Viewing profile — emtel

In my experience fable can absolutely find very subtle bugs just by reading code and thinking. Last example I saw was a very subtle race condition that neither I not the author not…

> Compiler performance is dominated by algorithms But you can always use the best algorithm no matter what your implementation language is, so it still makes sense to prefer a lang…

> should I walk or drive to the car wash there is an entire genre of riddles based on this kind of misdirection that works on humans, such as "A plane crashed on the border or US a…

Even if pre-training was the only training step, it still wouldn't necessarily follow that the only thing the model is doing is stitching words together probabilistically, unless y…

I’m guessing you don’t have kids. My membership pays for itself just for the savings on string cheese alone. Same for eggs.

audiophiles ( https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/turntables-with-pace.... ) also claim that turntables can be rated on "timing, rhythm, and pace" in which supposedly the timing…

What a strange paragraph! Why on earth should we assume that a body is a prerequisite for having emotions?

How is drugging an animal's food a "brute force tactic"? What would qualify as a non-brute-force tactic in your mind?

The "Einstein can't get a cat into a carrier even though he is smarter" is just a hilariously bad argument. All cat owners can get their cats into a carrier! And most cats don't wa…

A lot of posts urging people to get colonoscopies. But general anesthesia also carries risks. How should one weigh the risk vs benefit?

> The goal is not to force individuals to not replace their phones, but rather to provide that as an option at all, for those who want it. But my point is that you need to recogniz…

That's an odd reply since by that argument they also flocked to a phone with no replaceable battery, which was pretty standard in the 2000s. But you could be right. I guess this wi…

One of the most frustrating things about HN is that people seem so unaware of how idiosyncratic their preferences are. If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby wh…

I bought a north face backpack for college in 1998. It cost $60. It was an extravagant expense for me at the time and I felt horrible about it for weeks. That backpack is currently…

Communist regimes, especially the USSR, had nearly unlimited power to impose exactly the policies that supposedly would help. Open societies, in contrast, must balance many competi…

It has never been the case that publishing a work entitles you to a share of all profits that are downstream of your work. Copyright law protects your ability to receive profits th…

This comment defies common usage and accounting practices. When people say “selling at a loss” they mean negative unit economics. No one ever means this much more expansive definit…

They don’t allow unlimited “extraction” of wealth. It is inherently limited by the need for people to take the other side of a trade. Importantly, people who either thought they ha…

I’m simply refuting the claim that when nasa launches a mission, they “know it will work”. They certainly do not.

NASA has killed 19 astronauts. SpaceX: 0

But McDonalds can't pay people $1 an hour because no one is willing to work for that little, regardless of how they classify them.

> I'd wager most Uber drivers or prostitutes or maids or even staff software engineers would choose something else if they had a better alternative. Yes, that's what I said, but yo…

I was quite disappointed with the essay when I originally read it, specifically this paragraph: > This is extremely realistic. This is already real. In particular, this is the gig …

I pay for YouTube premium and it’s one of my happiest expenditures. YouTube is a miraculous, unbelievable treasure trove. Learn any language, any musical instrument, any academic s…

Time-keeping is vastly cheaper. People don't want grandfather clocks. They want to tell time. And they can, more accurately, more easily, and much cheaper than their ancestors.