Viewing profile — ShardPhoenix

I liked PG's essays better when they were more concretely rooted in the details of his work his work at his startup and at YC. This one feels like a sort of non-specific variant of…

Based on the chat transcript Demz seems like either another bot or someone who just doesn't give a shit. Can't be bothered helping someone? Just spam the "I'm sorry you're frustrat…

When Git was taking over from SVN, the main benefit I remember reading about was the much faster/lighter-weight branching. IIRC in SVN making a branch makes a complete copy of all …

>When I described this to Amy, she responded with a magnificent rant that was something like “this is a romanticized utopian ideal about a thing that was inhabited by socially inhi…

OpenAI claims that their work on Dota2 has carried over to work on a robot hand: https://blog.openai.com/learning-dexterity/ (Which isn't quite practical yet but might be in the mi…

The first four words of the linked Gwern article are "Joel Spolsky in 2002". In fact he gives him credit 3 times!

Note: this applies to new updates to Java 8, as a result of the upcoming Java 11 taking over as the LTS version. Oracle is not charging for Java in general. As a result the headlin…

"Good actors" isn't some term of high praise, it just means those who aren't "bad actors" (who do harmful things).

Such large swings in basic things like "Mandarin" make me doubt the quality of the data.

An AI doesn't need to be upset at humans (or even have emotions as we know them) to be dangerous - it just needs to be powerful and to not care about us as much as we care about ou…

>The part I don't understand yet is who is the dumb money buying shares in these hollowed-out debt-laden husks from the private capital vultures? It almost always ends up badly. Is…

Thanks to the very lucid explanations, I feel like this gave me a better understanding of why computers might be implemented in a certain way (eg why certain gates or instructions …

>You also would probably mention that the code would be less likely to be buggy and crash due to the null safety principle. Not really. Although it makes it easier to deal with nul…

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=slack,discord So far of course Slack is still much more popular among business users, but I've anecdotally noticed a big surge in Discord…

>In one short story he proposes a kind of reverse CYOA book: A book with many beginnings but only one ending. Some games work like this (eg Dragon Age: Origins). It's not as myster…

You get your name and address checked off when you vote, if you don't get checked off you get fined (~$100). However I've heard of people sometimes not voting without getting fined…

Voting is mandatory in Australia and our political system doesn't seem particularly better (or worse) then the UK.

I don't find this very surprising - I've seen a similar level of framework heterogeneity even at much smaller companies.

>Is the problem that there are lots of mediocre artists but not many who can actually execute projects? I think part of it is that standards keep increasing. Compare this demon con…

The meeting seemed a little content-free, I wonder if there was some other discussion happening off-camera? Like, "I'll fund the movie version" or something. Or maybe Gates is real…

>The decisions they make during the gameplay get translated into decisions about non-trivial aspects of scientific work. (This is the hard part). It's a nice dream but I suspect fi…

After spending two minutes clicking around my free account, I couldn't see either how I'd upgrade to a paid account or why I'd want to. Seems like an important usability issue.

It sounds like he has no idea about the machine learning basis of Alpha Go (and therefore presumably any future Starcraft AI) and thinks all this complex decision making has to be …