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asaph

1,401 karma · joined February 14, 2016

blog: https://www.asaph.org/
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asaph··on Agentic patters from scratch using Groq
typo in title: “patters” should be “patterns”.
asaph··on Employees who stay in companies longer than two years get paid 50% less (2014)
This article is nearly 10 years old. Is this still true?
asaph··on Miles Davis and the recording of Kind of Blue
That album is more challenging to appreciate for listeners new to jazz, while Kind of Blue is immediately accessible to mainstream listeners.
asaph··on OTP at a High Level (2019)
Am I the only one who saw the title and thought OTP was "one time password"?
asaph··on Amazon to lay off 9,000 more workers after earlier cuts
Coincidentally, not ironically. Perhaps clairvoyantly or prophetically. Definitely not ironically.
asaph··on Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio
As per https://layoffs.fyi/, Twilio laid off 1500 people on 2/13/2023, 17% of its workforce.
asaph··on Someone stole my car and now I own hundreds of vinyl records
I would go so far as to say it isn't worth your time to catalog them. If you can find a 2nd-hand record store that will take them, accept whatever they offer. Otherwise, throw them out. Don't hoard them in your home beyond the point where the novelty of it wears off.
asaph··on Someone stole my car and now I own hundreds of vinyl records
Judging by the condition of the records shown in the picture, and by the description of the records as "late-70's to mid-80's", a not particularly collectible vinyl era that produced mass amounts of low-grade (thin) vinyl, I would bet these records are not worth much. You would be lucky to find any gems in those crates.
asaph··on PhD student solves 2,500-year-old Sanskrit problem
“Almost” and “easily” are subjective and open to interpretation. My point is, that this is not a rigorous standard.
asaph··on PhD student solves 2,500-year-old Sanskrit problem
In English, the exceptions to the rules are arbitrary and numerous. English is also a moving target. From a logic problem perspective, English grammar is more of a practical brute force endeavor than an interesting one. When I read the article, I was wasn’t comparing the problem to English grammar, but rather comparing it to a logic puzzle that has a perfect solution.
asaph··on PhD student solves 2,500-year-old Sanskrit problem
What’s the threshold of special cases allowed where the problem is considered solved?
asaph··on PhD student solves 2,500-year-old Sanskrit problem
Perhaps my impression that this grammatical problem should be treated with logical rigor, where even a single counter-example invalidates the solution, isn’t the way this is being treated. The way it was presented in the article was like it was a kind of logic puzzle, for which an elegant solution has finally been found. Sounds like it’s more like a better rule of thumb was discovered that reduced the error rate, not to zero.
asaph··on PhD student solves 2,500-year-old Sanskrit problem
Well how would you know that if the rules of grammar are not fully resolved?
asaph··on PhD student solves 2,500-year-old Sanskrit problem
> Employing this interpretation, he found the Panini's "language machine" produced grammatically correct words with almost no exceptions.

If there are exceptions, I would think the problem isn’t solved. Perhaps the article is being loose with the wording. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

asaph··on Mistaken beliefs about how much to talk in conversations
I only read the abstract because the rest of the article is behind a paywall. So I didn’t see this. However, it too, seems somewhat inconsistent with the idea put forth in the title and abstract. Perhaps the advice is: To be more likable, talk less, and focus your talking on lots of questions about the other person.
asaph··on Mistaken beliefs about how much to talk in conversations
One of the often repeated pearls of wisdom from How to Win Friends and Influence People[0] by Dale Carnegie, is people like to talk about themselves and they’ll like you more if you let them do that in a conversation. I’m paraphrasing. This research seems to counter that.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influ...

asaph··on How I write React after 8 years
Sturgeon’s Law[0] states that “90 percent of everything is crap.”

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

asaph··on Ask HN: What is the most unique website you’ve come across on the internet?
Warning: If you click on the logo at the center of the screen, music plays, which may bother others around you.
asaph··on BMW removing touchscreen from a bunch of models due to chip shortage
> My dad just bought a new Toyota Civic and ...

Honda makes the Civic, not Toyota.

asaph··on Utsuro-Bune
Occam's Razor. It was most likely a lost human from a distant land, speaking another language, traveling in an exotic looking vessel. This is a simpler explanation than invoking extraterrestrial life.
asaph··on Ethereum staking – More sustainable crypto
> More sustainable

> Validators don’t need energy-intensive computers in order to participate in a proof-of-stake system – just a laptop or smart phone. This will make Ethereum better for the environment.

To me, this is the biggest win of proof-of-stake over proof-of-work.

asaph··on Open letter from researchers involved in the “hypocrite commit” debacle
Is this post actually research for an upcoming paper on apologizing to the open source community?
asaph··on Wildtype: Sushi-grade salmon grown from Pacific Salmon cells
Other companies working on cell-cultured fish:

Finless Foods: https://www.finlessfoods.com/

BlueNalu: https://www.bluenalu.com/

asaph··on In Defense of Dumb TVs
Let's not lose sight of the fact that in the era before smart TVs, the revenue model for most TV networks was advertising.
asaph··on The Pretty JSON Revolution
An incremental formatting tweak is not a revolution.
asaph··on Cellular immunity to SARS-CoV2 found at 6 months in non-hospitalised individuals
The plural of virus is viruses, not virii.

Reference: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3838/viruses-or-...

asaph··on How Scrabble Blew Its Big Moment
E-Sports are a thing now.
asaph··on The pandemic turned my parents into day traders
Don't assume the author is a man. The author of this article is Stephanie Yang.
asaph··on Early Work
Why doesn't http://paulgraham.com/ redirect to https://paulgraham.com/? And why doesn't https://paulgraham.com/ have a valid SSL cert? I expect better from PG.
asaph··on Employee works for both Google and Facebook from home
For Elon Musk, working at only two companies would be a substantial reduction in employers. He currently works for Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink and OpenAI.

* Update: Apparently Elon quit OpenAI. So let's not count that one. But even 4 employers is still a lot!

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