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PessimalDecimal

970 karma · joined January 7, 2023

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PessimalDecimal··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
Ships and aircraft can be overweight. Why assume it's an analogy to obesity?
PessimalDecimal··on Learning to live with Waymos
Speak truth to the powers that be at Big Convenience!
PessimalDecimal··on Scandinavia's first farmers slaughtered hunter-gatherer population, DNA suggests
It did survive! And it paints a fascinating picture of adaptation. The Yamnaya cultural package brought elite domination and patrilineal succession. So for the I1 line (mesolithic European HG) to not just survive but spread widely across Scandinavia and crowd out the Yamnaya R1 haplogroup suggests that at least one member of the Hunter Gatherers became dominant over the Yamnaya and beat them at the new Bronze Age game they brought to the region.
PessimalDecimal··on Scandinavia's first farmers slaughtered hunter-gatherer population, DNA suggests
Early European Farmers displaced the mesolithic Hunter Gatherers in the areas they both inhabited but there wasn't a complete elimination of the HG groups. In fact, the I1 Y haplogroup associated with Germanic tribes comes from the mesolithic Hunter Gatherers, so they obviously were _not_ totally eliminated. Actually, it was the EEF group that was more or less fully eliminated in Scandinavia when the Yamnaya appeared because both groups exploited similar areas. They wanted loess soils along rivers, while the Hunter Gatherers lived near the coastline.
PessimalDecimal··on Icons as a Service
The ark of the covenant was itself a cultural fusion of Egyptian New Kingdom solar barques, used to carry idols, with the practices of the aniconic Midianite Yahwists of the Sinai region. The proto-Levites brought this fusion with them into Canaan, where it melded further with the endogenous Canaanite worship of El.

It's a cool bit of history, but connecting it to diffusion models feels like a bit of a stretch!

PessimalDecimal··on Samsung's Processing-in-Memory (PIM)
Turning RAM into an active coprocessor does feel like an awkward model for that though.

Intel's Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) and the dedicated tile registers, which are basically systolic arrays IIUC, seem like a better fit.

But Samsung doesn't have that option so they're playing the card they have.

PessimalDecimal··on Tracking Costco gas prices
The Acquired episode about Costco (https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/costco) claims they don't do loss leaders at all.
PessimalDecimal··on The Sloppification of Peptides
Yeah, France should try to export its culture sometime!
PessimalDecimal··on Jaithon 3, a fast programming language with the perfect syntax
Also unrelated to Jython, aka the Python implementation on the JVM.
PessimalDecimal··on Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
but in the end...
PessimalDecimal··on Introduction to Data-Oriented Design [pdf]
This seems like a particular branding on cache-aware data structures and algorithms. Is there more to it?
PessimalDecimal··on Hyprland 0.55 announced the switch to Lua for its config files
Lisp is the perfect family of languages for a config. Homoiconic for seamless config generation. S-expressions for shared human and machine readability.
PessimalDecimal··on The Voice of Google
Ah good point. The Intel Museum in Santa Clara shows signs of that too. Custom labels on bottles of wine to celebrate hittings revenue milestones e.g.
PessimalDecimal··on The Voice of Google
I actually enjoyed the first hand experience of an early-ish Google described at the beginning. For those with enough tenure in tech, was this ethos unique (at the time)? Or was it typical of successful, tech-heavy startups? I could believe an early Sun might've felt similar but I don't know.
PessimalDecimal··on Precursor
Is this equivalent to Google Cloud Fraud Defense? https://cloud.google.com/security/products/fraud-defense
PessimalDecimal··on Learning to code is still worthwhile
Lots of unsubstantiated claims here
PessimalDecimal··on The disappearance of Japan's animators
Do you think this is a global phenomenon or regional maybe just in the US or the Anglosphere?
PessimalDecimal··on Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
These are still at currently subsidized prices. We'll see if they think they're getting $1500/month of value when that buys significantly fewer tokens.
PessimalDecimal··on Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute
Probably not so coincidental!

At least part of this is slated for employee stock comp. Could be to keep their talent from running.

PessimalDecimal··on Domain expertise has always been the real moat
Other vibe coders?
PessimalDecimal··on BYD overtakes Tesla and Kia as the best-selling EV brand in key overseas markets
In what world is China less "protectionist" than the US?
PessimalDecimal··on AI didn't delete your database, you did
I don't know what definition of AI you're using, but plenty of ML algorithms operate deterministically, let alone most other logic programmed into a computer. I don't see how your statement can be right given that these other software systems also operate in the real world.
PessimalDecimal··on AI didn't delete your database, you did
History is littered with great ideas that lost people's interest and focus. A sad realization is that the focus may never return to them either.
PessimalDecimal··on Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
Is this a submarine? https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
PessimalDecimal··on The beginning of scarcity in AI
That worked out, for the founders of frontier labs at least.
PessimalDecimal··on Women are getting most of the new jobs. What's going on with men?
What you're doing here is part of the problem. "Suck it up, buttercup!"

Many men would rather not work and deal with the financial and social consequences of that than deal with the toxicity both in the workplace and later on if they talk about it.

PessimalDecimal··on Women are getting most of the new jobs. What's going on with men?
There's been a lot of talk about "toxic masculinity" over the years but I've heard of and would worry about the female equivalent if I were considering a role in nursing as a man. Many stories where the only man in the room is expected to be, simultaneously, a punching bag, a mediator for drama, and a willing recipient of sexual advances. Seems awful
PessimalDecimal··on The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
I've been doing this with my kids, at least to some extent. It offers first rung on a ladder to understanding that complex things can be understood as cooperation among simpler parts. We'll see how it works out but so far it seems to be working.

It's actually great since a lot of older technology is cheap and still readily available. My little ones love listening to old records, control the playback speed and hear the music go up in pitch if the RPMs are set too high. We look at the tracks on the vinyl under a microscope at talk about how the music is written on it that way. VHS an audio cassettes offer their own talking points.

For computers, we don't literally use a Commodore 64 but we run simpler, old software on new hardware. Mostly because a lot of newer education software is somehow also funded by injecting ads into the games (awful). But there is also some good "modern" educations software worth checking out. I highly recommend gcompris.net.

PessimalDecimal··on Arm AGI CPU
Didn't random companies add block chain to their names only just a few years ago and get 30+% jumps in stock price immediately?
PessimalDecimal··on A sufficiently detailed spec is code
What you describe is more or less exactly algorithmic information theory. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_information_theory:

"Informally, from the point of view of algorithmic information theory, the information content of a string is equivalent to the length of the most-compressed possible self-contained representation of that string. A self-contained representation is essentially a program—in some fixed but otherwise irrelevant universal programming language—that, when run, outputs the original string."

Where it gets tricky is the "self-contained" bit. It's only true with the model weights as a code book, e.g. to allow the LLM to "know about" Slack.

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