Viewing profile — wmwmwm

Joseph Heller methinks, but probably not too far away in embedding space!

I’m guessing Ramanujan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

Also had to remember not to drag people out of cars and drive off with them when walking felt too slow in real life!

Book recommendation for The World Without Us which explores what might happen if humans vanished overnight: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us

My aero engineering friend from university winds me up every time I see him saying that pi = 22/7 - I finally stopped getting angry, checked and it’s pretty good! I’m still glad he…

The domain name and the story seem a bit incongruous...

I had one due to a bulging disc in my neck and some pins and needles - it was fascinating, but I still remember them turning on the audio and letting me listen to my nerves trying …

You can throw python threads at it, but if each request traverses the big old datastructure using python code and serialises a result then you’re stuck with only one live thread at…

Historically I’ve written several services that load up some big datastructure (10s or 100s of GB), then expose an HTTP API on top of it. Every time I’ve done a quick implementatio…

Same for me on Firefox, though Chromium and Safari seem to work

Does anyone have any insight into why reinforcement learning is (maybe) required/historically favoured? There was an interesting paper recently suggesting that you can use a prefer…

There’s also a python api for getting the transcript from a given youtube video id so you can script the whole thing

I’ve had some pretty remarkable results pasting lecture transcripts from youtube into gpt4 and getting well formatted/relevant markdown summaries from meandering and mis-transcribe…

Not super related but a pleasantly surprising linux /dev trick I discovered yesterday was piping “hello” to /dev/udp/ / in order to check connectivity between two machines (the oth…

I think it is actually meant to be "scruples" - so it sounds pretty accurate to me: https://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/James/Turn_Screw.pdf (see p4)

This is amazing, and scary (as a musician) but also reliably kills firefox on iOS!

As someone who’s been prompted every other night over the last couple of years for a fresh made-up story with an ever-changing cast of dinosaurs, superheroes and aliens by my five …

I can recommend “Other Minds” by Peter Godfrey-Smith for a pretty in depth read about octopus intelligence. Fascinating stuff!

Actually, I think it was the initials of the original publishers

I love this story about Agloe, New York - a "copyright trap" that materialised into a real place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agloe,_New_York When another map maker put the actua…

I remember several times putting my eldest son to bed when he was a few months old and having this intrusive thought that maybe the reason why he was yelling was because he knew he…

I’m a fan of that book too - though hoping I never need it! On a tangential theme, another one I read and liked at the same time was The World Without Us - all about what would hap…

Having just implemented a softmax() function for an online ML course, I think the python implementation here suffers from overflow if any of the elements of z get big(ish) - e.g. e…

Although I haven't used LaTeX in decades to write anything substantial like a paper or dissertation, I recently had cause to use it to write up some homework for an online course I…