Viewing profile — bnjmn

"Context and intent cannot be known" seems like a bit of an overstatement? A qualifying clause like "in all cases, with complete confidence" would allow for the possibility of alig…

This game was the first software I ever modified! I added an easter egg where if you spent all your money immediately on cocaine, its price would reliably skyrocket, so you could g…

> Humanoid robots are handicapped by their similarity to humans which is really an artificial constraint. YES, and I wish people would stop pretending we've unlocked some new gener…

Here's a use case that seems more science fictional to me (as the parent of a 2yo) than warp drive: a robot that can gently restrain an uncooperative human baby while changing its …

Among other general advice, my CLAUDE.md insists Claude prove to me each unit of change works as expected, and I'm usually just hoping for it to write tests and convince me they're…

They say the e-ink display has "Unmatched Speed, Never Seen on ePaper" so it would nice to know the actual refresh rate. This is not an endorsement, but https://daylightcomputer.co…

Thanks for these detailed replies! Now I really want to read your paper.

I fully agree with your final statement, but needing to constrain the problem in an artificial way to prove it's NP-complete doesn't mean the constraint was justified or realistic,…

> We still do not know, for instance, what makes a good tokeniser (Gowda and May, 2020; Cognetta et al., 2024): which characteristics should its produced subwords `s` have to be a …

On any macOS computer (or replace /usr/share/dict/words with your own word list): grep '^[qwertyuiop]*$' /usr/share/dict/words | \ awk '{ print length(), $0 }' | \ sort -n

Are there any new cars / car brands that credibly promise not to track their drivers? Any car with a network connection for software updates seems likely to be harvesting driver da…

Mostly because they admit those results are not statistically significant (for example, at the bottom of the summary diagram). That said, I admire their honesty, and I hope these r…

Although these results are not exactly impressive or compelling (they don't make me want to change my exercise habits), it's reassuring to see researchers go through with publishin…

"Potentially" is an understatement! A much better take, IMO.

This isn't exactly what you asked for, but it seems pretty relevant to your stated interests: https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/voronoi/capitals/

I don't think you can have a proper Merkle tree if cycles are possible, and cycles definitely are possible in this AST representation: https://www.unisonweb.org/docs/faq#how-does-h…

My thoughts as well!

you're right, I should have replaced "intuitions" with "observations" instead of waffling

Scientific understanding (defined by the ability to make accurate predictions) can be (must be?) anchored in both the math and physical intuitions/observations, and it's very diffi…

One of my favorite takes on this topic: "From... elementary theories we build up descriptions of more and more complex systems. But in all these efforts we take for granted that we…

Thanks!

Speaking as a maintainer of large open-source projects, I know what it's like to get stuck working on a release branch (which is sometimes just the `master` branch) that takes fore…

Here's a comment from Sebastian M (React core team member) about why they chose not to use generator functions: https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/7942#issuecomment-2...