Viewing profile — xmddmx

Another way (which happens to be correct) to say tenth of a second is 100 000 000 (one hundred million) nanoseconds. You were off by a factor of 1000!

There's a meta-level of irony here that's important to note. TFA is defending the use of AI, and it very clearly (to me) used AI to analyze the data and present the results. In doi…

You say "the underpowered study did not find evidence". Not true, it found quite a bit of evidence - many statistics were presented. There is no absence of evidence. The author wro…

Perhaps in an “everyday language” way, but not in the technical, statistical sense. In an underpowered statistical study, a claim that two experimental conditions did not differ ar…

The concept you need here is "Statistical Power". The ELI5 version is that there are two mistakes you can make when looking at a P value: Type I error, where your P value is falsel…

On a M4 Pro MacBook Pro with 48GB RAM I did this test: ollama run $model "calculate fibonacci numbers in a one-line bash script" --verbose Model PromptEvalRate EvalRate -----------…

I run some boutique web servers (Apache on macOS, https on 443) and most of them were being weird - occasional slowdowns. Apache logs were mostly blank. CPU and RAM were close to 0…

See my other note [1] about bugs in Ollama with Qwen3.5. I just tried this (Ollama macOS 0.17.4, qwen3.5:35b-a3b-q4_K_M) on a M4 Pro, and it did fine: [Thought for 50.0 seconds] 1.…

See my other note about bugs in Ollama with Qwen3.5. I just tried this (Ollama macOS 0.17.4, qwen3.5:35b-a3b-q4_K_M) on a M4 Pro, and it did fine: [Thought for 50.0 seconds] 1. pot…

Ollama users: there are notable bugs with ollama and Qwen3.5 so don't let your first impression be the last. Theory is that some of the model parameters aren't set properly and thi…

> Sheldon Brown, a beloved iconoclast bicycle tech guru, died Sunday from a heart attack. He was 68 63. Curious, what does "He was 68 63" mean. Is it a bicycle gear joke about his …

On Mac Safari, holding shift and using the magic mouse to scroll up or down reverses the zoom direction. This is both right (Shift-X is the reverse of X due to convention) But is a…

My memory is that it was named "Aero Glass" which heightens the irony of "Liquid Glass" sucking. But I see many references to it being called just "Aero", but some call it "Aero Gl…

Right, this annoyed me too - it was stated w/o attribution as if novel. What is the name of the law when someone writes a think piece of "stuff I've learned" and fails to cite any …

You mean 1990. Someone graduating college in 1990 would have been about 21. That was 35 years ago, so they would be about 56 in 2025. Math is hard.

The CFR is pretty clear, and I have experience with this (being both an IRB reviewer, faculty member, and researcher). When it says "is exempt" it means "is exempt". Imagine otherw…

Turns out that under the USA Code of Federal Regulations, there's a pretty big exemption to IRB for research on pedagogy: CFR 46.104 (Exempt Research): 46.104.d.1 "Research, conduc…

I was impressed by the lack of dominance of Thunderbolt: "Next I tested llama.cpp running AI models over 2.5 gigabit Ethernet versus Thunderbolt 5" Results from that graph showed o…

I really hope the user was running Time Machine - in default settings, Time Machine does hourly snapshot backups of your whole Mac. Restoring is super easy.

There is something wrong with this article, possibly just copyediting mistakes but it makes me question the whole thing. For example, check out this mess: > “Unfortunately, there i…

Why not do an empirical A/B test: Set up two honeypots (or perhaps 2000 for statistical significance). A gets zero updates, B gets all updates immediately. See which ones get pwned…

I am baffled by Apple's incompetence here. In the past years I've seen: * iTunes/Music app randomly reassign my Album artwork, with different (incorrect) art showing up on differen…

Good points this wasn't entirely a protobuf-specific issue, so much as it was a (likely hierarchical and historical set of) bad decisions to use it at all. Using Protobuffers for a…

I share the author's sentiment. I hate these things. True story: trying to reverse engineer macOS Photos.app sqlite database format to extract human-readable location data from an …

Even the non transparent stuff looks bad - a plain Finder window: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-tahoe-26-0-beta-1...