Viewing profile — tlb

Please don't submit pages with multiple unrelated stories, as it's not suitable for discussion.

You can engage with an AI-written document! Simply paste the document into the AI (same or different as the AI that wrote it) and ask questions. You can get an answer in seconds co…

Librarians have systems that can classify every published book. And scientific publishers can classify every paper. Those don't add up to a complete classification of all human kno…

Gmail is at least as large a target, and they don’t keep having breaches.

I just ask LLMs questions about things I'm curious about. I don't really want to follow someone else's predefined curriculum. A curriculum is necessary when the information has to …

Some of mine do. They use WASM64 with threads to run robotics simulations.

This is out of date. There are now a number of fusion energy startups, including Helion which has raised $1B from investors, mostly Silicon Valley ones you've heard of. It's not ye…

They do as soon as that company makes a profit, or anyone sells shares in that company.

Yes, if you run `git blame -C`.

15 years ago you could argue that venture capital wasn't funding enough advanced tech, so ideas were failing to cross the gap from pure research to commercial development. But late…

git actually does this. `git diff --find-copies`

0 for 10 on some startups (large and small, YC and not) that came to mind. It's easy to scrape YC startups from https://www.ycombinator.com/companies . Scrape that and a dozen othe…

In terms of political power, programmers are more like yeomen than peasants. Yeomen have power due to their essential skills because if a good fraction of them stopped working the …

England also has a lot of disused airfields, often with huge hangers and stupendous concrete runways built during WWII. A few are open as museums. They can be worth a quick visit.

As a kid I found saltpeter at an old-fashioned pharmacy and made gunpowder, and it also barely fizzled. I think you have to grind the ingredients much finer than a kid has patience…

Generator excitation is not the hard part of a black start. You have to run coal feeders, blowers, and water pumps for an hour before you can spin the generator. Then you get power…

Yes, that is basically the plan. It's based on the belief that unfettered AI would let anyone be a supervillain and destroy the world. There are enough would-be supervillains out t…

It's ridiculous to consider MITM attacks out of scope for taking over your computer. Also, there are probably ways to exploit this without a true MITM like DNS cache poisoning. But…

They should compile it to WASM and host it.

Building a swap device at user level used to be one of those classic unsolvable problems, because what if your daemon needs to swap in a page in order to swap in a page? Or at leas…

There's a package to do this in Julia: https://juliaarrays.github.io/StructArrays.jl/stable/

There are still things you can't do with an open-weight model without the training data, like modifying the architecture and training from scratch. That's different from true open-…

Linux on Arm works great. I barely notice the difference except everything is a bit faster. Most SaaS companies can and should switch.

Yes, for example taking off or landing a rocket on the surface blasts particles of sand out sideways at 1000s of m/s. The particles can fly in the thin atmosphere for kilometers an…