Join 📚 Josh Beckman's Highlights

A batch of the best highlights from what Josh's read, .

I thought it was notable that by making some minor tweaks to Ruby code it can now outperform a precompiled statically typed language in a purpose-built example of when it is slow. I’m hopeful that someday with future advancements in the Ruby JIT even the small tweaks might not be necessary.

Ruby Might Be Faster Than You Think

johnhawthorn.com

As with p values, having a bright-line threshold, causes curious behavior. In this case, scoring below 30 on any subject (a 30 or above is required in every subject) and failing the exam has arbitrary negative effects for people, so teachers usually try to prevent people from failing if there's an easy way to do it, but a deeper root of the problem is the idea that it's necessary to produce a certification that's the discretization of a continuous score.

Suspicious Discontinuities

danluu.com

Turkle made the point that AI companions aren’t qualified to converse with you about life’s challenges because they don’t have *standing* to do so: they haven’t lived a life. They haven’t suffered loss or fell in love or struggled with parenthood. I thought this was a nice point.

AI as Golem and Egregor

Matthew B. Crawford

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