Viewing profile — scottmsul

An interesting anecdote: I was a big trumpet player in high school, and developed perfect pitch but mainly only for trumpet sounds.

Or you could, you know, let people have access to the base model and engineer their own system prompts? Instead of us hoping you tweak the only allowed prompt to something everyone…

Also I should add, being a Factorio veteran with 2-3k hours in this game, I think the goal of making the "largest possible factory" is too vague and not the right metric. When Fact…

There was a HN post here not too long ago about a team that used reinforcement learning to train an agent to beat pokemon red. They mentioned how they had to tweak the cost functio…

I made one of these a while ago https://github.com/scottmsul/Password-Generator

I just see a bunch of spinning coins forever and nothing happens with no way to stop it...

> if you have a path in the upper bunk that gets broken you are screwed Counter-factuals like this don't apply when talking about average probabilities. If you cross over, it's an …

Suppose all the groceries raised the price of item X by exactly the same percent Y on the same day. At first glance this would look like perfect collusion in the data. But how do y…

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Suppose we took this line of thinking to its natural conclusion. If we wanted to be completely neutral, in theory we could have no male/female division at all, and just compete for…

Except sinusoids are special in that they are natural solutions to the Helmholtz wave equation. There's other problems too like square waves having infinite energy. This article mi…

Congrats! For anyone who's interested, there's a group of us dedicated to natural myopia reduction at reducedlens.org, which is a free and open-source fork of endmyopia. I've even …

But why would it be a dodecahedron and not just a metal plate with a hole in it? Seems overkill.

Having given my brother a Tungsten cube once for Christmas, it's possible they just made these because they were fun and looked cool.

I'd be curious to see if someone could use generative AI to make fake irises and scam the handout mechanism

I'm in Florida so it must be pretty major.

Interesting, I didn't think to try mobile, that actually works for me too. Twitter seems to be fine for me on both mobile and desktop. Edit: actually seems like twitter isn't refre…

The two-state system was the first example I learned in undergrad stat mech, and really helped me understand the first-principles definitions of entropy, temperature, etc. My paren…

Everyone here seems totally lost on the physics connection. Suppose you have a box of atoms, each atom can be in one of two states, a low energy E1 and a high energy E2. If the box…

Also the novel rulesets make it so much more interesting than vanilla sudoku. Oftentimes the puzzles have really abstract/mathematical/beautiful break-ins. Definitely adds a lot of…

In general relativity space-time is a 4-dimensional (3 space + 1 time) surface that itself can expand, contract, or move around. It's perfectly reasonable in GR to have a distance …

There was a point in time where everything in the visible universe was the size of a potato, but the entire universe (beyond the visible edge) is most likely just more matter in ev…

I would add the connection to GR. In a Newtonian world, there would be nowhere for matter to expand into, and our intuition would be correct. But in General Relativity, space itsel…

Something that's always bothered me about many-worlds is that it states the number of worlds should always be increasing exponentially. Which means from an anthropic point of view,…