• 11 Posts
  • 648 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 9th, 2023

help-circle

  • Just for fun, I tried three more pens and writing in an inverted position (i.e. towards the ceiling):

    • A Bic Crystal
    • A Papermate Gel
    • Some random pen from an auto shop with a nonstandard ballpoint tip (so probably some brand other than the first two).

    All of them failed. Interestingly, the Crystal lasted the longest, but when it failed, it was almost immediate.

    I’m not saying this is an especially scientific test, but I’ve now tried four different ballpoint pens, all from different manufacturers, and none could write upside down. Gravity is an important part of how they work on Earth.

    It may be that you can still write in space, but I would hazard a guess that it has to do with whether you can keep ink on the ball. Since there’s no “down,” how you write or how you hold the pen when you take breaks might make things better or worse.

    It’s cool, though, that he put it to the test. When I just put my pens to the side, they get refreshed and are able to write again, which is why my hypothesis is that it’s down to whether you can keep the ball continuously wet or not.








  • This framework was tested on nine complex challenges. It achieved an 85 percent success rate, whereas the best baseline only achieved a 39 percent success rate. This suggests its applications in various multistep planning tasks, such as scheduling airline crews or managing machine time in a factory.

    85% isn’t good. It’s a vast improvement, but it’s not a good rate at scale. If you have 100,000 actions, 15,000 are wrong. If you have 1M customers, 150K are calling customer support.

    Also, even if we’re talking about smaller scales like scheduling airline crews or managing machine time, how is AI not overkill? You have to have relatively massive amounts of hardware for the payoff of what a handful of people could do. Or a “dumb” algorithm. Or a signup sheet. And now we’re adding additional computing overhead?

    AI is still a solution in search of a problem.










  • I keep an old ring, that doesn’t fit, in a box. I got a silicone ring and honestly prefer it to my titanium ring. If I gain or lose weight, or get arthritis or something, the ring is a little more adaptable.

    Plus, you can get silicone in lots of colors, so I like it for the fact that you can accessorize more easily!