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barelyauser

301 karma · joined January 31, 2023

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barelyauser··on Why bother with argv[0]?
Can something posses extrinsic properties? Or are them a intrinsic property of external things?
barelyauser··on New forms of steel for stronger, lighter cars
Once I was told by a mechanic the following: if car companies where the ones liable for fixing your car, the design would look very much different.

Car companies choose what is simple to manufacture, but eventually making it very hard to maintain. If it where not for regulation, they would give you something that has a timer for breaking. That is how little they respect their customers.

Anecdotal (but at this point one of hundreds I've come across): older car had fuel pump accessible through a little sealed hatch. In current car the same pump was integrated into the fuel tank. It went bad. Guess what? You have to remove the whole fuel tank to service it. And that entails taking the exhaust out of the way. Car companies hate you.

barelyauser··on Smaller, Weaker, yet Better: Training LLM Reasoners via Compute-Optimal Sampling
I find that researchers choices of names for the sake of differentiation is more of a barrier than something helpful. Sometimes it feels like I know nothing, but in reality it is the name of the "technique" or phenomena that does not get parsed by my brain.

Things like "Compute-Optimal Sampling" sound just like any other made up gibberish that may or may not exist. Wordings like "memory-centric subsampling", "search based hyper space modeling", "locally induced entropy optimization" don't get parsed. And more often than not after reading such papers, I've come to find out that it is a fancy name for something a toddler knows about. Really disappointing.

barelyauser··on Ask HN: Imagine a world with 1Tb/s internet. What would change?
Pretty much this. It was a huge disappointment for me to understand that even if I made a revolutionary discovery and doubled the yield of food crops, people would reproduce and the prices (and availability) of food would not change.
barelyauser··on Writing a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch
The Byte magazine is incredible. First time reading it. The archive.org collection is a gold mine for learning. Thank you very much for posting it.
barelyauser··on Fiber optic drone control beats any RF jammer
Beam riding is also a thing. The missile is guided by a sensor in its butt, therefore making it harder to jam.
barelyauser··on Breakthrough a step toward revealing hidden structure of prime numbers
Also, the safest data is the one never sampled into digital format and stored in computer systems.
barelyauser··on Racist plant names will change after historic vote by botanists
Perhaps they are not. What is really happening is the world is getting more complicated. And if people don't get smarter, or better informed, their capacity to create problems is going to increase.
barelyauser··on What Materials Are Magnetic?
But they can be picked up with right kind of electromagnetic arrangement[0].

[0]. https://youtu.be/7ZeBWJLRXqM&t=1231

barelyauser··on 310-mile automated cargo conveyor will replace 25,000 trucks in Japan
So you are telling me that a certain linear city will also not materialize?
barelyauser··on Volkswagen to invest up to $5B in Rivian
Would you rather have Cars as a Service?
barelyauser··on Chang'e 6 lunar sample return mission returns with samples from moon's far side
Don't they use radar altimeters to get altitude? You don't need to rely only on image processing. You can even pull off stereo using a single camera since you are moving and know the altitude at every point.
barelyauser··on The Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)
People got very upset when chemistry proved that we are made of the same thing as "unalive" things like rocks. You can see the same now that we proved the same for intelligence.
barelyauser··on Unitree G1 Humanoid Agent
We will probably get as much collaboration as the car industry does with some basic components and standards. But perhaps big differences in the major hardware (hands, chassis). The most valuable part, the AI models, will certainly be closed.

With that said, it is hard to imagine the economics of humanoid robots. The trend seems to favor automation in controlled environments for certain products. Then the displaced factory workers flood remaining jobs driving down labor costs and shutting down any prospect of a humanoid machine.

barelyauser··on Unitree G1 Humanoid Agent
Yet again very little attention is given to the touch sensing. No sensors on the back and sides of the fingers. I can grasp objects blind folded because of the richness of touch. It is super costly to try to compensate lack of touch with vision and all these robotics companies seem to miss this.

A big problem is the lack of innovation in touch sensing. We mass planar (sometimes flexible) products with millions of little active devices (OLED). Cannot be this hard to assemble a decent touch sensing planar device. It will be like a camera for touch and then all the beautiful neural net techniques can be used.

barelyauser··on What John von Neumann did at Los Alamos (2020)
This is an absurd take, to say the least. It offends the intelligence of virtually everyone involved in the bomb development. Plutonium usefulness would be noticed eventually. Implosion of fusion fuel using X-Rays thermal transport would have been discovered as well. The world does not have a single point of failure based on a single person, like you paint it.
barelyauser··on Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom
Non-deterministic means random. AI or natural I is not random. Analog suffers immensely from noise and it is the reason the brain has such a large number of neurons, part to deal with noise and part to deal with losing some neurons along the way.
barelyauser··on Engineering household robots to have a little common sense
If they think this plan of "connecting" word to actions is promising then they should ask it to tie a shoelace based on "natural language" description. I'm shocked. I really did not expect that MIT would foster such naivety. They completely disregard the fact that natural language is a very crude description of physical actions. Perhaps next they will include in the instructions numerical values, and rediscover CNC.
barelyauser··on A Stabilizing Robotic Tail for Floating Astronauts
Perhaps your assumption that stepper motors are the first solution to any motion problem speaks more about your lack of resourcefulness than the ingenuity of another solution.
barelyauser··on Mercedes is trialing humanoid robots for 'low skill, repetitive' tasks
Can one achieve elite status without wealth?
barelyauser··on Mercedes is trialing humanoid robots for 'low skill, repetitive' tasks
The mistake you make (and a lot of people also do) is to assume the purpose of the system is to somehow cater to your (the consumer) needs. The purpose of the system is to fulfill the needs of the elite (those who benefit from the system). Average people having a car is a thing because then people will be more productive. But make no mistake, if the rich don't get what they want FIRST then your whole economy goes into recession and what not.
barelyauser··on Boeing 777 loses tire while taking off from SF, crushing cars on the ground
They are literally falling apart at this point...
barelyauser··on The Race to 2nm: RISC-V Chips in Japan – By Dr. Ian Cutress
Why is he not employed at research? Semiconductor is a gigantic field growing by the year.
barelyauser··on FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor
Amazon as a gateway to illegal or fraudulent products? Please, a trillion dollar corporation must surely have professionals watching this over.
barelyauser··on Why it's so challenging to land upright on the moon
Because streets are not controlled environments. Planes have auto pilots for a long time, because air is a highly controlled environment with professionals agreeing to cooperate and making logical decisions (most of times).
barelyauser··on Inside the miracle of modern chip manufacturing
I suppose the '47' in your username tells the same story as the Kalashnikov one does?
barelyauser··on Weather.gov 2.0
For any corporation everything can be boiled down to: profit or loss?
barelyauser··on If You're So Successful, Why Are You Still Working 70 Hours a Week?
Consider the meaning of interest rates. I work 10 hours in exchange for 10 moneys. I could exchange it for 10 hours work from some other guy. But what does it mean when I purchase a government bond and make 1 currency per year of interest? I can purchase 1 hour of work in exchange of nothing. People are not working for me because I work for them (a fair system). They work for me because I'm the dragon with a pile of gold, and gold must come back to me.
barelyauser··on MIT researchers demonstrate rapid liquid metal 3D printing technique
Precisely. $1M and interest rates of 6% per year mean almost $7 per hour just to cover financing.
barelyauser··on MIT researchers demonstrate rapid liquid metal 3D printing technique
Mass production is not only about energy efficiency. It is also about material efficiency and time efficiency. People want stuff NOW. Each process has its advantages. 3d printing can do stuff that mass fabrication techniques can't.
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