chromaton

1,346 karma · joined April 13, 2013

Hacker and business owner with an interest in digital manufacturing.

chromatonon Diving into deep learning: Understanding Deep Learning book review [pdf]

I've been slowly working my way through this book for the past couple months. It's been amazingly helpful in learning all of the deep learning terminology, and giving a good overview of the technology.

I was doing all of the examples and exercises for a while, but gave up on that at some point. My main goal, after all, was to learn about how the technology works in order to separate the wheat from the chaff, not become an AI researcher.

chromatonon A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material

Slop has been around a while. I was researching a topic, and noticed that most of the top search results had the same misunderstanding of some of the definitions. The writers were clearly not familiar with the topic, and I'm sure they were just copying each other. All of the articles pre-dated GPT-3.5.

The kicker is that if you ask GPT-4 about it, it spits out the same incorrect information, meaning that GPT-4 was likely trained on this bad data. FWIW, GPT-4o gives a much more accurate response.

chromatonon Magika: AI powered fast and efficient file type identification

It can't correctly identify a DXF file in my testing. It categorizes it as plain text.

chromatonon The fastest-growing countries for software development, according to GitHub

  developers iso2_code population fraction
  20226711 US 335893238 6.02%
  15528470 EU 448387872 3.46%
  13326416 IN 1392329000 0.96%
  9131545 CN 1409670000 0.65%
  4315369 BR 203080756 2.12%
  3422806 GB 67026292 5.11%
  3060711 RU 146424729 2.09%
  2972917 DE 84607016 3.51%
  2938205 ID 279118866 1.05%
  2886350 JP 124090000 2.33%
  2479673 CA 40528396 6.12%

chromatonon The fastest-growing countries for software development, according to GitHub

By the metrics on this page, 6% of the US population has a GitHub account. Seems a bit high to me.

chromatonon Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

"I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships, motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then, one day, I got in..."

chromatonon Marc Thorpe, Robot Wars founder, has died

I met Marc Thorpe back in 1995 and saw some of the Robot Wars highlight videos he was using to promote the event. My life was never the same after that.

chromatonon Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again

Please remind me why landfills are so bad again.

chromatonon Show HN: Bigcapital - A open-source alternative to QuickBooks

I ran a business successfully for many years with GnuCash. I only switched because I wanted to offload bookkeeping to a professional for a couple hundred bucks a month, and she was only familiar with QuickBooks.

chromatonon Fake town built exclusively for filming TV and movies

Assembly Atlanta has 135 acres with indoor studios, plus outdoor streets to simulate New Orleans, New York, Tribeca, and "Europe".

It's under construction, but close to completion.

chromatonon Walmart didn’t kill the small town, it is the small town

Sam Walton points out in his autobiography that big cities are changing all the time, yet somehow people expect that small towns will not.

chromatonon Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?

Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill

Making Money Is Killing Your Business - Chuck Blakeman

chromatonon Who rules Earth? Wild mammals far outweighed by humans and domestic animals

Here's a cool infographic showing all the animals, and comparing that to all the other forms of life. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-biomass-of-earth-in...

chromatonon H.L. Mencken Reviews the Great Gatsby (1925)

https://archive.org/details/CoverageOfTheScopesTrialByH.l.Me...

chromatonon Thunderbird Supernova Preview: The New Calendar Design

The Calendar sync via the gdata-provider plugin is currently broken.

chromatonon Gödel, Escher, Bach: an in-depth explainer

Yes, the later editions have a foreword which explains what the book is about: Hofstader's theory that consciousness arises from self reference.

chromatonon Federal Reserve to increase interest rates by 75 basis points

Prices on raw materials like aluminum, copper, and lumber have been dropping for a little while now.

chromatonon VCs are scared when they should be greedy

A lot of them were just early.

pets.com => Chewy. Also PetSmart operates the pets.com domain now apparently.

webvan => Amazon Fresh, Instacart

kozmo => DoorDash, Uber Eats, etc.

chromatonon The night I met Einstein (1955)

Had to be after 1931, when the Crosby song (the title of which he gets wrong) was recorded.

chromatonon Computerized Cooking (1985)

I've always missed having an equipment list in recipes in addition to ingredients.

I think the tree idea is good, as it shows what steps can be done in parallel. It would also be helpful to show how long each subtree is expected to take with working time and waiting time.

chromatonon Ask HN: Should I sell my vintage computer collection?

If it's not organized, it's not a collection, just a pile.

I collected classic video games for a while. After a while, I realized I'd be happier if I focused on one area (Atari). Eventually, I wasn't playing or displaying the consoles or games, so I got rid of all of it except for one nice 2800 console and a couple of the funnest games which I wanted to show my kids.

Somebody else got to enjoy the stuff that was just sitting in my boxes. No regrets.

chromatonon Smart mushroom growing device for beginners

I've done this technique: https://namyco.org/docs/grow_oyster_mushrooms_on_kitty_litte...

It's pretty easy. I learned it at a workshop for local mushroom hunting group.

chromatonon LaMDA is not sentient

Google gives a reasonable answer to that question.

chromatonon Ask HN: I miss Usenet. Are there any modern equivalents?

I think signature lines on the posts helped with that.

chromatonon The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

There's different versions of that meme, so please make sure you know which one you're arguing about.

Edit: a long take on all the variations, by the meme's originator! https://medium.com/@CRA1G/the-evolution-of-an-accidental-mem...

chromatonon The ACLU Has Lost Its Way

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy suggests something like B.

chromatonon We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure

Linode was founded in 2003.

chromatonon Intuit asked Mailchimp employees to pay medical costs out of pocket

Depends. If your employer doesn't offer health insurance, you can shop for plans on the government health insurance marketplace. These plans can have substantial subsidies.

chromatonon NotepadNext: A cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++

Yes, it does run well on Wine.

chromatonon Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

I think for most people it's the introduction of the module system. If it causes code to break in libraries you're using and there's no direct replacement for those libraries, it's a big hill to get over.