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guiand

281 karma · joined June 13, 2020

Like to work on emulation, compilers, reverse engineering, embedded development.

All opinions here are my own, not my employer’s.

You can find other projects of mine at https://guiand.xyz.

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guiand··on A Model for Winning Survivor
Love this!

I played with doing something similar, where my features were based on Edgic charts I found online[1]. This ends up implicitly factoring in people’s _perceptions_ of the players/editing, which can be useful. Ultimately it was just a bit of a toy still, somewhat better than random.

Like other people mention, Survivor is edited with a lot of intention, I think if you really want to predict winners you need to somehow capture cues from the editors.

I wonder if you could derive per-player 1st and 2nd person sentiment from transcripts of the episodes. Could be interesting to factor that in.

[1]: Example - https://www.reddit.com/r/Edgic/s/2v0nA93odi

guiand··on [dead]
Long horizon events like this on Polymarket stabilize around a % odds corresponding to time value of money. You can get 4% buying risk free CDs for that horizon.
guiand··on macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt
For security, the feature requires setting a special option with the recovery mode command line:

rdma_ctl enable

guiand··on Mind-reading devices can now predict preconscious thoughts
Split brain experiments show that a person rationalizes and accommodates their own behavior even when "they" didn't choose to perform an action[1]. I wonder if ML-based implants which extrapolate behavior from CNS signals may actually drive behavior that a person wouldn't intrinsically choose, yet the person accommodates that behavior as coming from their own free will.

[1]: "The interpreter" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-brain_interpreter

guiand··on You can turn a cluster of Macs into an AI supercomputer in macOS Tahoe 26.2
Noteworthy: this is powered by a new ultra-low-latency userspace TB5 driver offering an ibverbs/RDMA interface over thunderbolt 5[1]. Non-inference HPC workloads could see a massive benefit as well.

[1]: See MLX integration PR at https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx/pull/2808

guiand··on Testing is better than data structures and algorithms
> true positives and false negatives

That would be a simple cache in most instances.

guiand··on Show HN: Heatscroll VSCode extension to help you work in large files
This looks fantastic! I also rely a lot on CTRL-`-` for navigating to past locations.
guiand··on Show HN: Auto-summarizing meetings for SF government transparency
Hi HN,

I figured one of the really useful applications of LLMs would be in processing transcripts of city government public meetings.

First I was doing it for myself, but I figured others might be interested to read these summaries as well. I use a few prompts to semi-automatically create reports of the most discussed topics for various board/commission meetings.

Ad free, done in my spare time. Just figured people might be interested.

guiand··on The fastest rm command and one of the fastest cp commands
This could be useful for e.g. bazel, where I’ve regularly seen deleting the bazel caches take on the order of 10 minutes because of absurdly large and repeated directory trees (caused by things like runfile trees containing the python interpreter).
guiand··on Boston Fed releases report, source code of digital currency prototype study
It’s somewhat true in the sense that banks need to keep some fraction of their deposits in cash as reserves (the “reserve ratio”). So if they lend money it needs to be backed to that extent by their deposits.
guiand··on Ask HN: How can I help you?
Hash tables are (usually) faster to do all sorts of operations than tree based maps, as most operations become a simple function to calculate a tree’s hash followed by a table lookup. Of course, they’re unordered, so if you need to iterate in order, or find all keys < a certain value, or things like that, tree maps can be better for your algorithm.

Also, TreeMap uses a red-black tree to implement the map, which is a basic type of binary tree. Depending on the data you’d like to store, other kinds of tree-based maps can have better performance characteristics. A map based on a Splay Tree[1] speeds up repeated accesses, so it could perform well if you had keys that were cheap to compute an ordering but expensive to compute a hash, and your access pattern has good temporal locality.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splay_tree

guiand··on Python Type Hints – How to Handle Optional Imports
I swear by type hinting in Python, but it is pretty frustrating how many common patterns don’t work or require very convoluted use of typing.

It’s an uphill battle to convert a team over to using hinting because of how awkward things can get and how easy it is to just pretend the feature doesn’t exist.

guiand··on Arm-Based 128-Core Ampere CPUs Cost a Fraction of x86 Price
Sounds like exactly the use case of a server. Rack space is expensive, condensing it can save the operators money.
guiand··on Are there any good companies anymore?
OP’s entire post is defining ‘not a good company’ and asking what’s left…
guiand··on Cuttlefish-Like Robots Are Far More Efficient Than Propeller-Powered Machines
Note that it’s a qualified claim: 3x as efficient as the “average propellor of a small boat”. The tech looks awesome in the video though, would recommend giving it a watch.
guiand··on Million Short: A search engine that removes the topM most popular sites
I think the intent would be to filter out SEO spam essentially, and get you a small primary-source website. Like searching for "san francisco restaurants" gets you some much more interesting results on MS than on Google.
guiand··on Fringe notions on antitrust would destroy small businesses and hurt consumers
One particular thing that has always deeply concerned me about Amazon is the cognitive dissonance: they aren't a store but a platform, and yet they can exert total control over the store in an anticompetitive way when it suits them.

They banned selling the Chromecast and Apple TV [1]. Isn't that curious? They don't have to exert quality control over the Amazon marketplace because they just Connect Sellers to Buyers. But if that seller happens to compete with an Amazon product, sorry! No-can-sell.

[1]: https://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-to-stop-selling-google-chro...

guiand··on There’s a Hole in Your SoC: Glitching the MediaTek BootROM
Fault injection is a really interesting avenue for exploiting things like game consoles, where bootloader exploits tend to be the holy grail and where dumping decryption keys is huge for emulators.

It was used on the Nintendo 3DS, for example, to get the CPU to take an exception during bootROM execution [1], which combined with some other flaws allowed dumping the ROM with all of its keys.

https://derrekr.github.io/3ds/33c3/#/18

guiand··on The ambitious plan to build a Minecraft version of Australia
If anything, projects like these can be interesting time capsules in the future, both preserving the city itself and providing some clues about which landmarks were most detailed, and which parts of those landmarks were so detailed.

One thing that comes to mind is UC Berkeley's "Blockeley"[1] server a bunch of students built in the same vein. Some very specific parts of campus are insanely detailed; the V&A Cafe even has furniture where most buildings are hollow facades.

It's also interesting as a virtual meetup environment... at Berkeley, the official graduation this year was even held in the Minecraft server.

[1]: https://www.blockeley.com/