The Octopus Carwash is one of my early memories from trips to the twin cities, probably the first time I have seen it or thought about it in 40 years. Kind of weird to stumble on that after all these years, I opened the link curious if there would be anything from my Minnesota childhood but did not expect that.
>you can have Tk (as long as your Cobol allows you to call C).
No C required, you can just connect to the UI through a socket and often skip the FFI completely. This is my preferred way to use Tk and I don't even consider anything else unless there is a reason. Working this way also has the nice side effect of making the application UI agnostic.
Believe you have to do that anyways unless you are going to create full language bindings as tkinter and the like do. I don't know the Tk API in full but I don't believe it provides ways to create widgets, just interact with them more directly. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable will fill in the gaps here, I learned what I needed of the Tk API and called it good.
Within a few minutes of picking up a guitar my fingers start to stiffen up, I crack them and then all is well, been doing this for 30 odd years now and the joints of my hands are some of the few which don't cause me problems at this point in my life. I never could crack my knuckles before I started playing guitar and if I stop playing for a few weeks, I cease being able to crack my knuckles.
These articles on knuckle cracking never seem to say anything but state, but sort of maybe could be but your aunt is almost certainly wrong unless or maybe in certain exceptions. For the majority of people I think we crack our knuckles for the same reason we often stretch when we get up, it relieves a tension that needs relieving.
I do this through the day etc but in my case it feels quite clear that the two are unrelated. The stiffness is in muscles, tendons, and ligaments and feels very similar to that in other parts of my body. In the hand, performing the stretching actions causes cracking. In my ankle etc, it does not but the stretching and twisting has the same effect on the stiffness I experience.
I grew up and around 7-8 I started cracking my neck. It was like an accordian. For years it worked.
Now I get maybe one crack every few weeks but the magic is gone.
Same for my hands. I was "voracious" cracker, now my fingers get 10% of the cracks I used to get.
I still am able to crack my back, lower back by tugging on my belt and that releases a lot of uumpf. For upper back, I lay on my back, put my knuckles below the spine and go down one by one. Satisfying.
I also have a problem. Every time I stand for a long time, do some work standing up, my lower back is like dead. So I get someone to get on my sacro-illiac joint I think and a loud crack and I'm fit as a fiddle. I'm weird
I can feel some kind of tension after a short bit of using my hands, and cracking my knuckles relieves it and allows me to continue without any issues. Usually I have to crack them before falling asleep, since the feeling of tension keeps me from sleeping. Doctors never thought this was an issue and I have no joint damage (checked for other reasons).
I also crack my fingers in the morning, over the day, and before sleeping. I also feel this "tension".
But I am not sure whether it is a real "tension" or something my brain makes up to force me crack my knuckles which gives some perceived relief. Maybe I am just addicted to this relief.
I haven't seen any research on this urge to crack and the possible tension. Is this a physical tension, some psychologically perceived tension due to an addiction, or something else?
Is it a theory, I thought it was exactly what causes it. The stretching depressurizes the liquidy thing in the joints and that causes dissolved gases to bubble out of solution in nucleation points. It's not really gas build up, but more like opening a can of coke, the pressure drop causes the equilibrium to shift and brings dissolved gases out of solution. At least that's what I thought it was.
Generic life processes? Everything is dissolved you know, including the oxygen and carbon dioxide from respiration. Nitrogen too, though it's not really very useful. The fact that it's all dissolved is how divers get the bends. As the pressure lowers gases drop out of solution and form bubbles, clogging arteries.
My uneducated guess would be that the pressure is the natural state because of the fluid/gas involved, much the same way sediment eventually settles at the bottom of a bottle of orange juice. Over time, the gas will just naturally form inside your joints that way.
I am not doubting the theory of the gas getting out of the liquid.
I was just referring to the "urge" to crack my fingers. I thought, maybe this instant relaxation (with additional auditive feedback) results in an addiction which creates or increases my urge to crack.
Pretty sure it's not in your head. When I was younger I had growth hormone treatment for a while. I needed to crack more ofthen when on it, and less when I wasn't, and it was apparently a common side effect.
I came here to ask this, as well! Where does that tension come from and the relief one feels after cracking? People keep saying it's built-up gas but that doesn't really explain why we feel so much relief after cracking. (Not just when cracking our knuckles but also, or especially after, cracking our back, neck, etc.)
The article provides some hints at least but I wish there'd be more research on this topic:
> For some people, cracking can provide a sense of relief and a temporary increase in joint mobility, because it stretches the joint, taking it through a wider range of motion. One theory even suggests that cracking stimulates nerve endings around the joint, relaxing surrounding muscles while reducing pain and releasing endorphins – but this hasn't been proven.
I can relieve cramping in my feet by cracking my toes. Cracking is 100% useful in certain instances, and I have never seen evidence that it causes any harm.
No, the bubble is never there. The bubble only appears when you stretch it, and the pop comes from the bubble bursting. Would be weird just having a bubble of gas in your joints.
there are 2 type of cracking. from guitar i have same, its ok, some fluid goes out because ur tendons are longer and there is some space. something like that (i am not medical person ofc).
then there is 'forced' cracking, which will be more difficult to do because its actually going to crack things that are un healthy. it destroy some soft crap between the bones.
both are not healthy but first is much less destructive and wont lead to chronic issues as fast/often as the later which much more often has that result later..
the second forced one u rly need to put some pressure or pull them hard etc its not about getting rid of that stiffness u talk about.
i did that for 15 years and my fingers/hands are fine. (stopped playin so that also went away eventually, mostly)
>You'd think that LLMs fulfill this, but I do wonder if a clever human could still discern between them given their particularities.
While LLMs are very capable of appearing human in general conversation, the test is that they are trying to convince a human that they are human, which is not something that is in their training data and I suspect they would go about things in very odd ways from an actual person, especially when challenged by an actual person. It is still very easy to back LLMs into a corner where they fall into very unnatural patterns and in my experience challenging them on their "humanness" (or anything) backs them into that corner.
LLMs also still can't use context or subtext in natural ways and even people who are terrible with purposefully exploiting context and subtext, generally have a natural ability that they developed to use and parse them. In a short conversation that is not adversarial, this is not an issue but falls apart as the length of the conversation grows or they start getting challenged.
LLMs just don't play with ideas and conversation like we do, they don't riff on it and go with the flow without care, picking up on subtexts and contexts and manipulating them the way people constantly do without effort until they find themselves on the edge of a cliff looking into the void and debating if they should jump. If we are put into the situation of proving we are human (in an academic test sort of way) we will play with it and have fun with it, and we will find ourselves on that cliff looking into the void, debating if we should expose ourselves and admit things we normally wouldn't. We pick up on this when people do it, even over the internet, their way of stating things changes and their subtext falls away or drastically changes; I have never seen anything approaching this in LLMs.
I don't think any frontier lab tried to make an LLM optimized for the literal Turing test where the LLM is made to argue that it's human. This is not in their interest. They make their LLMs insist they aren't human, have no feelings and sentience etc etc.
So we don't actually know how good LLMs can be in this.
That is absolutely true of the chatbots we have access to but I suspect there are people working towards these ends, including all the big names in the field, major win for their company if they manage it. But even then, I have yet to see a model that could naturally handle subtext and context, they struggle even when dealing with programming languages where these things are far simpler than they are in human language.
There is also the problem with how easy it is to back them into a corner where they start acting in very unnatural ways. This would arise when challenging them on their humanity and most people would pick up on it and craft their challenges around it until it fell apart because that is how people work in such adversarial situations.
I'm agnostic on the matter because post training and RLHF on this specific capability could be quite effective. Nobody ever tried because it would cause a backlash and bad PR. Much better PR to solve math problems, help run businesses, cure disease etc than to pretend it's human. The only business case for pretend human is AI boy/girlfriends but those are also not most profitable at their most realistic state.
> LLMs just don't play with ideas and conversation like we do, they don't riff on it and go with the flow without care, picking up on subtexts and contexts and manipulating them the way people constantly do without effort until they find themselves on the edge of a cliff looking into the void and debating if they should jump.
It takes no effort to play LLM or not, you don't need to know anything about the topic or put anytime into reading and understanding the submission, just find that em-dash and you can turn every discussion into meta slop.
I also think an LLM isn't going to just spit this all out and viola, it boots. I imagine there were many rounds of jtag debug, copy/paste into the LLM prompt, with enough human knowledge/context to say the right thing, suggest some existing implementation snippet, etc.
> I imagine there were many rounds of jtag debug, copy/paste into the LLM prompt
You may not be familiar with modern LLM tools.
You don’t need to copy/paste anything. You can easily instruct your agent to access the serial port and JTAG debugger and it will easily handle it through subsessions.
The tools have moved rapidly this year. Something like this is entirely doable by attaching the right cables, telling the agent where to access everything, and then keeping it fed with enough tokens to keep going.
There are some amazing projects doing reverse engineering or porting to micros fully automated. The results are still full of typical LLM output problems, but it’s amazing what can be brute forced with enough tokens in an LLM loop.
When I’m evaluating MCU platforms for new projects I’ll some times set an LLM loose on each to get a proof of concept running so I can do benchmarks or testing. It can save a lot of time finding showstoppers or roadblocks before I waste a lot of time on doing the problem correctly.
I've been writing code by hand for 30 years and nowadays use LLM too for embedded and Android development among other stuff. It saves a lot of time and is amazing that it can debug multiple embedded devices connected to the computer far better than my doing it by myself.
There is certainly slop but it was always like this in software engineering, just that now is far easier for anyone to write code that runs on ESP32 which in my opinion was already quite easy in the past but frankly bothersome to get any complex project running.
I'm old enough to remember when other developers criticized heavily the usage of Turbo Pascal in the 90s because "it wasn't a real compiler" but reality is that it made software writing far easier and fun for a whole new generation of kids. It seems we are going through a similar wave, it will take time until this settles as a new tool.
Interestingly, it is not always the case that birds can drop what they catch. I never knew this until I watched an eagle struggle to shore after it caught a fish that turned out to be too large for it to fly off with or do what it needed to do to be able to release the fish until it got to land. I have no idea about the swimming ability of an eagle but they certainly can't swim when they have a large fish in their claws, it was quite the struggle for that eagle to get to shore.
They don't need to be on the ground to release as a rule, there are just situations which make it very difficult or impossible for them to release without being on the ground. The bald eagle courtship would be suicide if they could not release while in the air. For light loads they are quite good at releasing stuff in the air and will pass nesting materials and food to each other while in flight.
I have never liked split keyboards but I might if each keyboard was also a mouse with its own cursor, it seems fun to develop the skill to work that way. Would also be useful at times if the the Thinkpad trackpoint and trackpad could each have their own cursor and I could leave one somewhere. Or maybe a cursor stack like pushd/popd, registers would probably work better; instead of virtual desktops just give me one massive desktop with cursor locations I can jump between, switch to cursor 3 it saves the location of the current cursor and jumps.
Wayland seats are sets of inputs, to be handled together, each seat having its own cursor position, focused element, and so forth. That’s not what you want, I believe.
… unless you do want the left half of your keyboard to type into one window, and the right half of your keyboard into another.
I have a UHK split keyboard with a keycluster module (which has a small trackball) on one the left half and a larger trackball module on the right half.
Even though there is only one cursor it's been a really powerful way to work, being able to control the mouse with either thumb.
Then there are the alternative keybindings that allow moving the mouse using the wasd keys as well.
Jokes are downvoted not because of a lack humor but because if we reward making jokes we will have to scroll through dozens of jokes and all of their responses to get the actual discussion. Voting is about keeping the on topic and worthwhile discussion at the top with everything else buried beneath it.
Of coarse they are going to pick Steam and Netflix and social media just like 20 years ago they picked reading Harry Potter, majority of people want to use their time alone towards connecting with people and they put that time towards things which will help them connect with people. At least 99% of the books I have read I have not gotten to discuss with someone on a meaningful level, even if I met someone who has read the book I just read and loved there is a fair chance they read it years ago and can't say much about it, there are just too many books.
I wish things were different but the logistics of it are not in my favor. If I were to sit down after work and watch the baseball game, I would know that millions of other people are doing the exact same thing and I will be able to discuss it at work tomorrow. You can't do that with books, not even with current best sellers, which do offer better odds but even with those you are not sharing the moment with millions of people who are also just as alone as you are.
I was 17 before I met someone with who there was a real bond through literature, and they went on to family and work and all that. But that is fine even if that relationship has never been replaced because my interest in literature has never been about socializing, it has been about literature.
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