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billiam

1,747 karma · joined October 24, 2012

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billiam··on Sebastian Raschka's from-scratch video course on building reasoning models
I think the level of interaction on forums like HN is a great example of the still-yawning gulf between LLMs and humans when it comes to encoding reasoning into language. Even with the self-selection that comes with posting here, think of how many times it is almost impossible to tell if posters are shit-posting, serious, angry, sock puppets, or just weird.
billiam··on Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
This is a completely inhuman and unamerican take. Money buys secrecy, it always has. Money is a tool, exercising speech is a right. For the Supreme Court to equate them is ahistorical, plutocratic, and terrible. You sound like you support giving corporations the right to vote as well,
billiam··on GLM-5.3-Flash
"you don't want to get flagged"

Ding!

billiam··on There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
The vision of the automated stove is partly fulfilled, at least around San Francisco, by the astounding number of people who get all their meals delivered, for the moment by humans but soon robots.
billiam··on There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
Quaint? We are the closest we've ever been to nuclear annihilation, according to the experts: https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/
billiam··on Wayfinder Router: deterministic routing of queries between local and hosted LLM
I sure hope the community is working on these APIs now for Linux, with pressure to come on M$ and Apple.
billiam··on Who's the smartest corvid?
Maybe you should be asking yourself what you did to piss of this corvid? They have been shown to recognize faces.
billiam··on Driver accused of DUI tracks missing laptop to Illinois State trooper's house
Straw man argument. Teachers are important but don’t have impunity to use deadly force.
billiam··on Driver accused of DUI tracks missing laptop to Illinois State trooper's house
Exhibit A for why we need to rewrite sovereign immunity laws and get them out of union contracts, at the same time professionalizing how DUI is enforced. If we made the punishments like they have in Europe, the incidence would go way down.
billiam··on God sleeps in the minerals
these dramatic and colorful massive specimens are perfect for an art museum, but as a recovering mineralogist I feel like the true beauty of the world of minerals in Earth is shown on the microscopic level, where you can see both the incredible order and incredible randomness of the (mostly) crystalline solids that make up minerals. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_section

There is an idea that minerals are these inorganic substances but fully two thirds of all minerals identified were originated from direct or indirect interaction with living things on Earth. In fact a recent hypothesis holds that minerals have evolved since the formation of the solar system very much like living things, getting more and more complex via selective processes. See https://hazen.carnegiescience.edu/research/mineral-evolution

billiam··on Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI
This seems like a classic straw man argument. Plutocratic oligarchs have been making the argument that private monopolies are better than representative democracy at basically any societal function for decades without any actual data.
billiam··on Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI
This seems like a classic straw man argument. Plutocratic oligarchs have been making the argument that private monopolies are better than representative democracy at basically anything for decades.
billiam··on ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
Just pointing out that this silly exercise was mostly powered by nuclear reactors in France that (besides fission) transmute Uranium into Plutonium.
billiam··on El Cono: The mysterious sacred 'pyramid' hidden deep in the Amazon rainforest
This site is becoming the Buzzfeed of tech. Better moderation please.
billiam··on How the US defense secretary circumvents official DoD communications equipment
Clown take. The use of Signal or any app on a non-secure device by SecDef for what we know he messaged about in his office is absolutely a primary national security threat. Firing offense for any senior Pentagon official dealing with highly classified traffic. Nothing to do with politics.
billiam··on All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding
Afloat like Weekend at Bernie's. I lived through multiple efforts to prop up the corpse while making sure it would never ever be as good as Chrome.
billiam··on Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4
New headline: AWS RDS is not CockroachDB or Spanner. And it's not trying to be.
billiam··on The Russian Paradox: So Much Education, So Little Human Capital
The demographic time bomb that is the Russian population (human capital, to use an inhuman term) has been recognized since the late 80s. I am surprised how much that productivity along with health has plunged in the last decade. It is not as some suggested a lagging indicator of the aftermath of the Soviet empire but the continuing collapse of the Russian empire, of which the Soviet Union was just a phase. Despite the best intentions of would be autocrats in the West to pump it up, Russia is transitioning from a pretend developed nation to a much smaller developing country on a large land mass.
billiam··on Polypane, The browser for ambitious web developers
If dominance wasn't at least enhanced or supported by owning the browser engine, Google wouldn't be doing Chromium.
billiam··on Greenpeace must pay over $660M in case over Dakota Access protest activities
As is the jury selection process, especially in low population areas. And jury instructions from the judge. This seems to be a particularly egregious example, and I think on appeal this will will be corrected.
billiam··on 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says
If you are a federal employee that got an email from these scumbags, look at who is extending this "offer." Trump, who has stiffed everyone who ever did work for him, and Musk, who still is being sued by lots of Twitter employees especially execs, for their unpaid severance. They are the most untrustworthy people ever to serve in the federal government.
billiam··on The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE
[flagged]
billiam··on Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy
fingers crossed!
billiam··on Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon
I just can't fathom the lack of self-awareness of people who championed Ross Ulbricht's cause, seemingly because he looks like them, codes like them, and sat in the same public library they frequent or became associated with a techno-libertarian identity. Hundreds of drug and gun dealers are sentenced every week, some certainly unjustly. Where is the outrage for them?
billiam··on The Origins of Wokeness
Wow, Paul Graham just kinda set the standard for cognitive dissonance on HN. In short, sins of elision, omission, and exaggeration in this post and elsewhere in his absurdly entitled world make it clear that he is himself the prig here.
billiam··on Show HN: Tetris in a PDF
and this is why I can't read HN at work anymore........

I have increasing confidence that when AIs finally destroy the Internet the delivery vehicle will be the file format that was created, as the Internet itself was, as a form of digital paper.

billiam··on Adaptation to a Viscous Snowball Earth Ocean as Path to Complex Multicellularity (2021)
I think the rare Earth hypotheses get it backward, it all looks unlikely when you only have one data point. I think that complex life finds a way and it all looks like a six cushion bank shot in retrospect.
billiam··on Adaptation to a Viscous Snowball Earth Ocean as Path to Complex Multicellularity (2021)
This is more of a hypothesis than a well-rounded and evaluated theory. I could argue that rather than the viscosity of seawater the isolation of hydrothermal vents during the Snowball Earth period was the primary driver of eukaryote evolution and diversity. Isolation makes evolution speed up, and homogeneity slows it down in general. Fascinating to think about it though.
billiam··on Nullboard: Kanban board in a single HTML file
The mental model my kids have for work is that typing or even thinking is itself a finished product. For my generation that idea of a conscious action of saving your work on a computer made me think more about what I was doing and how I was doing it. But I am an old.
billiam··on Trump wins presidency for second time
In our current panopitcon, lies work. Turns out if an entertaining man lies again and again into a mechanism (the Internet) that endlessly amplifies and repeats those lies for free (paid for by all of us with our attention), you can win.
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