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A chapter on memorising numbers from he book The Memory Book: The Classic Guide to Improving Your Memory by Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas uses a similar technique. They recommend memorising this mapping:

0: 's'

1: 't'

2: 'n'

3: 'm'

4: 'r'

5: 'l'

6: 'sh'

7: 'k'

8: 'v'

9: 'p/b'

To use it, just make images/stories that correspond to the digits you need to remember.

The more absurd the story, the less likely you'll forget.

E.g. pi (3.14159265359 ) could be the images of these objects: mit, rat, lab, Noah, shell, mail, bee. Then just sew them together in a story e.g. someone drops a mit, it lands on a rat, the rat runs up to someone in a lab, it's Noah, he throws a shell, it knocks over some mail which lands on a bee.

I don't use it often, but I like to memorise any 8+ digit door code when checking into a serviced apartment or airbnb, in case I forget my phone and would otherwise be without the code.


Funny, I just finished that book.

They were using a few more mappings per number for instance:

0: 's', 'z', soft 'c'

1: 't', 'd', 'th'

6: 'j', 'sh', 'ch', soft 'g'

etc

The problem I have, is that they present them from 1 to 0, and the first 4 have some mnemonic logic added to them: a bar in 't' for 1, two bars down in the 'n' for 2, three in 'm' for 3, and the 'r' from fouR in 4.

Great. And then mnemonic logic goes out the door. 5: 'l'. Ah. A single bar. Err.. is it 1 or 5..? 7: 'k'. Imagine the K looks like a 7. Ok, maybe.

So the mapping itself starts getting confusing. Unless you do what they claimed all along the book you shouldn't do: rote memorization.. Which was grinding my gears a bit..


I mostly use grok voice mode (on iOS) and share similar sentiments (just 1-2 conversations per day before quota runs out).

Even worse, the mere risk of quota exhaustion mid-conversation makes me not risk starting convos with Grok, instead I'll use ChatGPT or Claude (even though Claude is inferior for non-coding tasks, and ChatGPT is inferior for all tasks).

In fairness to xAI, they're a profit-motivated company like any other, so they cannot give us tokens for free or less than it costs them. Reality is we may have to simply pay a lot more if we want that Grok goodness.


Exactly the same for me. Mostly using voice mode, and equally worried that I will run out of quota

Claude voice mode if you put it on Opus is now also pretty good, but there are frequently situations where I get upset at it’s responses.


Whoa... TIL the rover had a tissue-box-sized helicopter (!!) on it! (and apparently the rotors must spin several times faster than a helicopter on earth due to Mars's sparse atmosphere). That's incredible.

I feel like SpaceX does an amazing job of producing docos and media (constant professionally-commentated live streams etc) but I never seem to see much from NASA. Sad, really.


The fascinating thing is that it wasn't a primary part of the mission but got lots of excitement. For me it was the thing that it features many off-the shelf parts from smartphones, uses linux and other open source software and it beat the expectations on how long it will service - Planned ~30 days with 5 flights and it did almost 3 years with 72 flights. https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/after-three-years-on-mars-...

There was extreme media coverage of the helicopter, live streams, twitter accounts, and scientists talking every day in media about if they could get another flight out of the copter. It was a huge media moment

^^ this is actually a great lesson in the power of marketing. In this case, something as simple as a product name.

Forgive me using your comment as a madlib, but one potential ending:

(something as simple as a product name)... is enough to make someone ignore the actual point about software trust and instead argue that good marketing is what's important :)


Depends on the implied meaning. What technical reason? There isn't one, obviously. But what about the practical reason for the behavior we observe? That's explained by the name and marketing. And if your goal is to understand "why are people doing this" then indeed marketing is what's important and software trust only barely enters into it.

Of course the irony there is palpable. Worry about the glasses while disregarding everything else.


I recall my friend's older brother and his friends all loving chronotrigger some 3.5 decades ago.

Is it worth playing today? (I don't have any gaming consoles, and use macOS)

(I've never played an RPG, except for Disk 1 of the original Final Fantasy VII, which I really enjoyed).


I'd say it's still very worth playing. It has a lot of tropes that future games took inspiration from, and it's art style is iconic (in part because the character designer and art direct was Akira Toriyama, of Dragonball fame). If nothing else the soundtrack will grab you by the ears and draw you in.

I've seen people bounce off of it, no shame if that happens - in typical JRPG fashion of the time it came out it's involved (there's some non-intuitive progression steps) and takes about 20-30 hours to complete.

There's a DS version which I can't speak to since I've only played the original SNES version, but I understand it adds some additional content that's not required for the story.


Additionally romhacks exist assuming you own the original game, which layer some quality of life tweaks on top! For the SNES version at least.

Available in play store on Android also. Cheap

Yes. It is one of the most polished JRPGs, and there are no random encounters or grinding. The game can be played through in 24 hours, with optional side quests.

Chrono Trigger holds up very well, and much better than many PSX/N64 games. It was at the pinickle of 16bit sprite graphics. I beat it a bunch of times as a teen on an emulator. Then I bought it for the DS and beat it again several years ago. It's available on Steam.

i played thru it with my kids recently and they all loved it so i would say it holds up, the steam version is fine

I play it on average once a year, the full 6h playthrough.

If you like JRPGs (and you say you like FFVII so that applies to you!) then you should. Personally I played it wanting to try out the genre and found it uninteresting. But hey, doesn't cost anything to try something new!

> But AI has absolutely no problem with going with the cheesiest, most overused trope

I genuinely wonder if this can be addressed (at least partially) as simply as prompting: "don't rely on overused tropes", or something to that effect.


> Combined with earlier moves like removing &num=100

Removing this made google search horrible to use. I often use command+f to quickly identify relevant search results, but doing it on 10 results at a time is so laborious that I just don't bother using Google search, resulting in less searches and use of other tools instead.


would you mind sharing such other tool?

I refer to tools like LLMs, unfortunately (not search engines). If anyone knows of a search engine that returns 100 results, I'm very keen to learn of it

1. Humans use AI

2. AI requires power^

3. AI companies purchase/produce power

4. Humans complain that AI uses power (but continue to use AI)

^Same for water

This is a silly 'news cycle' witch hunt that no economist takes even mildly seriously.


I don't choose to use all the AIs sites keep shoving at me.

If the consumers of AI aren't paying the marginal costs for the energy they're using, it's a market distortion and we won't have working market discovery of the actual cost performance of the AI. "Wow tokens are so cheap let's use AI for everything" meanwhile the costs are actually being hidden elsewhere.

> but continue to use AI

Not all humans


For over a decade, Google's been wearing the environmentally-friendly / carbon-neutral label as part of their public-facing brand values. It's definitely been eating into their CapEx then, and this isn't much different.

3a. AI companies make hyperbolic projections on the future use of AI and plan building and powering data centers according to that.

5. when the AI bubble bursts, we'll be left with huge amounts of unused/half-built data center capacity and unused power (with complications such as the data centers belonging to creditors and not being worth nearly as much as the inflated prices paid for building them).


> Performing security verification

> Verify you are human

Does anyone else command + w on first sight of a cloudflare screen?


I'll tolerate that but that new QR recaptcha that wants a selfie is 'hell fucking no' from me 100% of the time.

There are captchas that demand selfies now? I have never heard of that before and it sounds completely crazy.


I sure hope humans are in the loop at those companies, reviewing pics that aren't recognized as faces. If I ever see one of those captchas, they'll get to see some things that no human has ever, or should ever, see.

Nah, I just have my clanker deal with it. It's better at those stupid puzzles than I am.

Cloudflare doesn't do puzzles. It either says you're a bot or you're not a bot.

Love when something decides I'm a bot and the decision is final. (Looking at you, CPU-World -- it even lets me know my IP address has been banned for "abuse", too.)

Right. Because IP addresses uniquely identify people. /eyeroll

Even if I were behind CGNAT (which I'm not), you don't see that message if you're already blocked. They won't even serve you the signup page then.

Patchright is a patched playwright that clears turnstile and other similar automation hostilities

Feels like W goes back (instead of forwards like in an FPS), and S goes forward. Is that intended or just my keyboard being weird?

EDIT: ah, by setting 'Speed of light' parameter to 40km/hr I find it a bit more intuitive


I think it is an illusion because as you approach the speed of light everything in your wide view contracts to the front of where you are going, so it would seem like you are moving back. Stop, and you now appear closer. It's probably why you do not see this effect on sci fi films, instead they show the ship moving forward by streaking the stars showing through the window, which is more intuitive for our brains to understand.

You're not controlling an FPS character walking, you're controlling the 'throttle' of how fast you're moving fwd or backward. Holding it down increases speed.

Forward means light is hitting your eyes faster, making it look like the distance the light had to cross is condensed, meaning it looks further away.

Moving backwards slights the light hitting your eyes, to the point where you're moving away from the light, so everything goes black.


What you are observing is relativistic aberration. W does make your velocity increase in the forward direction.

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