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a3w

628 karma · joined July 13, 2020

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a3w··on H.264 Is Magic (2016)
Discussed elsewhere here: h.264 supports lossless storing.
a3w··on H.264 Is Magic (2016)
2018 AV1 demo

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16796127

a3w··on Anthropic trained Claude on illegally obtained Stanford professors' books
does n.b. mean nota bene?
a3w··on What’s getting pwned right now
cuck coding, pwn on my watch...

The internet just keeps giving.

a3w··on What Is Gridifcation
"we like music in the abstract as a series of numbers" seemed like a nod to AI or quantization general. Now, it might have just been genuine instead of an ironic statement. Also explains an unreadable-to-humans giant table in the middle of the article.
a3w··on What Is Gridifcation
> What hits me immediately is how perfect the vocals are. There are melodic leaps in the verse that are incredibly difficult to nail, and Bruno Mars is hitting every single note pitch-perfect and in absolutely perfect time.

Isn't every song recorded as every word singularly at a certain pitch? And timing done completely in the DAW instead of while recording.

Barely was singing when a friend of mine did ``professional'' recording, and had to know each pitch of a song to perfection, since no overlap was ever sung.

a3w··on The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable
Most growth is exponential (for a while, as a logistics curve (aka S-curve) does start exponentially), how about showing log(y(x)) instead of y(x).

But not always: if zero is not on the bar chart, e.g. log(y(x)) with [x] = Kelvin, such a plot will of course not work. So keep temperature as temperature increment over pre-industrial times or other baseline.

Also, does coastal nitrogen have three data points, or why the edge in the middle? Scatter charts plus trend are more the real thing than a curve if this is two linear relationships, with a second slope after a certain time, and keep y(x) plotting here, of course.

a3w··on SlopCodeBench 10/2026 – Opus 5.5, Astra wins overall, xhigh considered harmful
There are 36 tests. You can pass 0 or 36 or any number inbetween. Lets give five significant digits of how accurate solving was.

That is not how data physics work. It should not be how data science works.

a3w··on JAXA is about to perform a Phobos sample return mission
Bringing Protomolecule to earth, when?

(Minor spoilers for The Expanse, word Protomolecule means something there.)

a3w··on The Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving
German nerd here. I know next to nothing about "the interesting parts of the Holmes/Theranos story", is there a documentary on the facts instead of the villain somewhere?
a3w··on Super Intelligence
An observed concept.
a3w··on Super Intelligence
process information and generate an output is really enough. A calculator is mentioned in Wikipedia as being an AI technology, and we feared students would no longer learn and understand calculus and the people who worked as Computers at companies would lose that job. Only one of both came true, and the math nerds still get a job at different tasks with a different title.

Okay, now no one can add numbers at scale since Excel exists and calculates at the accuracy limits of a counter-top calculator. But in theory, spreadsheets can be intelligent solving tools.

a3w··on Super Intelligence
AFI, American Freedom Intelligence. Mark my words, dumb people will use that, soon, since ASI/SI is actually the same term by just lazily leaving of a redundant part of the term.
a3w··on Super Intelligence
> largest SI ecosystem

wait, we need more than one future ruler of earth? Won't any two Skynets fight each other for control, which is why the US want to be first, not second, after PRC?

a3w··on I Love Software Rendering
spatial anti-aliasing

aka (just) anti-aliasing, we are talking original quake 1 era, after all.

a3w··on X purges 13,000 accounts linked to suspected meddling ahead of US midterms
e.g. anti-anti-facism was missing, which is funniest use of "anti", and saddest for a POTUS.
a3w··on Nvidia's first GPU: GeForce 256
First we had video or graphics accelerators, for video, or rendering. Then 2D/3D mentions with different performance or quality became a topic.

Then we got GPUs to say "This thing is closer to a CPU by now".

Then those were recoined into GPGPU, as in general purpose GPU, when CUDA became an important feature and again to say "This thing is closer to a CPU by now".

a3w··on Recreational Programming
reveal.js , press o for menu. Or ? for this help:

``` KEY ACTION N , SPACE Next slide P , Shift SPACE Previous slide ← , H Navigate left → , L Navigate right ↑ , K Navigate up ↓ , J Navigate down Alt + ←/↑/→/↓ Navigate without fragments Shift + ←/↑/→/↓ Jump to first/last slide B , . Pause F Fullscreen G Jump to slide ESC, O Slide overview

```

a3w··on A Modern Web App in C
why not dietlibc/gatling/append-only-DBs?
a3w··on “Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically
This was how it was done in chemistry back in the day: release a cooking instruction. If it fails, visit the colleagues and give hints on what you meant.

The idea would be that you should not fiddle with the minds who try to independently evaluate your works, so that is not a feasible approach to truth seeking.

While in organic chemistry, this way, valid progress was made, you can always avoid a perpetuum mobile inventor and get conned.

a3w··on Wood Tape (2004)
The boy did the table, if the following holds true:

We do credit architects with buildings, and the actual builders don't get a say in copyright of the fascade or naming the final thing.

a3w··on Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The URL is the app
Won't it say

> You are a poo-emoji bomb-emoji #!! driver

?

a3w··on Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai
Chemist here. I read this and thought it was either lies or propaganda. But after a while of pondering , it would say that the word "homochiralic" (creation-from-nothing) does a lot of heavy lifting here to make their claim technically true, if at all:

Asymmetric synthesis was already well established before 1995. Chemists like Knowles, Noyori, Sharpless, and Evans could routinely produce highly enantioenriched molecules using chiral catalysts or auxiliaries.

What made Soai's reaction different was that it did not require an external chiral source. The chiral product catalyzes its own formation, so a tiny random imbalance can be amplified into a very large enantiomeric excess.

Other examples of abiotic asymmetry, such as Pasteur's crystallization experiments and circularly polarized light, were also known earlier.

So the Nobel press release is best understood as shorthand: Soai did not discover asymmetric synthesis, but demonstrated a remarkable form of self-amplifying, spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in an abiotic chemical system.

a3w··on What's Earth's dominant species by mass?
How come algae did not make the list?
a3w··on Mistral Large 4
If you remove tech companies, US and A has spent the last twenty years in stagnation, too. If that bubble bursts, both are on par.

If it bears fruits and we build ``it'', everyone dies, which is par, also?

a3w··on Blindsight (Watts Novel)
First the reading at bayesian conspiracy, now here? Own the novel, it was often hard to read, but kinda worth it for the novel concept introduced.
a3w··on You are no longer invited to dinner
Why is church in there?
a3w··on Lunar Terminator Paradox
More like the Moneyball rational fiction with robots version of it. Or whichever movie was about basketball.
a3w··on AI companies in race to demonstrate their model most threatening to humanity
Somehow, not the Onion.
a3w··on Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock
Just today I clicked a to shortlink for my German Univeristy and thought "curious they use a non-EU shortlinker, is that legal or secure?".
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