Viewing profile — ponco

I was being a bit cheeky, but I’m not really arguing that individual inventions can be determined as good or bad. My point is it comes from the same underlying mode of production. …

Darn, I tried this and the lithium battery kicked in.

The benefits of modernity (electricity, cars, iPhone, Claude) are good, but they come bundled with potentially terminal ecological costs which is bad.

Writing a custom solver seems kind of absurd to me. There are 10s(/100s?) of open source ones out there. HiGHS in particular seems to be challenging the paid solvers with its LP im…

I disagree with the analysis, although I liked the opening paragraph. Why separate the economics of interest rates from the economics of AI productivity?

Always good to challenge the narrative - but I don't pay for RDS Postgres because of the WAL, replication, all the beauty of pg etc. I pay RDS because it's largely set and forget. …

(disclosure: I wrote this)

more throughput WITHOUT huge tail latency is my understanding. A user above posted this link https://lwn.net/Articles/994322/ which goes into the background. My mental model is "gi…

I've speculated about this myself, but haven't heard anyone actually discuss it or reveal/leak this is the case. Do you have a source for this?

`peon --pack peasant` This was my first thought too, thankfully they thought of it!

This was a very bitter pill to swallow! It took me more than one mistake to learn this - "you are not the user".

Not OP, but I think that without some creative impetus like 'agency', how useful is an AGI going to be?

I agree. I'm imagining a large software team with hundreds of tickets "ready to be worked on" might support this workflow - but even then, surely you're going to start running into…

The privatisation of the commons will endure as our generations' greatest folly. I look at the Australian NBN as a great example of a project that is not economical for a private b…

Respectfully, I don't think that piece adds anything of material substance. It's a list of hollow platitudes (vapid writing listing inactionable truisms).

I reflect on university, and one of the most interesting projects I did was an 'essay on the history of ' as part of an OS course. I chose OS X (Snow Leopard) and digging into the …

A simple Google tells me (as I was curious) it's between 6 months to 20 years, with the average being 2 years. https://www.google.com/search?q=carbon+payback+time+solar+pa... Hard …

I had an old colleague who had a favourite lunch room trick - if challenged to Scissors, Paper, Rock then he would win every single time. I presumed it was some kind of behavioural…

For a time, we did not have an “R” rating for video games and this sort of content called for this rating, which legislation said could not be given. Fortunately saner heads prevai…

Our family VCR had the "EZ Rewind" setting which would automatically rewind it to the beginning once the movie ended. Saved a lot of hassle.

Can anyone explain why this isn’t a discrete optimisation problem? I don’t understand what aspects of problem would require a non convex approach