Viewing profile — serhei

There are... multiple blog posts online now about how to use freely available data and modest amounts of compute to train a custom GPT-2-sized model from scratch. It would be quite…

Clearly Apple's decision is based on paternalism, which most people don't appreciate when it's combined with government power. Compare: "Clearly the ability to eliminate opposing v…

It's still completely illogical to install an update just to wait for another update to fix the problems introduced by the first update.

Apple has had a planned-obsolescence approach for years and years [1], but with the way software used to be distributed and the consumer expectations on hardware design it was less…

You may laugh, but it seems scarily plausible to develop a machine algorithm that generates 12 articles, have a human go through to pick the 3 least-ridiculous ones and do some lig…

Yes, that was a typo on my part. Lake Ontario lengthens any NY-Toronto train line. Lake Erie lengthens any NY-Detroit train line.

I'm not sure that makes sense as a single rail route. If Toronto and Detroit are intermediate stops on a line from NY to Chicago, that would mean the train either goes the long way…

There could also be a desire to push partial-autonomy features in the short term, when Model 3 owners are making the decision day-by-day whether to drive the car completely manuall…

Don't worry, those buildings can always be repurposed as condominiums. Unless the housing bubble implodes in which case Toronto has bigger problems.

I'm more concerned about whether the streetcar running on top of there will ever be more than just a sketch. An extension of the streetcar network in that direction has been propos…

The ability to buy something on Steam is sadly no longer a guarantee that it works.

Seems like Peter Thiel just has a policy to keep a finger in a lot of pies. Reminds me of the time Yarvin wrote a criticism of Sam Altman: > Sam Altman (whom I don't know, but SF i…

To paint a less rosy picture, many countries are good at keeping out US based tracking / social media monopolies because they want to support their own tracking / social media mono…

Have a look at https://sandstorm.io/

> After a lot of lunacy including running around in the backyard and driveway looking for a spot of coverage, we finally settled on a system of handwritten IOU notes, and most peop…

The reasoning on this guy's website is often pretty fascinating: http://www.worlddreambank.org/P/PLANETS.HTM -- these are entire fantasy planets. For a warm-up exercise, he started…

It's worth noting that conventional railways tend to sacrifice a bit of speed (relative to what you could engineer them for) in favour of being flexible in terms of how much passen…

That's pretty similar to how languages like Scala with higher-order features translate down to the JVM bytecode (which is subject to certain restrictions).

The next boom will be in whatever _isn't_ being hyped right now.

I believe hype is actually Musk's primary product: by constantly coming up with these announcements he plays his part in maintaining the narrative of the US being the leader in tec…

I certainly don't look forward to auditing a Solidity contract with the complexity of the federal tax code.

Imitating other code that is known to work [1]. Lots of testing. Fixing the bug when someone runs into it and complains (a viable last-resort for almost anything besides a Solidity…

Thanks, I edited my comment to be more readable.

Heck, the basic methods of writing provably correct programs have been explained in plain English since at least the 70s: https://www.amazon.com/Discipline-Programming-Edsger-W-Dij…