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I always find it really weird when somebody on the anonymous internet talks about local places as if we're all neighbors or something. Googling "Richmond Hill" gave me multiple pages of results that had nothing to do with the one that Attenborough lives at.

Not to sound hipster about it, but if it's done in this way I find it charming. I also had to piece it together, which took me on a little virtual travel tour, and had me wonder about what Richmond Hill means to the locals. Rather fitting in context, too.

The "everyone on the internet is American" stuff in e.g. politics or job market convos is a lot more grating.


I really enjoyed OP's story, and the way they told it. Knowing the location of Richmond Hill is really not the point.

Well yes but it does open the question for me as to what the place is like and why he'd like it so much.

Yes, but it’s refreshing that for once it isn’t a San Francisco neighbourhood!

You had context, it piqued your interest and you did a tiny amount of work to figure it out. You could have quit without all three but you didn't; I wish the internet had a lot more of these types of experiences. It's only in the last ~25 years when the Internet became an anonymous place where we aren't all neighbours, and I mourn the loss.

If you're familiar with London, you know where Richmond is and that it's a wealthy area. A search confirms there's a Richmond Hill in Richmond.

The hill offers the only view in England to be protected by an Act of Parliament—the Richmond, Ham and Petersham Open Spaces Act passed in 1902—to protect the land on and below it and thus preserve the fine views to the west and south. Two years before the wooded isle centrepiece of the view, Glover's Island (also known as Clam Island), was bought by a local resident and given to the Richmond Corporation (Borough) in return for the latter noting against its records that it and its successors would not develop the isle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond_Hill,_London


Aa in the the old English folk song "The lass of Richmond Hill".

That's about Yorkshire, but yes

Or if you've seen Ted Lasso

In hindsight it maybe should have also been obvious from the language alone. "Richmond Hill" feels a bit like saying "Rich Hill Hill" which is basically like saying "Wealthy Desirable Area."

BTW there is a linguistic tradition of “hill hill”. When new immigrants come to an area and ask the locals what that hill is called, the locals say “big hill” in their language. The newcomers call it “bighill” hill in their language. I forget the examples but this has happened enough in England that there are places whose names are five hills deep (Brythonic -> Latin -> Saxon -> Norse -> Norman).

One of my favourite quotes from the late Terry Pratchett:

> When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don't Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.



Thanks for sharing!

My contribution to this discussion is the place in BTTF which makes fun of this concept, the home of Marty McFly: Hill Valley

Not a tautological name but an oxymoronic one!


You're not thinking fourth-dimensionally!

London isn’t exactly a small “local place” and there is only one Richmond Hill in London. So I’m not sure what the issue you’re having is.

The second sentence was unnecessary.

Less than 0.2% of the world's population lives in the wider metropolitan area of London.

I live in Europe, I've been to London a few times, I have no idea what "Richmond Hill" is or whether Sir Attenborough actually lives in London.


I get where he's coming from, Attenbrorough is vocal about being a londoner to the point he has a whole documentary about the city, and he's very present in UK media.

I get why it doesn't seem so obvious from the outside, but for British people it's as obvious as Apple headquarters being in California.


You didn’t need to know any that because the GP literally referenced London in their comment.

I don't think full context should be provided at all times in casual internet conversations.

However, in your defense, "Richmond" is one of the most overloaded geographical names, second only to "Kingston".


It's in the Richmond that's in London, not the one in Yorkshire.

would you rather less anecdotes or more hard coordinates?

I'd bet "Richmond Hill, London" would have been geographically adequate. Don't we criticize USAians for their provincialism?


For me, I know "Richmond" is used numerous places near me locally, so my assumption would've been that "Richmond hill" is too generic a query.

"David Attenborough Richmond hill" would've been the way. I'd hardly fault OP for my own choice in query.


Richmond Hill, London

Now I just hear the Cinema Sins "ding!".

Try this search: The Open Book in Richmond UK

and when you googled the book shop name?

> In my view a spinor is even more familiar than a vector

Okay... Pauli and Dirac both received Nobel Prizes for discovering spinors. Nobody needed to discover pointing in some direction.


Sometimes the simplest things are hidden in plain sight :) Most people point with their fingers/hands. Unlike rayman, who has vector-like hands, biological beings have them connected to their body, which makes them behave like spinors. But Dirac actually knew about this, after all there is a belt trick named after him.


Same. I rarely use mine and find that they just about always still have battery. And even when they don't I'll just plug them in and go find something else to do for a few minutes and by the time I come back they are usable for hours. The talk about the power button is super strange to me.


> It fixates on one particular basis and it results in a vector space with few applications and it can not explain many of the most important function vector spaces, which are of course the L^p spaces.

Except just about all relevant applications that exist in computer science and physics where fixating on a representation is the standard.


In physics it is common to work explicitily with the components in a base (see tensors in relativity or representation theory), but it's also very important to understand how your quantities transform between different basis. It's a trade-off.


Most relevant applications use L^2 spaces which can not be defined point wise.

If you want to talk about applications, then this representation is especially bad. Since the intuition it gives is just straight up false.


Fwiw, my favourite textbook in communication theory (Lapidoth, A Foundation in Digital Communication) explicitly calls out this issue of working with equivalence classes of signals and chooses to derive most theorems using the tools available when working in ℒ_2 (square-integrable functions) and ℒ_1 space


> I own an M4 iPad Pro and can't figure out what to do with even a fraction of the horsepower, given iPadOS's limitations.

Literally everything you do gets the full power of the chips. They finish tasks faster using less power than previous chips. They can then use smaller batteries and thinner devices. A higher ceiling on performance is only one aspect of an upgraded CPU. A lower floor on energy consumed per task is typically much more important for mobile devices.


Right but what if I don't notice the difference between rendering a web page taking 100ms and it taking 50ms? What if I don't notice the difference between video playback consuming 20% of the chip's available compute and it consuming 10%?


I'm pretty sure that users of the announced Blender for iPad port will notice any additional horsepower.


what users?


> but what if I don't notice the difference between rendering a web page taking 100ms and it taking 50ms?

You probably won’t notice this when using the new machine.

For me, it only becomes noticeable when I go back to something slower.

It’s easy to take the new speed as a given.

> What if I don't notice the difference between video playback consuming 20% of the chip's available compute and it consuming 10%?

You would notice it in increased battery life. A CPU that finishes the task faster and more efficiently will get back into low power mode quicker.


Faster can also mean more efficient for a lot of tasks, because the cpu can idle sooner so your battery can last longer, or be smaller and lighter.


"Literally everything" doesn't amount to much if I can't actually control the stupid thing.


The difference in usefulness between ChatGPT free and ChatGPT Pro is significant. Turning up compute for each embedded usage of LLM inference will be a valid path forward for years.


That's a JIT. It uses the same compiler infrastructure but swaps out the AoT backend and replaces it with the JIT backend in LLVM. Notably, this blog post is targeting on-device usage which a custom JIT is not allowed. You can only interpret.


Because the usefulness of an AI model is reliably solving a problem, not being able to solve a problem given 10,000 tries.

Claude Code is still only a mildly useful tool because it's horrific beyond a certain breadth of scope. If I asked it to solve the same problem 10,000 times I'm sure I'd get a great answer to significantly more difficult problems, but that doesn't help me as I'm not capable of scaling myself to checking 10,000 answers.


Without reading an entire novel's worth of text, do they explain why they picked these dates? They have a separate timeline post where the 90th percentile of superhuman coder is later than 2050. Did they just go for shock value and pick the scariest timeline?


Only gripe I have with the tool is that once you've gotten a country right a few times it zooms in too far. I still had no clue where Eritrea was after getting it right like four times. Just got lucky.

But now that the map only shows me three possible countries I can trivially remember which one it was. Ask me again tomorrow while only showing me the full map and I might guess it's in South America.


Wrong thread?


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