Viewing profile — ijk

I wonder if it partially because "write like a human" is kind of a vacuous request. Like, it's the objective everyone including me has been saying that we want, but there's no one …

The portable gas turbine is a somewhat separate issue, in that it's highly illegal but if you have more money than god you can just pay off the fines and the judges. It's relativel…

Technically the current best chess engine is a neurosymbolic hybrid. But I have found that sometimes the best use of an LLM is to write code for symbolic AI.

Yeah, unfortunately "LLMs are bad at counting" seems to apply to counting parentheses. With modern tool calling I wonder if a better way to go about it is for the LLM to express th…

Except you can express the higher order structure in s-expressions too, and using an AST usually means expressing it as a different syntax than the other parts of your program. Or …

From the outside Meta's attempts to pivot from open source releases to fast follow closed models fell flat when they tried to prematurely monetize it. They could have owned the ope…

I did start a blog in that time period and this is the first time I've ever heard of this. (Admittedly, I wasn't trying to directly make a living off of it.)

If we use the S&P 500 as a proxy for the top 500 companies, I would guess that a lot more than 0% will be gone by the end of 5 years. It's hard to find non-paywalled sources for bu…

Back when red LEDs were the new cheap lighting option everything was great: red doesn't affect noght vision as much and at least for me it doesn't seem to prevent sleeping on the s…

Hence the drive to control the compute hardware. If your competitors can't run inference at competitive scale and cost, they can't challenge you.

Historically one pattern this took was patronage. Most famously associated with sponsoring artists, but historically it covered a wide variety of professions. The patron gets power…

Closing a question as a duplicate because there is already a question with similar wording (but assuming an entirely different tech stack, architecture, coding style, and goal) is …

Ah yes, programming: the discipline which famously only has singular right answers to problems, such that programmers never get in arguments with each other about the correct appro…

A sink that has large but finite capacity to absorb something can reach an irreversible tipping point when an additional shock happens. There are many examples of this in nature. (…

I agree in principle, but every time I run a debugger on modern C++ it makes it clear that, rather than being a simple and cutesy transformation, "compiler optimization" is actuall…

Yeah, private universities being unionized is more recent.

It's not. In the US, public university graduate student unions started in the 1970s. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unio... Which is not to say that co…

Where I encounter it at the higher education level is that academic-level research almost universally has maximum word counts or page counts rather than minimums: if you think you …

Literacy. Percentage of children to survive to adulthood. Global food surplus. The was a big phase shift over the course of the 20th century...

So the individual website has to subscribe to the surveillance operator's IP location verification service, or be fined.

I don't understand the need for age verification. I mean, I understand what it effects it has, and why many parties want to perfect their expanding panopticon, and why screaming th…

Secure encryption has been classified as controlled munitions in the past. Making SSH illegal is well within the range of possible futures. It'd be a stupid future, but it's a stup…

There were a lot of millennials at the time. Still are, it's just that they're pushing 40 instead of 14.

In the US, homelessness per capita peaked in the 90s. It remained relatively high afterwards compared to the pre 1980 numbers, and has recently spiked higher in the wake of 2020 an…