Viewing profile — timdellinger

agreed - America went through a "mandolin mania" in ~1880s, and even in the 1900s and 1910s, the guitar was by no means an established instrument. As a matter of fact, the "tenor g…

“sort by year” is buried on the site, but definitely a fun way to sort there should also be a “you can spot the villain early since they’re the only one not using Apple” sub-list

The difference is that CEOs fired a lot of people, using "AI can replace human coders" as an excuse. Also: there are claims all over the headlines along the lines of "We built some…

Bayesian optimization of, say, hyperparameters is the canonical modern usage in my view, and there are other similar optimization problems where it's the preferred approach.

My take is that the Rasmussen book isn't especially approachable, and that this book has actually held back the wider adoption of GPs in the world. The book has been seen as the au…

This perspective under-appreciates the role of a leader's charisma when it comes to attracting staff that will actually execute the ideas of that leader. Anyone who has worked in a…

for perspective, monodisperse spheres max out at 74% (hexagonal close packing)

Oh, indeed - for instance, the "Brooks Brothers 346" product line is manufactured specifically and exclusively for the outlet stores.

This cries out for a histogram.

You could grab the top 10 posts by each author, and report the average score of those 10.

I find that I have to steer the AI a lot, but I do have optimism that better prompting will lead to better agents. To take an example from the article: code re-use. When I'm writin…

Totally agree here. I tried the following and had a very different experience: "Answer as if you're a senior software engineer giving advice to a less experienced software engineer…

an eternal truth, but like all eternal truths, there are many people seeing it for the first time I would perhaps perhaps articulate it as: you find your tribe by hoisting a flag a…

an opinion, and a falsifiable hypothesis: call me old-fasahioned, but two spaces after a period will solve this problem if people insist on all-lower-case. this also helps distingu…

This sounds like a prompting issue. If your prompt instructs the model to ask such questions along the way, the model will, in fact, do so! But yes, it would be nice if the model w…

My personal view is that the roadmap to AGI requires an LLM acting as a prefrontal cortex: something designed to think about thinking. It would decide what circumstances call for d…

Fair enough. Perhaps better stated as "adult human height is approximately Gaussian for a given biological sex", with an asterisk that environmental factors stretch the distributio…

Interestingly enough, sports salaries are Pareto-distributed, which says something about how valuable (as assessed by the marketplace) each player is https://marginalrevolution.com…

Oh, the answer to that is apparent enough, but frustratingly circular: Performance is "visibly doing the things that the company rewards during the performance review process". The…

Interestingly enough, I remember in my younger days being inspired by Rand Corp's 1950's era game theory work on e.g. mutually assured destruction. It later occurred to me that I d…

My take on the press release is that they're announcing a collaboration between two companies. Lithoz uses photopolymerization to 3-D print a variety of ceramics, and is in the bus…

I still remember in 2008/2009 when Buffett deployed cash on extremely juicy terms to Dow Chemical, Goldman Sachs, GE, Mars, and Swiss Re. Perhaps he's being prepared just in case c…

I'll write the obligatory comment about doing literature searches in the 90s, which involved trudging to the physics library, the chemistry library, and the engineering library in …

I'm a day late to the comments, but... I like the lens of the Big Five model of personality. I think what's at play here is (1) Low neuroticism = resilient and confident (2) Low ag…