“The reason that tech generally — and coders in particular — see L.L.M.s differently than everyone else is that in the creative disciplines, L.L.M.s take away the most soulful human parts of the work and leave the drudgery to you,” Dash says. “And in coding, L.L.M.s take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you.”
“There are many arguments against vibe coding through A.I. It is an ecological disaster, with data centers consuming billions of gallons of water for cooling each year; it can generate bad, insecure code; it creates cookie-cutter apps instead of real, thoughtful solutions; the real value is in people, not software. All of these are true and valid. But I’ve been around too long. The web wasn’t “real” software until it was. Blogging wasn’t publishing. Big, serious companies weren’t going to migrate to the cloud, and then one day they did.”
“Hong Kong is one of the last places in the world where bamboo is still widely used for scaffolding in construction. It’s flexible, strong and cheaper than steel and aluminium — metal alternatives that are now more commonly used in mainland China and elsewhere in Asia. In Hong Kong, skilled armies of scaffolders can erect enough bamboo to engulf a building in a day — even hours — using techniques that are thousands of years old, and have been passed down through generations.”
In a historically poor area, “leaving enough” required advance planning. “There was the ‘cheese of the dead,'” explains Zufferey. “Everyone had a wheel of cheese so that they had something to serve at their funeral.”
On seeing the first few examples, my mind immediately thought about two performances: Yoann Bourgeois and the Nicholas Brothers. Going to include both here, as an extra for when you’re done with the article.
“I mean, who am I kidding? There’s no way the real Eddie Van Halen’s email address should be available for anyone to find in a public database — and it sure as shit shouldn’t be an America Online account.”
“Put simply, if you test positive on a rapid test, you almost certainly have Covid-19. If you test negative, in some cases, you might still test positive on a PCR test, which is much more sensitive because it tests for genetic evidence of the virus.”
“What a Douglas fir does, it does very slowly, and that includes dying. Possibly the least attractive feature of a nine-?hundred-?year life span is the century or two spent dying. Decomposition drags on for another hundred years or so. A tree is the rare organism to which the comparative deader is often and accurately applied. A recently dead, or ‘dead hard,’ conifer progresses to ‘dead spongy,’ then ‘dead soft,’ limbs and top rotting and dropping off, until the last piece of standing trunk topples and the tree enters the final classification, ‘dead fallen.’ At some point in its protracted twilight, a tree that stands near a road or path or building may earn a new classification: ‘danger tree.’ Because if it falls, anyone it lands on will spend a very, very short time dying.”
“Am I trying to be, like, a five-star employee? Not really. I’m just trying to do the job I need to not get fired.”
There was a feeling that it wasn’t me who was shoving the song in everyone’s face, it was the rest of the world, and I was kind of like, “It’s okay! You don’t have to play my song so much! Play some other songs! We can listen to different music!” I’d show up at commercial music stations and they’d be like, “The star has arrived!” And I’d be like, “I’d like to hear some other music, please.”
“When used by a trained accountant to carry out double-entry bookkeeping, a long-established system with inbuilt error detection, Excel is a perfectly professional tool. But when pressed into service by genetics researchers or contact tracers, it’s like using your Swiss Army Knife to fit a kitchen because it’s the tool you have closest at hand. Not impossible but hardly advisable.”
“When they lay their eggs, they wait nine days, and then park themselves by the eggs and start singing. They will sing and sing the same tune every four minutes, over and over for a week, and the chicks inside those eggs not only hear the tune, they commit it to memory.”
“A fungus laced with the same chemical as psychedelic mushrooms will invade their bodies and eat away their insides until their abdomens crack, fall off and get replaced with a ball of white spores. Because they’re either bombed on psilocybin or under the control of the fungus in some other way, the cicadas won’t even notice. With missing butts and full hearts, they’ll forge ahead with their only reason for existing: finding a mate and reproducing.”
“Everyone who studies the jewel wasp knows it stings the roach twice – once in the first thoracic ganglion to paralyze the front legs and once in the brain to zombify the roach.”
“[Ms. Mitoh] added that she expected the slug ‘would die quickly without a heart and other important organs.’ But it not only continued to live, it also regenerated the entirety of its lost body within three weeks.”