Viewing profile — docfort

I think the first goal of writing is to talk to yourself. Without an external, unchanging scratchpad, most people cannot keep their thoughts truly straight. It can feel otherwise, …

Related: the Busy Beaver problem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40857041

I know this is such a late reply, but for clarity: my foundational point is the exact opposite hypothesis. Free labor enables incentivized labor. Economic theory has a neat concept…

Free labor enables capitalism, especially if you consider labor arbitrage as a mixture of free labor and properly compensated (according to the real value) labor. From literally be…

Interesting post, but the last bit of logic pointing to the Neural Engine for MLX doesn’t hold up. MLX supports running on CPU, Apple GPU via Metal, and NVIDIA GPU via CUDA: https:…

This was a passion of mine decades ago, but Putterman's lab jump-started interest after the cold fusion debacles. Some fun videos and pictures on the lab website. https://acoustics…

More specific info on the reference card is available in the paper's supplemental information. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ielx8/83/10795784/11125864/supp1... . Basically, they use…

The article says that implantation fails in humans 10-40% of the time. Your point is still valid, but the scale in reality is very significant.

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/package/#publishing-your-pa...

Verification is indeed the majority of the time spent. Unlike programming, Verilog and VHDL and higher level things like Chisel aren’t executed serially by the hardware they descri…

There is some recent work [0] that explores this idea, scaling up n-gram models substantially while using word2vec vectors to understand similarity. Used to compute something the a…

Terry Tao has referred to this classification system as foxes vs hedgehogs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox

I take your example on multitasking operating systems as not being limited to only helping make friendly asynchronous I/O, but I do think a deeper consideration of Multics is coinc…

It's too bad that they took the physicality of the monkeys into account, but assumed the key probabilities were IID. It would have been nice to see the effect of keyboard layout on…

Thanks for the reality check. I was worried about how I could be conflating my own personal view as a parent with the popular narrative of "kids these days and their Instagram/TikT…

I don't dispute the facts in the article, but this question kept popping up in my mind: how do they define reading time? I mean, in a too-pedantic sense, smartphone screen time is …

A nice complement to this post is Mike Culbert’s article about how Apple chose to use 32-bit ARM6 instead of a 16-bit processor for reasons entirely unrelated to maximum memory siz…

I take your overall point, but for this specific complaint, there’s a shortcut: long press on the “+” button to take you directly to the photo pocket in Messages.

Complexity is the outcome of misunderstanding. The misunderstanding can come from lots of areas. It could be from a requirements perspective: “I understand what I can build easily,…

The iTEAR 100 is not generally reimbursed by insurance. If you have an HSA or FSA, you might be able to get it through that. This whole medical device lifetime thing is because it’…

I’m still surprised that this essay didn’t explore the nature of the audience. I’m not disagreeing with your take about the dangers of straw men, but PG does seem very much in the …

There is research on humans showing that we can perceive at 500 Hz. There are devices that try to simulate a color by modulating a single LED (no color filter) and they don’t work …

I think that for people without enough paid sick leave (maybe especially in the US), being knocked out for 2-3 weeks with a virus that is more infectious than flu is an event causi…

So I honestly thought that this was going to be another LLM article, but using the venerable ReLU activation function instead of the usual. A ReLU is exactly an if statement when r…

It’s exactly this kind of thinking that underlies lossless text compression (not exactly what a transformer guarantees but often what happens). For that reason, some people thought…