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bayesianbot

660 karma · joined June 20, 2019

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bayesianbot··on Human coders are still better than LLMs
Been suffering the same, I'm used to having so many days (weeks/months) when I just don't get that much done. With LLMs I can take these days and hack around / watch videos / play games while the LLM is working on background and just check the work. Best part is it often leads to some problematic situation that gets me involved and often I'll end up getting a real day of work out of it after I get started.
bayesianbot··on How to Build a Smartwatch: Picking a Chip
There are ESP32 watches. One I have[1] comes with quite thick 940mAh battery but my understanding is the battery life still isn't that amazing (just got it, haven't really tested the battery) - something like less than a day of constant runtime or few days if you turn it off constantly

[1] https://lilygo.cc/products/t-watch-s3-plus

bayesianbot··on Mercury: Commercial-scale diffusion language model
I basically did this with aider and Gemini 2.5 few days ago and was blown away. Basically talked about the project structure, let it write the final plan to file CONVENTIONS.md that gets automatically attached to the context, then kept asking "What should we do next" until tests were ready, and then I just ran a loop where it modifies the code and I press Return to run the tests and add the output to prompt and let it go again.

About 10 000 lines of code, and I only intervened a few times, to revert few commits and once to cut a big file to smaller ones so we could tackle the problems one by one.

I did not expect LLMs to be able to do this so soon. But I just commented to say about aider - the iteration loop really was mostly me pressing return. Especially in the navigator mode PR, as it automatically looked up the correct files to attach to the context

bayesianbot··on OpenAI releases image generation in the API
It says "Organization verification" but I got my personal account (with Personal as organization) verified with just a passport.
bayesianbot··on OpenAI releases image generation in the API
Tier 4 requires $250 spent. I'm tier 4 as well and I can see how they get easily mixed, but it actually says $1,000 spent to move to next tier.
bayesianbot··on Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?
The biggest issue I've seen with these is the networking limitations in a browser - there might be hundreds of seeders for a video and using a normal streaming torrent video player works well, but as torrent clients in the browser need to use WebRTC / WebTorrent, there might be just 0-5 seeders supporting it. I don't see much adoption for WebTorrents before the widely used standard Bittorrent clients support the protocol.
bayesianbot··on 7.7 magnitude earthquake hits Southeast Asia, affecting Myanmar and Thailand
Felt it in Northern Thailand, I've lived through many earthquakes around here but this was on completely different level - usually I notice some open doors and hanging things shaking and can slightly feel it, but today I felt worried if my house is going to crash down and all my neighbors ran to the street. (our houses are built on ~1m stilts to protect from floods)

Sadly didn't receive a notification from Android this time, last time I got it about ten seconds before the shaking began.

bayesianbot··on Nikola founder Trevor Milton, convicted of fraud, granted full pardon by Trump
To me it was clear there's no line after the Ukraine extortion scandal. When you extort your ally in war to make up lies about your political opponent and your supporters take your side, there's clearly no limits. I gave up arguing with MAGAs after that, it's pointless.

Though the new Signal leak is quite funny, there must be a ton of people who were so angry for Hillary's emails their face matched their hat color, but now are attacking the reporter for just reporting that he was sent classified information.

bayesianbot··on Better Shell History Search
You can use ' to do exact match, like 'docker

https://docs.atuin.sh/configuration/config/#fuzzy-search-syn...

bayesianbot··on From QED to Neovim
Just trowing out another similar, LazyVim[1]. I tried different neovim and emacs configurations over few years until stumbling on LazyVim and have been really happy with it for quite a while now - everything works out of the box, easy to add stuff and reasonably good documentation.

[1] http://www.lazyvim.org/

bayesianbot··on When did you first start worrying for humankind?
Right after I started first grade, and later again when we learned about democracy.

I'm autistic, and just before first grade I found a science/physics book and I was absolutely amazed. I spent all my days reading, thinking about the universe and trying to understand the stuff, and I was imagining that I'll go to school and me and my friends would study science after school, as who wouldn't want to? Learning scientific method also gave me relief, as I was always struggling with thoughts if I'm wrong about anything I believe as I had no ways to confirm - like half my day was spent thinking "could I be wrong on X", but now finally I could perform tests to adjust my confidence.

When the school started, I was amazed to find out nobody wanted to learn science and the scientific method, they did not care at all. But much stranger was that people didn't care at all if they're correct or not. If somebody told me I'm wrong about something and I couldn't 100% confirm which one of us is wrong, I'd lose my sleep and spend hours / days trying to confirm the validity of our claims. But when I told people I can prove them wrong, and I have the books I can show so they don't need to trust me at all - it just never mattered. They wouldn't spend five minutes proving themselves wrong, they'd just look at me like I'm insane and continued their day without giving it another thought. It was mind-blowing, compared to my constant crippling self-doubt.

So when we studied democracy, my first thought is that some evil greedy people will be using this feature of humans to tell them what they want to hear while taking advantage of them, and that new technology will make it easier to surveil people and also to make massive global damage compared to localized tragedies.

Obviously I thought I was wrong, like I always did. The humanity has survived for a long time, and I'm just observing a tiny slice, would be really unlikely to be born just at the time when brown hits the fan. But nowadays it feels like I was way more correct than I could even have imagined at the time..

bayesianbot··on The features of Python's help() function
I used to, but wat offers a better printout of the methods: https://github.com/igrek51/wat
bayesianbot··on Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says
https://archive.is/dWo55
bayesianbot··on Troubled electric truck maker Nikola files for bankruptcy
At least funnily the video delivered its promise as it was titled “Nikola One in Motion”
bayesianbot··on Troubled electric truck maker Nikola files for bankruptcy
I always wondered how it kept some value for a long time after the Hindenburg Research report[1]. To me, the report (and the CEO's empty response to it) made it clear there was pretty much no value in it, but the stock only lost 50% in the following week.

[1] https://hindenburgresearch.com/nikola/

bayesianbot··on Augment.vim: AI Chat and completion in Vim and Neovim
I've used it a ton too and it feels quite polished. Lately I've seen codecompanion.nvim[1] around a lot and been wondering if someone has tried both, are there differences between these two in actual use that would make other one worth trying over the another?

[1] https://github.com/olimorris/codecompanion.nvim

bayesianbot··on ZeroTier – home VPN without a public IP address
I thought it was Tailscale that always selects which IP to use as endpoint for other devices, and set that up for Wireguard? If I'm wrong, could I replicate that behavior (using relay on WAN, direct connection on LAN) with Wireguard without external configuration tools?
bayesianbot··on Ask HN: Which RSS reader do you use?
Newsboat for reading in terminal / TUI. I've used it for years and it's quite capable for my needs.

https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat

bayesianbot··on Twitter's heir apparent isn't X or Threads – it's Bluesky
As really active ex-user of Twitter I suddenly had no reason to open it anymore as my feed in there is now less active than on Bluesky - most of the people I liked to follow either made the move or are double posting. There's just no reason to open Twitter anymore and I'm not really sure how it would change.
bayesianbot··on Vimium – The Hacker's Browser
qutebrowser UI is on top of the engine running inside it so it catches every key press (and then submits it to the web engine when needed).

Clunky would be the exact term I find my day to day with these extensions - it's often pressing a key, noticing the focus is somewhere that makes the extension not catch it, and then either using a mouse or a key shortcut just to move focus somewhere the extension works with before repeating the actual command. I'd get so used to it that even when the keys do work I'm using them really slowly as I expect they might not. That never happens in qute, if I press a key it will work unless I've made a mistake myself. Also the UI being native Qt it feels snappier for me than extensions bolted on existing browsers.

The features qutebrowser can implement are somewhat limited by the web engine API and it doesn't have some things other browsers do, which is exactly why sometimes I try out these extensions, but usually after trying them for a day it feels so good to get back to qute and get an instant reliable response to key presses that I don't care about the few missing things.

bayesianbot··on Vimium – The Hacker's Browser
I've used this and other similar extensions but always them being an extension makes for a slow and unreliable experience imo. Pressing shortcut keys just might work depending on the focus and other current state. Going back to qutebrowser after trying out these extensions feels so fast and reliable in comparison - when you press a key it will instantly work like it should.
bayesianbot··on Deriving the Kelly Criterion to Maximise Profits
He means video draw poker machines, where you get paid a multiple of your bet depending on your final hand. Most online casinos used to have bonuses where the required wagering amount to clear the bonus multiplied by the return value of certain games led to a positive expected value for the player. So as example you'd deposit say $100, get $100 bonus, wager on video poker for $2000, getting back 99% of the wager for average of $20 loss from the wagering and $180 cashout. Much more rarely there also were some games that when played optimally, would give slightly over 100% return for your bet. The casinos were banking on most players playing them suboptimally and/or getting hooked.

Even though it's +EV for the player, you'd need some bankroll to ride out the variance as you could lose on X casinos in a row. Ages ago these were really +EV and you could usually just autoplay them with small bets, so the bankroll requirements weren't that harsh. Later on the wagering requirement on the bonuses grew, often making the small bet grind unprofitable, but you could still find profitable situations when played with correct bet sizing. But those needed much bigger bankroll as usually it was more +EV the bigger the bets you made, so you'd often play many casinos for just a few minutes with big bets losing your deposit and bonus, but sometimes winning big and covering the losses with profit left over.

bayesianbot··on Contextual Retrieval
I was trying to do this using Prompt Caching like a month ago, but then noticed there's five minute maximum lifetime for the cached prompts - doesn't really work for my RAG needs (or probably most), where the queries would be ran during the next month or a year. I can't see any changes to that policy. Little surprised to see them talk about Prompt Caching relating to RAG.
bayesianbot··on Serverless-registry: A Docker registry backed by Workers and R2
I don't use much of CloudFlare services but it seems kinda cheap, $0.015/GBmonth for storage (+10GB free), Workers are charged per request and CPU time, both of which would probably be quite low for a registry so free plan would go quite far?

I just set up the official registry on a VPS (for similar usage pattern) and it was a bit of work and probably much more expensive, this seems quite attractive unless I've misunderstood something.

bayesianbot··on Cryptominers made $100k from mining at an Airbnb for three weeks
They made over $100k but they waste time renting and moving AirBNBs (which forces them to take their miners offline) to save $1.5k in electricity?
bayesianbot··on Show HN: I made a Note-Taking app for people who keep texting themselves
Huh? I just tried tagging a message, which opens a popup for Telegram Premium. Also web search brings up "Tags are already available to all Telegram Premium users." from Telegram website - it's an old post, but I don't see anything anywhere that says otherwise. Or do you mean #hashtags?
bayesianbot··on Show HN: I made a Note-Taking app for people who keep texting themselves
Though tagging is only available for the (kinda pricey) Premium subscription.
bayesianbot··on OpenLoco: Modern, open source version of the classic transport simulation game
I have played neither of the originals or the open source ones but I really liked Factorio and building traffic in city-building games (even though I feel they're too limited). Which one should I spend some time on, OpenLoco or OpenTTD?
bayesianbot··on Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size [pdf]
Looks cool even though closed source makes me wary.

Trying to save Anthropic API key on Arch Linux doesn't do anything and there's a message "If you're experiencing problems saving API keys especially on Linux, contact Discord", if it's so common problem maybe you should have a link with possible fixes? Adding another Discord server and searching for answers for a question that clearly has been asked often enough feels like quite a hurdle for testing it out.

bayesianbot··on Author Clock: a novel way to tell time
LilyGo T5[0] has some different (smaller) sizes that seem quite good and cheap. They even have an option for battery and touch capabilities. And if eInk isn't required, they have some weirder types of devices with screens for tinkerers, like glasses and watches. Not Linux but ESP32, but I think in that form factor and performance it's preferable. Haven't tried them myself though, but they seem quite popular, my cursor has been hovering over the buy buttons for months. They usually don't come with case but there's a ton of 3d printable options and also some ready ones on Aliexpress.

[0] https://www.lilygo.cc/products/t5-4-7-inch-e-paper-v2-3

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