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GZGavinZhao

197 karma · joined June 16, 2024

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GZGavinZhao··on Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]
Tao's proposition could be read completely differently depending on if you care about solving open problems OR about (pure) mathematics as a field. I think many commenters are in the former group, hence missing the point. The takeaway here should be that proof-maxxing via AI is particularly destructive to the (pure) math ecosystem because in many cases the process (both successful ones and failed ones) is just as important as the proof. When AI is hyper-optimized on finding the most "correct" path to arrive at a solution, you fail to look at all the other possible paths. They might be less "correct" or "efficient" but could also yield more interesting results that will inspire other problems or fields. Judging from the history of mathematics, without trials and errors that happened when the math community came together to focus on one single hard problem, mathematics wouldn't be as diverse and abundant as what it is today. With AI, we risk removing all of these trials and errors such that, while in the short term might mean we solve open problems at 100x speed (depth), could significantly impair the breadth of mathematics as a field.

What feels sad to me is that for many people though, this doesn't matter / the incentives don't line up to do anything to this situation, especially if you're applying math in your field. In this case, AI being hyper-optimized on finding the best solution / proof does indeed benefit those people enormously.

GZGavinZhao··on Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
The biggest difficulty is probably that from my observation, there's a sharp cutoff line somewhere between Gen Y and Z where anyone born before that (and don't work in tech) genuinely have no idea how to navigate their digital life and gets preyed on by those subscriptions. And these people are still a super large portion of the population paying for those subscriptions.

Only Gen Z and later are starting to care and willing to spend the time and effort to self host. All the Gen X and Y people that I know of, including many that are very intelligent and accomplished in their field, literally have no idea how to operate a computer outside of watching youtube, checking emails, and opening Word documents. Ads? They hate it but have no idea how to disable them. iPhone running out of storage and iCloud says I can solve that for $2.99/mo? They would be like IDK what that is but sure I'll pay that $2.99 if that means I can record more videos of my kids.

I really hate this situation, and I try my best to help out the folks around me who I see are getting ripped off (either they don't know or they know but think that's what it is). But still, it's really hard to communicate or teach those people when the skill of operating a computer has become intuition and human nature to me. I really can't put these things into words on the fly that would help them understand :(

GZGavinZhao··on Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
Related: I find this self-assessed AI level for contributions [1] to be extremely useful, both professionally and personally, to communicate the level of AI assistance so that the person on the receiving end can evaluate how much time & effort they want to spend understanding my code.

[1]: https://www.visidata.org/blog/2026/ai/#self-assessed-ai-leve...

GZGavinZhao··on Launch HN: Stoa Markets (YC S26) – A Marketplace for GPUs and AI Servers
Any chances of offering AMD cards :pleading_face: I would love to get my hands on some used MI210 or MI250X!
GZGavinZhao··on Docker Sandboxes – Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents
I'm confused: 1. If I run this on Mac, then inside the sandbox / microVM, am I still running MacOS or some Linux distribution? 2. If the only thing that's mounted from the host is the $PWD, how does it guarantee that it has all the system libraries that I have installed on my host system? e.g. my `/opt/homebrew` libraries or `sudo apt install libfoo-dev` headers
GZGavinZhao··on Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard
Opened the site, thought it was teenage engineering... Which is a compliment to me, because I always love their designs! Unfortunately as a HHKB user I'm not a fan of low profile keyboards otherwise I would've bought this.
GZGavinZhao··on Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
Maybe you should try using Pi [0] if you care a lot about owning your harness and making sure you're in control of what goes into your system prompt and context?

[0]: https://pi.dev

GZGavinZhao··on Codex Micro
Stop giving me ideas to repurpose my AKAI Fire with a simple Pi extension!!
GZGavinZhao··on UPI: Anatomy of a Payment Transaction
How is this different from Alipay/WeChat Pay in China? Handling transactions of this volume is an amazing technological feat, kudos to the team! However, I don't think this mobile QR code paying system is anything novel. Alipay rose to popularity much earlier (I can't recall exact when, but it was already super popular in ~2010, and definitely ubiquitous by 2015).
GZGavinZhao··on Steam Machine launches today
*sad poro noises
GZGavinZhao··on Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers
There are still games you simply can't play on Linux, e.g. Valorant/LoL can't be played on Linux because of Riot Game's kernel-level anti-cheat. And as a highly addicted LoL player it's one of the only two reasons I still have Windows taking up 200GB of my precious hard drive space.
GZGavinZhao··on Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]
They're ultimately employees. Their employers hire them to write the code that the employers want. If they don't write the code, employers just fire them and move on to hire some other people to write code. As much as how ethically questionable it is, it's still very rare that people would give up their jobs to defend their viewpoint.
GZGavinZhao··on Show HN: Edsger – A handwritten Clojure REPL for the reMarkable 2
My reMarkable is still stuck on a super old version (v3.3 I think), precisely because of xochitl being closed source and there's no stable and efficient way of driving the display. It's super sad because I would love to have much more things appearing on my tablet yet I cannot develop reMarkable apps easily. I'm not talking about browsers, but more like my Linear TODO list, calendar, etc., so I don't have to reach for my phone.

I really want to try for further reverse engineering of xochitl now that I've heard those AI tools have gotten so good at doing it.

Man I really wish one day I could run mainline Linux kernel on this tablet with the display just works.

GZGavinZhao··on 'Fuck you, Bambu': How one private message could change the face of 3D printing
> I get voting with your wallet but not many people want to spend 4x more for a worse product.

Yeah as much as I like Prusa, I really hope they figure out how to cut down their prices because, let's be real, most of the people buying a 3D printer don't give a cent about how "open" it is, and if Prusa continues this trend I'm afraid it'll become obsolete. Having competitors with genuinely good products (like Bambu, despite them not being a good company) is healthy, but not helpful if Prusa doesn't do anything to catch up to their competitor.s

GZGavinZhao··on 'Fuck you, Bambu': How one private message could change the face of 3D printing
Oops my bad, I mixed up Flashforge and Snapmaker. It was Flashforge that also started closing down their ecosystem. Snapmaker has been having a good track record so far with their open-source Klipper-based firmware and I hope they continue to do so!
GZGavinZhao··on 'Fuck you, Bambu': How one private message could change the face of 3D printing
I assume you're into multi-material printing and want a true multi-extruder setup. Then, quality wise your remaining options are: Prusa, Flashforge, and Snapmaker. Snapmaker very recently just shot themselves in the foot in a similar way that Bambu did, so you're left with Prusa and Flashforge. Of the two remaining, I really only trust Prusa.

Yes you pay a lot more, but I guess that's some sense voting with your wallet... I'm personally going to buy a Prusa after I stabilize where I live.

GZGavinZhao··on Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract
My understanding is that you got your printer when the firmware was not blocking you from doing all of that. Right now if you want to remote print (and don't want to do it via sending models to Bambu Cloud), you can get away if you enable LAN only and developer mode. However, what if the newer firmware forces you to create an online account and connect to Bambu cloud to do the setup? What if Bambu decides to limit the features you can use if you print using a SD card? It has been quite a worrying trend, and now the company is trying to legally threaten an open-source developer building on top of Bambu's AGPL code trying to make remote print without going through Bambu servers possible. Other ppl more knowledgeable on the issue, please correct me if I'm misunderstanding the situation.
GZGavinZhao··on Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.0
It's always sad to think what more can be achieved / how faster we might've arrived at M3 support if Asahi Lina is still active.
GZGavinZhao··on ZCAM: iOS camera app that cryptographically proves human authorship
*sad Android noises

Maybe some folks more familiar with iOS can comment on how reliable this is on the software side. For example, what's stopping me from feeding a video stream as camera input?

GZGavinZhao··on OpenSSL 4.0.0
*Linux distro package maintainers screams
GZGavinZhao··on The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
> if he wants to, he can spend the rest of the year trying to understand what the LLM has built for him...

Speaking from personal experience, 99% people/students don't, and that is the problem.

GZGavinZhao··on Industrial design files for Keychron keyboards and mice
I want one for HiFi headphones / IEMs! I feel really bad to order two or three models that I want and have to return all but one, because I can't really tell the difference just by looking at the specs sheet. My ears should be the ultimate judgement.
GZGavinZhao··on Why are we still using Markdown?
As always, honorable mention to Typst [0] as a good balance between the readability & simplicity of Markdown with the flexibility & composability of LaTeX. I think and hoping that Typst will be the future, but for now I'm happy with Markdown.

[0]: https://typst.app

GZGavinZhao··on Slovenian officials blame Israeli firm Black Cube for trying to manipulate vote
Always baffles me why some people think and act like being proud of their state/country/race and criticizing its actions are mutually exclusive.
GZGavinZhao··on Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies
Did you meant to write "You *can't* make massive leaps in technology or medicine" instead of *can*?
GZGavinZhao··on Async/Await on the GPU
One concern I have is that this async/await approach is not "AOT"-enough like the Triton approach, in the sense that you know how to most efficiently schedule the computations on which warps since you know exactly what operations you'll be performing at compile time.

Here with the async/await approach, it seems like there needs to be manual book-keeping at runtime to know what has finished, what has not, and _then_ consider which warp should we put this new computation in. Do you anticipate that there will be measurable performance difference?

GZGavinZhao··on The Future for Tyr, a Rust GPU Driver for Arm Mali Hardware
Can't wait to write a Rust driver for my eink tablet <3
GZGavinZhao··on Zulip.com Values
UI and user ergonomics continues to be Zulip's biggest blocker to wider adoption. I understand that to many people not having E2EE and truly independent self hosting (e.g. push notification issues) is a deal breaker, but for many organizations the current level of openness from its values is enough.

I really wish Zulip could find someone to re-design the interface around the channels/threads model to make it easier to use and more friendly to beginners. I am personally never bothered by the design and got used to its interface quite quickly, but I know many many people who got turned away by its design or uses it in a Slack/Discord way by posting everything into "general chat".

GZGavinZhao··on Remarkable Pro Colors
Their E-ink display driver is userspace unfortunately...
GZGavinZhao··on Remarkable Pro Colors
reMarkable just open-source your display drivers and E-ink render stack please. I'm pretty sure the pressure curve issue can be solved just by tuning a few parameters in the code. I appreciate reMarkable for adhering to GPL and giving us trivial root access to the machines, but while you're there I really don't see why you don't just do it fully.

Even with the limited amount of usability, the community has already made some amazing additions, for example KOReader. Imagine how far we'd get if we can just write any app we want for reMarkable. I would completely get a typefolio and ditch my laptop if I have the ability to *easily* write my own app on the reMarkable without going through the loops of binary patching and other quirks.

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