Viewing profile — nicklaf

Same story here. After installing dwm years ago, I've more or less stopped thinking about window managers as an open problem to be solved. I suppose one could run into trouble if t…

It's painfully apparent when you've reached the limitations of an LLM to solve a problem it's ill-suited for (like a concurrency bug), because it will just keep spitting out non-se…

> Van der Kolk lost his job due to pretty extensive sexual misconduct, so I think he's a pretty poor person to hold up as a hero. I was curious about this accusation, so I read a b…

preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14367

In my limited experiments with Gemini: it stops working when presented with a program containing fundamental concurrency flaws. Ask it to resolve a race condition or deadlock and i…

Personally, I don't trust LLMs to write code for me, generally speaking. That said, as of late I've been very pleased with the whole "shoehorn your problem to fit code examples fou…

Mathematics texts with titles that would mislead a beginner who naïvely takes words such as "basic" and "elementary" at face value are a bit of a running joke, particularly when yo…

FWIW, Colbert quipping that "reality has a well-known liberal bias" was clearly satirical of conservatives' tendency to trot out the canard of "liberal" bias. You could just as wel…

Rather amusingly, the author recently espoused the viewpoint that bloggers who wanted to stand out should avoid using tools like ChatGPT: https://youtu.be/avASDgtw9k0?t=678 It's no…

Interesting. This is actually behavior that I already prefer and enable in Firefox. It makes sense when you leave browser instances open for long periods of time (with multi-accoun…

"The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." —Geoffrey Chaucer, Parlement of Foules

To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour. —William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

Hacker News lacks a few distinguishing features that are characteristic of modern corporate social media: in particular, algorithmically driven feeds based on engagement metrics op…

> My feed is about 30% content I've asked to see or would want to see, the rest junk (AI crap, far right rage, far left rage). Since we both seem to use Facebook in the same way, I…

Browser extension solution to that problem: https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions

Check out Conrad Barski's Land of Lisp: http://landoflisp.com/

The phrase was made famous in an influential essay[0] by Richard P. Gabriel, where he laments Lisp's relative failure to compete with Unix. In Gabriel's opinion, Unix proved to fol…

You jest, but as famously emphasized by Steve Ballmer [0], Microsoft was (is?) all about developers! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE

Pardon me, but can we clarify what you mean by saying that "masks aren't helping much"? Do you mean that masks are not effective in stopping the spread of COVID on an individual ba…

What would be particularly nice is if it became the norm for LLM users to be expected to not only supply the log of prompts that produced a given output, but also the specific LLM,…

> They're busy thinking about much more important things. Generally I agree (because the content of modern mathematics is largely abstract), but to nitpick a bit, number theory is …

Notably, this material is based on an earlier paper on the design of algorithms by induction, also by the author: http://akira.ruc.dk/~keld/teaching/CSS_e10/Manber88.pdf

Interesting work! Thanks for putting this together. One potentially problematic thing about the new Imgur policy is that it will break machine learning projects that depend on Imgu…

Hmm, I suppose I'm inclined to agree with you here. If Wikipedia chooses not to adopt a style guideline on matters like this, his little quest to robo-edit this phrase is unreprese…

Pedantic, perhaps, but within the purview of an editor of an encyclopedia enforcing a style guideline!