Viewing profile — rdw

I spoke with an Anthropic employee, and came to understand that their definition of safety is more like "making AI be a tool that humans can use without hurting themselves or other…

Once you write enough code, you'll realize you need synchronization primitives for async code as well. In pretty much the same cases as threaded code. You can't always choose to wr…

In the area I live, houses are often built one complete room at a time, over many years. They start out as a single-room shack, then the owner builds extensions as they have childr…

"We should do something to preserve leading-edge chip manufacturing in the US. This is Something, therefore we should do it."

The bitter lesson is becoming misunderstood as the world moves on. Unstated yet core to it is that AI researchers were historically attempting to build an understanding of human in…

Thanks, Max! I've personally never been able to wrap my head around BSP; I appreciate your diagrams explaining everything, and I am optimistic about the new engine. It's crazy how …

Article is from 2021, but the game launched today.

It's a very risky industry. It's quite likely to sink a ton of money into a game and earn very little back, basically wasting everything. Game series that consistently make revenue…

It's a lot like the VR hype cycle of the past 5 years. Maybe there will be more of an actual change from the AI stuff, though.

I used to believe this and then I got into the area. It depends on the area of course but it turns out that the cost of the house is quite significant. House construction costs are…

It has more to do with how game engines are built, making embeddability be the most important criteria. Most game engines are written as a large chunk of C++ code that runs each fr…

You're right, and it's got more layers than that. C# does have value types, which are not boxed, and using them judiciously can avoid garbage. However, they are a more recent addit…

I had one, and I wrote a lot of code on it. There was pretty much nothing else on the market that could do web browsing in that portable of a form factor, and at that price point. …

Yes, I've heard this said many times about sales people. If they're not visibly wasting money, people are reluctant to hire them because they either aren't good (and thus have no m…

It's fun to be back in the age where every few years you want to upgrade your computer because the new ones are so much faster, not because the old one is worn out. 20% faster isn'…

The practice of using political party affiliation as a criteria at all for drawing district borders inevitably leads to gerrymandering. This part of the article does seem apparent,…

This is written in such a way that it seems like it makes sense, but it ultimately takes its conclusion as an axiom and is thus essentially meaningless. Gerrymandering is to draw d…

Can someone explain to me how any schools are in danger of going out of business? Their expenses aren't going up, they're not paying professors more, they're not leveraging themsel…

> Code that runs slow over pathological input is nowhere near as dangerous as code that goes into an infinite loop over pathological input. In my experience, these are not actually…

Presumably related to this: https://www.roryctait.com/post/why-did-shaq-just-add-eth-to-...

Oooh, I have one. It is really amazing, in that there's really a usable display in a package the size of one's finger. I've struggled to use it for anything practical, though, beca…

Don't give up on the industry. I believe that HP is actually seeding the idea that no printer is better, because I've heard several people resignedly tell me that they're getting a…

Google spends most of their time blocking ads. "Spam" is ads.