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> ‘Spirit’ thermometers, made using brandy and other liquors, were in common use in the early days of thermometry. They were even considered as a potential standard fluid for thermometers. It wasn’t until the careful work of Swiss physicist Jean-André De Luc in the 18th century that physicists realized that alcohol thermometers are highly nonlinear and highly variable depending on concentration, which is in turn hard to measure.

During Deluc's time in the 18th century Geneva was not part of Switzerland, thus Deluc was Genevan/Genevese, not Swiss.

Geneva was an independent city republic with centuries of history until Napoleon (1798) when it was incorporated into France. After Napoleon during the Vienna Congress of 1815 - in the 19th century - Geneva joined Switzerland.

Other people from Geneva of the same time period include Rodolphe Töpffer, the first comic book artist, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

We don't use today's political borders for historic figures.


My hunch is that more people in countries like India use cpubenchmark / buy computers and try out cpubenchmark; and that in countries like those lower performing laptops outsell more powerful laptops by an enough large number that it shows.

It doesn’t have to be literally India, it’s an example for illustration.


Or the ‘slow CPUs’ are actually truly Fast Enough. Intel N100 and N150 systems are low key amazing value.


I bought into the N100 hype train because of Reddit. Sure its an amazing value, but I hope anyone reading this isn't convinced it's remotely fast. I ended up going with a minisforum ryzen for about 2x the price and 4x the performance.

I was a bit bummed since I wanted to use it as a kind of streaming box, and while it can do it, it is definitely slow.


I got a 16GB RAM 512GB SSD N100 minipc for less than $150 last month. Yes it could be faster (always true for any computer), but I feel I got way more than I paid for. Certainly a much better deal than an RPi 5.

PS. If you need more power than that I have a hard time coming up with a better deal than M4 Mac Mini, perhaps with some extra usb storage. It's possibly the only non-workstation computer that is worth buying in the not-inexpensive category (in the base version, obviously).


> it could be faster (always true for any computer)

The question isn't whether it could be faster, but whether it's slow enough to be annoying for the tasks you use it for.

I bet most people would find the N100 annoyingly slow when opening documents or browsing the web, or doing crazy things like opening a few programs at the same time.


> I bet most people would find the N100 annoyingly slow when opening documents or browsing the web, or doing crazy things like opening a few programs at the same time.

I'm actually not convinced. If you're used to a fast box, yes; I'd argue most people actually aren't.


I’m annoyed opening a doc pretty much daily on a year old MacBook Pro.

However the blame lies squarely with Microsoft. What the hell is their office suite up to?


Sounds possible, office laptops in India are generally shit-tier. But the largest non-bulk retail buyers of laptops in India seem to be (from my armchair market observation) school/college kids, and school/college kids increasingly prefer gaming laptops (India is the largest consumer of gaming laptops after the US) that will likely not give below-average benchmark results.


I switched to plain white when I was ca 20 years old and never looked back. I need to use plain white since then and I am so used to it that I find lines or grids slightly offensive to me and it throws me off from layouting. You can get used to anything.


I came up with similar rules over decades (I still write sometimes mathematical symbols), and I have to only take care of my "u" vs "n" and "r" vs "v", and write these pairs especially slowly because in my handwriting (especially u and n) look the same.

But for all the others I’ve developed similar disambiguations.


I have come to understand that "no politics"/"just politics" means no election campaign talk.

As almost everything that is personal is in some way political (when taking the meaning "what strategy to use for ruling over a city") even the discussion of what politics is can kill discussions. (Like it seems to have happened in your example.)

So my conclusion is you cannot separate "personal" and "political" into completely disjoint categories.

The rule seems to be in place to make discussions not veer off in direction of which policies to apply/to be in favor of which particular politicians (which is nowadays the biggest taboo for a corporate LLM).


Really interesting puzzle. I tried the different Chatgpts and they all solved it. I tried Deepseek and Deepseek R1, and Deepseek did have this meltdown:

Let's break down the problem step by step to understand the relationships and positions of Bob, Ann, and Cathy. 1. Understanding the Initial Setup

    Bob is facing forward.

    This means Bob's front is oriented in a particular direction, which we'll consider as the reference point for "forward."

    To his left is Ann, to his right is Cathy.

    If Bob is facing forward, then:

        Ann is positioned to Bob's left.

        Cathy is positioned to Bob's right.

    Ann and Cathy are facing backwards.

    Both Ann and Cathy are oriented in the opposite direction to Bob. If Bob is facing forward, then Ann and Cathy are facing backward.
2. Visualizing the Positions

To better understand the scenario, let's visualize the positions: Copy

Forward Direction: ↑

Bob (facing forward) | | Ann (facing backward) | / | / | / | / | / | / | / |/ |

And then only the character | in a newline forever.


I kinda have the same very subjective feeling where o1 is the first AI that is clearly superior to me.


Nah the formula is different:

1. Take some conditional and true statement: “The original IBM PC can address 1024KB memory of which 640KB are in user space.”

2. Remove all conditionalities: “The PC has 640KB RAM as that’s all one needs.”

3. Attribute it to a famous figure: “Bill Gates said that 640K is all anyone ought to need.”


4o: https://chatgpt.com/share/678ecbcd-a864-8007-9a34-e4e6574a2b... "Thus, the five odd numbers without an 'e' in their spelling are:

41, 43, 45, 47, and 49. "

o1: https://chatgpt.com/share/678ecbf8-ba20-8007-a33e-20ddbc545b... " 2 (two), 4 (four), 6 (six), 30 (thirty), 40 (forty)

Those five are “odd” (i.e., strange) choices, yet each spelled-out form has no letter e. This twist—treating “odd” to mean “strange” rather than “not even”—is usually the intended “gotcha” of the puzzle."


> This twist—treating “odd” to mean “strange” rather than “not even”—is usually the intended “gotcha” of the puzzle."

I like this one.

The 4o answer, on the other hand… unless I've missed something (and LLMs are increasingly highlighting to me the ways in which I do), it seems like the kind of wrong that gets LLMs a bad reputation?


It is! 4o is unfortunantely often very dumb in tricky circumstances, or is biased toward pundit-like opinions that are wrong. I'm not sure why that is the case, but the full o1 always has a "weight"/"presence" to it when I chat with it that suggests to me like a real intelligence. It can also solve difficult puzzles that 4o and me struggle with.


Huh I think this YouTube short is the same topic: https://youtube.com/shorts/DA_-6296G5o?si=BLKcSP2Q1jAaca9K

Finding new geoglyphs from known examples.


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