remake of Sleuth (1972) with Lawrence Olivier and Michael Caine 200
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 13/10/2026Wow, I guess I'm totally out of the loop! I had no idea that students had stopped reading male authors like Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Shakespeare. Clearly this must be addressed at once! 000
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 13/10/2026Louis Primayoutu.beLouis Prima, Keely Smith, Sam Butera & The Witnesses "When You're Smilin' (Instrumental)"YouTube video by The Ed Sullivan Show 000
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 13/10/2026Sure but if your task is "infect an insecure IoT device and then try to compromise everything else on the network," then having it take months might be acceptable. 000
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 13/10/2026I guess this is just advisory, but I couldn't find much analysis as to what this actually means. Does it mean that out-of-state owners of apartment buildings would get a property tax break and wouldn't have to pay this tax? 000
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 13/10/2026"Shall Illinois adopt the Millionaire Amendment..., which would enact a 3% income tax surcharge only on millionaires and use 50% of this new revenue to provide property tax relief for residential and commercial taxpayers and 50% to improve state funding for public education?" 100
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 12/10/2026and then infect a new appliance you brought home that didn't even exist at the time the worm was created. 111
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 12/10/2026Doesn't change the fact that there's a huge difference between the sort of worms we're used to, which only carry out an exact sequence of actions when they're cut off from the internet, and the sort of worms that this makes possible, that could lay dormant "behind enemy lines" for years w/o internet 270
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 12/10/2026Burn after reading (for tax purposes) Frozen for tax purposes The men who stare at goats for tax purposes The Devil wears Prada for tax purposes How to train your dragon for tax purposes Doctor Strange, in the Multiverse of Madness for tax purposes 110
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 07/10/2026Yeah, and for them it used to be considered a problem that needed to be solved. Massive resourced were invested into fixing the economy so that people could have stable careers. Today, if anything resources are being invested into accelerating this. 130
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 07/10/2026Now, if you are saying that the first place *you personally* encountered some concept was in a paper about Deep Blue, even though it was a pre-existing industry-standard design, I can't argue with that, but you can't count that as a technical advancement or contribution to humanity on IBM's part. 000
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 07/10/2026But I don't know *everything*, so I gave you a chance to elaborate. And instead of elaborating you attack me personally, on the basis of the fact that I don't accept your claims without any explanation or evidence. 100
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 07/10/2026In what way am I arguing in bad faith? You are the one making an extraordinary claim ("Deep Blue ASICs were an influence on off-CPU computation") that no search turns up any support for (and yes, I did spent about half an hour searching before I responded, just in case I'd missed something.) 100
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 07/10/2026Can you expand on what you're claiming here? I looked up how those ASICs worked, and it says they were memory mapped and sent an interrupt when they had data to read. That sounds exactly like how e.g. keyboards and mice worked in the 1980s. 100
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 06/10/2026Given that they were doing stuff like fabricating ASICs specifically to do minimax search, I think they mainly learned "how to spend unimaginable resources on an engineering project to out-compete those working within realistic constraints." 100
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 06/10/2026(Of course there are various tricks that let them do a little less searching, like taking into account that you can reach the same position by different sequences of moves, but none of that was new to Deep Blue.) 100
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 06/10/2026The thing that makes Deep Blue work is minimax search with alpha-beta pruning, an algorithm which was already well-known by the 1950s. Everything they did beyond that only consisted of tweaking the way positions were scored, which is specific to chess and doesn't generalize to other problems. 100
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 06/10/2026Except it wasn't built by scientists, it wasn't "world-leading science," it didn't lead to any notable original research outside of chess, and they weren't really trying to sell RS/6000s to scientists, they were trying to sell them to finance and telecom companies. 100
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 05/10/2026And in fact "really fast computers" is relative. The Sargon program from the late 1970's that ran on Z80 CP/M machines (with maybe a 10 MHz clock, 56kb of RAM, and 2 MB of storage) had something like a 1400 rating. That's more than good enough to beat 99.9% of living humans at chess. 010
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 05/10/2026Actually, you probably could. It's really not very complicated. There are of course lots of little tricks to eke out slight gains here and there, but the core of it is "look ahead a bunch of moves and count how many pieces are left" plus really fast computers. 110
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 05/10/2026I don't think you can call Deep Blue an attempt to make the world better. It was an attempt to get people to buy IBM supercomputers. 150
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 04/10/2026Several options included the outline of the state, and some of them also included a silhouette of Abraham Lincoln, ensuring that nobody but a professional artist would ever be able to sketch one. 000
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 04/10/2026I swear they pick bad options on purpose for the finalists to keep people from changing it. Look at the options we had to replace the Illinois flag. One of them looked like a mayonnaise logo and another looked the design off a motel bed comforter from the 80s. 110
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 04/10/2026If you take USA out of Massachusetts wouldn't that just leave Mchett? 110
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 01/10/2026"Beverages are for social occasions"? I dunno, man, I've literally never in my entire life worked at a job that didn't include unlimited free coffee for the employees. We literally offer people coffee in interviews. Have you ever actually had a job or do you just watch TV shows about them? 100
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 28/09/2026She is a "Woman Grandmaster (WGM)" -- a title earned by playing in female-only tournaments -- and not yet a "Grandmaster (GM)" -- a title earned by playing in tournaments open to everyone. 000
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 28/09/2026You mean the image of lying in bed staring at the ceiling, or how the poem imitates a military cadence (during this part)? 100
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 28/09/2026I'm sorry, but if Rudyard Kipling is your idea of "the most gifted poet in English ever" you have about 500 years of English literature to catch up on. 120
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 28/09/2026So like the Disney versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the life of Pocahontas, etc.? No thanks. 000
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 28/09/2026"I then do the rest of the meeting normally. When the meeting ends, everyone gets an emailed transcript where the AI summary is: 'Nikita hit an iceberg, is trapped on a sinking ship, and general updates'" (bounced around the internet; original source unknown) 000
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 28/09/2026"I’ve started joining every Google Meet 45 seconds early. When you join early, everyone’s virtual note takers join early too. I spend the first few seconds screaming about how I’m on the Titanic, we’ve just hit an iceberg, the end is near, and I need immediate assistance. 100
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 28/09/2026Second person plural is used rarely enough that it doesn't override other more pressing considerations. One of a million examples for why allowing language to evolve naturally is a bad idea. 110
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 28/09/2026I don't like it, but it's not atypical by any means 000
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 27/09/2026Wait a minute, if you're counting the extra layer of bread against the sandwiches you also have to count it against the lasagna. You'd never make a lasagna with multiple consecutive layers of noodles 110
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 27/09/2026I went in expecting it sound at least a little different than other songs in the genre, and it really doesn't -- if you played this for me and asked me how I thought it fared I would have guessed that it's a random album track that wasn't released as a single. 041
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 27/09/2026I just pulled this up and listened to it. I have definitely never heard this song before, nor have I ever heard the title or the name of the singer. (I have heard of Miranda Lambert before, who co-wrote it.) 120
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 27/09/2026By this reasoning, regular sandwiches and hamburgers are also not sandwiches, because club sandwiches and big macs exist. 100
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 26/09/2026The guy who wrote Old Yeller abused his son and brutally murdered his family dog for no reason, leading to his son committing suicide. But, yeah, nothing but well-adjusted people as far as the eye can see there. 100
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 26/09/2026I'd actually be more than a little concerned about what certain people would do with a detailed understanding of where people's core ethics come from. 110
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 24/09/2026At least where I come from, that's not a pejorative term, and hasn't been for at least 100 years. As a kid, I'd hear everyone from my classmates to 90-year-old ladies describe themselves as tomboys. 010
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 23/09/2026Hard to imagine a puzzle where people would come up with a mate in 12 and miss a mate in 7 along the way. 100
Daniel McLaury @danielmclaury.bsky.social · 23/09/2026Being trapped in an underground maze forever builds character 020
