Viewing profile — rxm

Nice project. I’m curious to see how it writes after instruct.

What used to be feature engineering a decade or more ago now seems to have shifted to developing distributed representations. LLMs use word tokens (for words or the entities in ima…

I also prefer to number just the important equations. One of the advantages of numbering all equations is that the reader can binary search an equation by number. I try to mitigate…

One of my pet theories is that flimsy homes reflect an economics signaling problem: it is hard to prove to a buyer the value of quality. Whereas size is easier. As a suburban home …

I also like Contact, which I think of as Sagan’s struggle with reconciling religion and science for himself. Also, I nlike what the article mentions, I recall the book being based …

I got through graduate school and over a decade of research with my inexpensive but very smooth Uni-ball cylinders (or classic roller) micro, 0.5mm pens. They were light, with a mi…

I would have included symbolic algebra systems to the list. Many famous calculations in physics and mathematics may not have been attempted without them. Macsyma and Reduce paved t…

Amazing things can happen when cellular automata have symmetries. Conserve number and momentum and you're a few steps from the HPP gas [0]. Make the momentum flow a bit more isotro…

Some URL shorteners provide a copy of their mappings to the Internet Archive as a promise that if they stop functioning for any reason the archive will continue to provide the mapp…

Until the early 2010s we ran our own tiny data center (six to eight racks in two separate locations). When we re-evaluated whether to have the racks hosted somewhere else, it worke…

> any Internet user who uploads a copyrighted work could find themselves subject to a largely unappealable $5,000 penalty Shared a viral amateur video? I understood that this law w…

In most organizations I have interacted with getting data with known sampling is always a problem. “The temperature sensor sends a measurement every 5 minutes.” Except, I learned a…

There are many aspects of a library of technical books that I miss online: the curation process, the higher bit rate once you are holding the book, and the lack of distractions in …

What awk and send are to files of lines, jq is to json. I find it indispensable on the command line. Jq is a functional language. It took me a bit to get used to it, but now it is …

One of the conversations was about reading. Let the kids read anything: comic books, fun novels, fantasy picture books. He re-assured me that they would eventually expand into othe…

When I was a graduate student, in the late 80s, I was waiting for a flight to Los Alamos in Albuquerque. There was only one other person in the lounge, obviously also going to Los …

Thanks for the example. What you just did is one of the hardest things to communicate about data. A casual user would never notice this. I find "data curation" doesn't always get t…

I still use textmate. I started with vi, which I still use for small edits, switched to sam, back to vi when I stopped having X on my Mac, and then to textmate. I have tried sublim…

Does anyone know when this post was written?

You are so right. Good design doesn't just pop out of nowhere. It does emerge early on, but requires work and time while the complexities of the problem are groked.

Hardy's rule can be adapted to programming: to code it better, think it gooder. One big difference in productivity comes from making good design decisions early on and not taking s…

Way too many.

Nice read on how to check your rsyncs.

The mechanics of creating a manuscript are not the big problem. Meaningful and honest peer review, assignment of credit among authors and from future developments, better matching …