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dasm

53 karma · joined September 10, 2017

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dasm··on AttentionViz: A Global View of Transformer Attention
Demo: http://attentionviz.com/
dasm··on Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
I suspect he won't want to get into thorny PR issues, but probably company organization. It's easy to imagine a disorganized startup scaling poorly, and those within it wanting guidance from highly-scaled FB.
dasm··on Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
It's surprising to me that your (former) title wouldn't entail more direct leadership, even as a simple messenger for "shut up and soldier."
dasm··on A Sober Look at SPACs (2020)
It seems you are implying that this sort of arrangement is fundamentally unhealthy for a market focused on accurate price discovery, and I think that's trivially true.

Some investing incentives are aligned with accurate price discovery, some are not (warren buffet vs a pump and dump).

dasm··on A Sober Look at SPACs (2020)
Effective strategy. It seems your edge comes from 1. learning about SPACs early and 2. identifying which ones will be successful. How do you get #1?
dasm··on Over 60% of people view journalism as more dangerous than ten years ago
The examples you selected do not seem representative of the list.

For example, the top three incidents involve verifiable journalists. You neglect to mention these before skipping to #4, the ACAB twitter account.

dasm··on Portland, Maine passes referendum banning facial surveillance
I grew up in Maine, and I think the statement is quite accurate. Portland is not authoritarian, but it is by comparison to the northern counties
dasm··on Hiring Myths Common in Hacker News Discussions
Why not try to get better at whiteboarding?
dasm··on Quibi Is Shutting Down
with Snap's earnings pop today, it must be tough to be them
dasm··on Why GPT-3 Matters
Sorry. Fixed list:

1. Set up a pseudo-adversary NN trained to recognize context-correct speech based on a small corpus.

2. Craft a GPT-3 prompt to get N 9s of accuracy

3.Retry if the answer fails the test from the other NN

4. Set a cap on retries based on how many 9s your prompt got

5. If cap exceeded, return a context-free or limited context response

dasm··on Why GPT-3 Matters
Seems like a minor technical challenge (at least in the case of games)

1. Set up a pseudo-adversary NN trained to recognize context-correct speech based on a small corpus. 2. Craft a GPT-3 prompt to get N 9s of accuracy 3.Retry if the answer fails the test from the other NN 4. Set a cap on retries based on how many 9s your prompt got 5. If cap exceeded, return a context-free or limited context response

dasm··on Germany's military missing over 60k rounds of ammunition
As you said, we have a little bubble on guns & ammo in the US right now.

Basic NATO 5.56 - ie, cheap enough for practice or poorly equipped grunts - is probably ~$0.30/round. However, it doesn't specify the caliber or load.

Loads designed for combat and not practice - like armor piercing, barrier penetration, soft target performance, precision, short barrel optimized, etc. - could be ~2-7x more expensive, and more indicative of a serious organizational problem.

Small arms calibers could include .50BMG, which is also a much larger cost & problem.

dasm··on Millions of abandoned oil wells are leaking methane, a climate menace
Not only in Nigeria. https://www.worldoil.com/news/2020/4/7/permian-gas-flaring-d...
dasm··on Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension
As a daily Pushbullet user, thank you for posting this! It's maddening that the best way to escalate a Google customer service issue is social media.
dasm··on If this type of dark matter existed, people would be dying of unexplained wounds
Have you reversed "entry" and "exit," or is this a reference to something like the CIA's alleged heart attack gun?
dasm··on If this type of dark matter existed, people would be dying of unexplained wounds
From a terminal ballistics background, it seems very unlikely that this injury would appear to be a gunshot wound.

Bullets behave very differently according to their mass and velocity, not just their energy. A wound channel for this a particle would likely be very different from any bullet.

dasm··on 38% of bugs at Airbnb could have been prevented by using types
I have very strong opinions on docstrings; they are simple to implement and completely solve this issue.
dasm··on Depression Far Too Common Among Tech Pros: Survey
I agree that prevention is the best method. For many people, therapy is more like basic self-care (ie, brushing your teeth) than a new limb. There are a great number of experiences that can batter us emotionally, and we can access therapy now while we work to fix these societal problems.
dasm··on Depression Far Too Common Among Tech Pros: Survey
I agree that prevention is the best method. For many people, therapy is more like basic self-care (ie, brushing your teeth) than a new limb. There are a great number of experiences that can batter us emotionally, and we can access therapy now while we work to fix these societal problems.
dasm··on We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly
Let's assume that this event is Google officially jumping the shark (in terms of workplace desirability, which has decreased due to moral turpitude and a gradually lowering engineering bar).

Who's the new Google? Is there a company that can pick up the mantle of near-universal desirability to software engineers? I don't think it's any of the other FAANGs.

dasm··on Ask HN: Is Google Compute down?
Thanks. Since it appears all this traffic is Google-related, any guesses as to what the attacker could have gained here?
dasm··on Ask HN: Is Google Compute down?
Agreed. This appears to be a repeat of the attack covered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18385920

I'm not familiar with BGP routing attacks; the article above seems to imply the attacker needs to compromise certs in order to glean useful data from the attack.

If that's accurate, is this Google-oriented traffic vulnerable to this type of attack?

dasm··on Lack of progress exposed by the Canary MacGuffin
This whole comment thread reminds me of my recent experience at an Amazon internship. I was trying to make my way out of the deep end, but my mentor was looking for whose fault it was; when the party with the upper hand decides to play this game, it's very difficult to escape.
dasm··on The Army May Have Found Its Next Rifle in a Colorado Garage
For conventional small arms, differing muzzle velocity due to different effective barrel length killed Metal Storm's accuracy. Eg, the top round in the stack may travel down 6" more of barrel than the bottom round; in a 5.56 gun, this could be a 500fps+ difference (https://rifleshooter.com/2015/12/223-remington-5-56mm-nato-b...).
dasm··on The Army May Have Found Its Next Rifle in a Colorado Garage
Almost forgot: while not simultaneous, the AN-94 did not have issues with ultra-fast RPM in one barrel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN-94).
dasm··on The Army May Have Found Its Next Rifle in a Colorado Garage
This is way too detailed, but describes how barrels behave while a shot is being fired: http://www.the-long-family.com/shock%20wave%20theory%20summa...

Based on this, it seems like multiple barrels probably wouldn't affect each other in different ways, leading to shot consistency as long as there aren't significant differences in ignition time or velocity.

dasm··on The Army May Have Found Its Next Rifle in a Colorado Garage
Good point! Hadn't thought about the bore wear - if they don't force successive shots to cycle through the barrels, that would be a huge issue.
dasm··on The Army May Have Found Its Next Rifle in a Colorado Garage
Unfortunately, aligning different bores is very difficult. Putting them in the same chunk of steel prevents them from diverging over time, at least, but doesn't solve the original issue.
dasm··on The Army May Have Found Its Next Rifle in a Colorado Garage
Hey, this is my niche! This article is not very good - think of the last article you read about the internet betting a series of tubes, and your Steve Jobs is a brilliant coder.

The rifle design objectives are pretty poor, but there's some interesting innovations in there nonetheless. Unfortunately, it's mostly academic; modern symmetric warfare places less emphasis on small arms than ever before, and asymmetric warfare suffers huge diminishing returns from small arms investment.

In short, the AR15/M16 family will be around for a while, and that's fine.

dasm··on Elon Musk Deletes Own, SpaceX and Tesla Facebook Pages After #deletefacebook
This is key; Facebook is incredibly important for a small business.

I started a firearms business, and being unable to use Facebook had a huge effect on how I was able to grow my business - making the same decision for political reasons is simply not an option for many small businesses who are just barely getting by.

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