Viewing profile — bloaf

I think they make things worse, because they very very often present straight inaccurate information. Just the other day I was trying to find out "What american tree species have t…

Yandex is the only search engine left which still feels like the "old" web. It feels like you're actually getting a best effort search, and not just the results that someone paid t…

As someone who regularly reads things online, then wants to read them again like 3 years later, Google has been monotonically declining in quality. Also I realized the other day ho…

I don't think this is the right framing, because I think it confuses the means and the ends. Its like making a jig in woodworking. The measure of the jig's success is not whether i…

We have entered the era of small software, and no one knows what it will grow to. Here's an example: my office has a few cars for employees to use as rentals. The number is small e…

The software which manages our instrument spec sheets, and the software which manages our field tech rounds.

Reminds me of this piece I read on hacker news over a decade ago: https://mcfunley.com/whom-the-gods-would-destroy-they-first-...

We got the thumbs up from management last week.

I think Sturgeon's law would tell us that everything will stay about the same. But in reality, a lot of corporate software exists just because there are plenty of companies who are…

Organizational inertia is a real thing. There are still fortune 500 companies with internal bans on AI. A lot of the answer to "how much impact has AI had" comes down to "how much …

There have been demonstrated rowhammer-based ECC bypass attacks. ECC mitigates but does not fix rowhammer.

As long as rowhammer is still out there, aint none of your memory safe. Fixing rowhammer is the memory safety absolutism I want to hear more about.

Obesity rates have been declining over the same time period.

I think the other alternative is that the senior guy thinks that the junior guy is working on a problem where the juice isn't worth the squeeze. "Just ask an LLM" can be interprete…

I don't think this is entirely true, insofar as non-local models inherently have a "man cannot serve two masters" problem. The end user and the org running the AI may have differen…

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/unbound/classrev/kipling.ht... I think the history of children's literature may be shorter than you think.

My search returned what might as well have been a random assortment of bible verses. It made me wonder what Terry Davis would have thought of modern AI. Would it be the natural evo…

The same guy found Sympy was similarly far behind in differential equations (although Maple edges out Mathematica here): https://www.12000.org/my_notes/CAS_ode_tests/index.htm He d…

Does SageMath use Sympy, or is there some other integrator built in? Last I heard Sympy was one of the worst performers, even among other open source CASs. https://www.12000.org/my…

How do they stack up doing actual computer algebra things like symbolic integration? https://www.12000.org/my_notes/CAS_integration_tests/reports... Note that alternative open sour…

I don't think anyone really knows. I consider these scenarios: 1) We stumble onto an algorithmic improvement in intelligence. This isn't just "what humans do but faster", its "bett…

I'm don't know what makes a bad CEO but I've definitely worked with people who could be replaced by a current-gen AI.

I think that what technical people fail to understand is that a lot of the time, "compliance" is not the same as a binary compiles/does not compile. For a lot of rules/regulations,…

Something else to note: The lab tested for chromium in two ways: one test (ICP) measures all chromium of any kind, and the other measures hexavalent chromium specifically. The ICP …

A counterpoint is this The lab tested for chromium in two ways: one test (ICP) measures all chromium of any kind, and the other measures hexavalent chromium specifically. The ICP t…