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dempedempe

813 karma · joined October 18, 2018

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dempedempe··on The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]
Saying that von Neumann was one of the first game theorists undersells it.

He wrote the original book on game theory! The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior with Oskar Morgenstern.

Relatedly, MAD was his conception as well.

dempedempe··on Eating Fruit Skins
I've eaten the peel on a pineapple before. Not so bad actually.

I thought eating the skins on kiwis was normal

dempedempe··on First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star
Even if FTL is achievable (which I agree, highly unlikely), it's still extraordinarily slow on cosmic scales. The closest star is a little over 4 ly away!

And probing the universe outside the Milky Way? Forget about it.

dempedempe··on First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star
> Researchers have found the first atmosphere surrounding an Earth-like, rocky planet orbiting within the habitable zone of a distant star.

Well, if they observed not only a planet orbiting the star but also the planet's atmosphere, it must not be a very "distant" star.

dempedempe··on Cannabis users face substantially higher risk of heart attack (2025)
It's more nuanced than that.
dempedempe··on Cannabis users face substantially higher risk of heart attack (2025)
Yeah it raises heart rate and blood pressure bc it dilates your blood vessels. The raised HR/BP are to counter that so you keep pushing the same amount of O2 per unit time.
dempedempe··on Screen time can damage under-twos' development, landmark study suggests
I don't think child rearing is supposed to be as difficult as modern society makes it.

As you pointed out, you don't have a lot of help in raising your kid. You're expected to do it mostly with your partner (or god forbid alone).

They've done some studies of hunter gather tribes to determine who handled babies the most. Turns out the kids' actual parents only handled the kids for about half the time (I think even a little less)! The term for it is "alloparenting".

Evolution did not prime us for this level of child care. Good luck to you!

dempedempe··on AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design
Read the article.
dempedempe··on AI coding at home without going broke
Because this person's entire blog is just copy-and-pasted AI responses.
dempedempe··on AI Coding at Home Without Going Broke
Did you just copy-and-paste an AI response an post it on your blog?
dempedempe··on Ask HN: What is your (AI) dev tech stack / workflow?
I'm a contractor (AWS and web apps), so I get a lot of sometimes-ambiguous requests. I have a five-part workflow via Claude/Codex skills: discovery->implementation planning->implementation->verification->review

Each phase writes to `./.agents/plans/{plan-name}/` in the project root. All in Markdown. That way, the flow is agent-agnostic. Each phase artifact is immutable after being written.

More details:

First, I put all the information that I have (documents, client statements, any code, my own summary, etc.) into a document. Which I pass to the discovery planning skill.

The discovery phase more formally defines the project in terms of functional requirements, non-functional requirements, constraints, risks, and assumptions. This might take a few passes to get everything nailed down.

After that, I being a implementation planning phase using the discovery artifact (`discovery.md`). We define the work in terms of phases, where each phases has various tasks associated with it (all checkboxes). Again, usually requires a few passes.

After that, I have a clear idea of the work needed and can send an estimate to the client. Or, if it's a personal project, get started actually building it. I have another phase for actual implementation.

Verification and review are similarly defined. They can be done by any agent.

dempedempe··on Creatine raises brain energy levels and slows cognitive decline: study
On the sleep deprivation topic, adenosine buildup in the brain is, along with melatonin, one of the brain's core sleep mechanisms. As you expend energy during the day, adenosine builds up, so your brain has an idea of how long you've been awake.

Creatine recycles adenosine back into ATP, so less adenosine builds up. The amount of creatine you find in foods naturally is way less than the amount people are supplementing with.

So it makes sense physiologically why mega doses of creatine might negatively affect sleep.

dempedempe··on The Art of Money Getting
Standard Ebooks has it too: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/p-t-barnum/the-art-of-mone...
dempedempe··on Antigravity 2.0 Tops the OpenSCAD Architectural 3D LLM Benchmark
I meant with Nix you're comparing hashes. With Docker, you're using pinned versions
dempedempe··on Antigravity 2.0 Tops the OpenSCAD Architectural 3D LLM Benchmark
It's like this with a lot of things now. For example, Nix's learning curve used to be a huge barrier to entry. Now with LLMs, I'm using nix-darwin and home-manager for dotfiles, package management, and have individual flakes in all of my projects for cryptographically reproducible builds!
dempedempe··on Was my $48K GPU server worth it?
At then end they briefly mentioned how they started a service to post-train LLMs on producing more human, less formulaic-obviously-AI text.
dempedempe··on New accessibility features powered by Apple Intelligence
The difference is that the voice in the video is a natural, human voice. It's the robotic sounding voices that always pronounce the same letters the exact same way (mostly the Eloquence family of voices) that enable blind people to listen at superhuman speeds. You can't listen to a real voice that fast.
dempedempe··on Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
Source can be anything with the original text, but, more often than not, ends up being PG.
dempedempe··on Running local models on an M4 with 24GB memory
It takes people years to learn how to write a good patent. If you gave your lawyer your attempt at writing your own patent, they might use the info to understand what you want (you're right about that), but a good lawyer would probably just start from scratch.

Imagine you're a contractor. You have a client who knows nothing about software development that wants you to write some software for them. They give you some code they generated with an LLM to get you started. Would you use the code or start over?

dempedempe··on Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks
What card games do you play? Do you have any recommendations?
dempedempe··on A couple million lines of Haskell: Production engineering at Mercury
Can confirm. I've been using Mercury for three years now for my LLC. Everything is just so smooth.
dempedempe··on Diverse organic molecules on Mars revealed by the first SAM TMAH experiment
The way I see it:

- Water on Mars: confirmed 2004 - Organic molecules on Mars: confirmed 2018 - Complex organic molecules (e.g., DNA precursors) on Mars: 2026

We now know for certain that it is possible for complex organic molecules to be preserved for ~3.5 billion years on the Martian surface.

The big question everyone wants to know is if life ever existed on Mars. Now we know that it's possible for that question to be answer, since we have confirmation of complex organic molecules actually being preserved.

This legitimizes future missions/spending on life searching missions to the Martian surface.

dempedempe··on A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/plato/dialogues/benjamin-j...
dempedempe··on The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
Just having JS disabled narrows you down by a lot. Yeah, fingerprinters can't use a lot of their more sophisticated techniques, but they still have a lot to work with as I understand it. I'm no expert though.
dempedempe··on We Induced Smells With Ultrasound
I find it incredible that the same olfactory activation patterns mapped to the the SAME smells in both subjects.
dempedempe··on The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
Yeah. You are fingerprinted if you disable JS and/or use a VPN. Read the article for more info.
dempedempe··on Show HN: Tamagotchi P1 for FPGAs
Now I finally have an incentive to buy an Analogue Pocket. Nice work and really great idea for a project!
dempedempe··on Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?
At least read the first chapter. I've never read anything like it (and I've read a lot). It was an experience more than anything. It became abundantly clear to me that I was reading something could only have been written by a true genius. No other author has a command of the modern English language like DFW did. The way he combines humor, wit, and wordplay was magic. It really showed me the power of writing.
dempedempe··on Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?
Everybody has already mentioned most of the best books I've read, so I'll mention one that I haven't seen on this thread yet - The Little Schemer.

Unless you're actively working through a bunch of problems/examples, reading most books is a form of passive learning. That is, you are simply being told information. The Little Schemer is the only book I know of that is written almost entirely in the form of increasingly intricate questions to the reader (active learning). There are maybe about two dozen or so statements ("Laws" as the author calls them). Everything else is a question in an extended Socratic dialogue aimed at refining the reader's knowledge of Lisp, how computation arises from recursion, computation in general, and lambda calculus culminating in the y-combinator.

The Little Schemer is the most unique, most fun, most educational (in the sense that it _forces_ you to work your way through it) book that I've read. Moreover, it's a great way to grasp computation in a more abstract sense.

dempedempe··on Base 10 is not a good base
I've always wondered this as well. In one case, math literacy among the Inuits actually went up significantly when they allowed them to start using their native base 20 system school[1]. Although, they also designed a new system of iconic numerals, so I think that was what caused the increase in math test scores (since you can do arithmetic visually with an iconic numeral system).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaktovik_numerals

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