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hyperpallium2

1,418 karma · joined July 26, 2020

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hyperpallium2··on Ask HN: If the models are so good, why doesn't OpenAI just start 100 companies?
Because there's no moat for such companies.

But I like the implied hype-conspiracy that models aren't so good. Let's see post-IPO!

hyperpallium2··on Code is clay now
> Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by the exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.... https://home.adelphi.edu/sbloch/class/adages/joy.html

Dependency is a cause of ossification.

hyperpallium2··on I know why the mathematicians weep
Omitted title payoff: But it's something AI can never do.
hyperpallium2··on What Sun got wrong
Disruption. Digital getting killed is what prompted Christensen to write The Innovator's Dilemma.
hyperpallium2··on The Real Luxuries In Life
IANAP but any philosophy based on absence is a nihilism
hyperpallium2··on The brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment
dreams are false data
hyperpallium2··on Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction (2016)
prefer semantic abstraction even when it creates duplication
hyperpallium2··on Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28
This beaurcratic development feels like turning a super-tanker that's connected to a hundred other super-tankers. While I accept the priority of back-compatibility, I personally lack the working memory to manage it, while creative problem-solving.
hyperpallium2··on Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28
The non-nullability issue seems to be about performance, not cognitive load (search the article for "writes atomically"), though not articulated.
hyperpallium2··on Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school
Bloom's 2 sigma problem solved at last! But that's overestimating LLMs, our zeitgeist.

AI can't detect AI, not because AI undetectable, but because it lacks judgment. Its shtick is random generation; the proverbial monkey on a typewriter.

hyperpallium2··on If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good (2010)
Fewer features = smaller frame, easier to satisfy, better customer targeting.
hyperpallium2··on Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants
Why not replenish with solar i.e. pump it back up into a dam-battery?
hyperpallium2··on The Emacsification of Software
What does clocks mean here? A new usage?

    “Emacsification” clocks that everything now works this way, not just baroque text editors.
hyperpallium2··on A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans
IANAG but the idea is that women get two copies of the X chromosome (XX), and men only one (XY). This explains why women have squared the colour blindness rates of men - women have to get two bad copies, men only one.

Many intelligence related genes are on the X chromosome, so it makes sense you get more variation in men. However, not all genes interact in this way.

hyperpallium2··on On the efficacy of online proctoring using Proctorio (2021) [pdf]
Thanks - looks like this has already changed in line with GGP since my time. https://peer.asee.org/open-book-problem-solving-in-engineeri... [pdf]
hyperpallium2··on On the efficacy of online proctoring using Proctorio (2021) [pdf]
New degree: B.Goo.
hyperpallium2··on On the efficacy of online proctoring using Proctorio (2021) [pdf]
Law exams are open book; Engineering exams are not.

I'm not sure exactly what the distinction is - apart from law being "soft" and requiring argument - but it's deeper than inability to reuse past papers.

hyperpallium2··on Premature optimization caught up with me as well
He's making a more general statement, with "root of all evil", that improving some aspect of something without understanding its effects on the whole outcome, is literally the root cause of evil in the world, in general. Winning the battle but losing the war. Not seeing the forest for the trees. Getting lost in the weeds. Unenlightened self-interest. Not hyperbole, but a particular instance of a general concept.

But on code optimization, k deeply nested loops are not a bad guide to O(n^k), and a candidate for optimization.

That said, I once cached something that obviously needed to be cached - so obvious in fact that a deeper level in the system already cached it.

hyperpallium2··on D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
It's more a research question.

I think it'll be more like ordered keys in JSON - not ordered, according to the spec, but very useful in practice, because easier to compare, locate keys by eye etc. This order might not merely be "the same" as the input happened to be, but an order customarily used - and there might be a semantic reason for that order in the first place, used in some original, non-JSON, representation.

Tenuous.

hyperpallium2··on D2: A new declarative language to turn text into diagrams
A problem with semantic markup is when it doesn't do what you want, and you need to wig-wam it. Does this mean you actually wanted presentation markup? Or, since you are trying to convey meaning, does it mean that the semantics aren't rich enough to describe what you mean?

In this D2 example (https://d2-lang.com/assets/images/intro-example-a917149ff3b7...), the diagram is nicely designed to be centered on the nexus node crawler. But the choices of which side the tributary nodes are on is not. You might want cron below and ps->express below - or to the sides.

The grammar can be extended to accommodate this (maybe already has been), but what is the semantic meaning of above, below, left or right?

One semantic choice is made: the "persists" arc is unidirectional, and is presented left-to-right - a natural order for many languages.

(Technically, "declarative" needn't be "semantic", but arguably is the most useful one)

hyperpallium2··on The Making of a Prophet
It does seem wrong that nature would use irrational numbers - the fault is more likely in our concepts. Our mathematics may be more parochial than we realize - than we can realize. Alien mathematics may have taken a different route.

pi is not irrational in base pi

hyperpallium2··on Common tech jobs described as cabals of Mesoamerican wizards
https://web.archive.org/web/20220811213920/https://etiennefd...
hyperpallium2··on Gojq: Pure Go Implementation of Jq
FYNI jq was originally implemented in Haskell.
hyperpallium2··on Gojq: Pure Go Implementation of Jq
jq uses bison (gnu's yacc), which is a nightmare for error diagnosis. Additionally, the founder (though brilliant - or maybe because brilliant) wouldn't accept improvements in error reporting.
hyperpallium2··on Gojq: Pure Go Implementation of Jq
jq used to do this, but changed to preserve key order.
hyperpallium2··on I love my GPD Micro PC
Android tablet + termux + bluetooth keyboard is cheaper, and better performance in some ways...

The only problem is Google slowly locking down and squeezing the life out of termux.

hyperpallium2··on The Essence of Programming (2021)
Pedantry: the only exception I could think of is a timer (delay, alarm clock), where the output is when, not what. sleep 10

Yes, information technology is for processing information.

Any transformation can be decomposed into lossy and lossless components (aka bijectve and non-bijective; reversible and non-reversible). The nice thing is that the lossless component can be automatically checked for that property.

hyperpallium2··on You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected
The Story of a Fisherman https://www.highview.com.au/the-story-of-a-fisherman/
hyperpallium2··on No More “Insight Porn”
> Luck is when opportunity meets preparedness.
hyperpallium2··on The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence (2019)
There's an interesting approach to "consciousness", as what you are aware of, consciously. i.e. attention management. Animals are conscious of their environment in this way. But because humans also have a lot of models going on internally, the mechanism adapts to that (perhaps higher mammals too; I don't recall). This fits nicely with your experience and the submission. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31373806

I wonder if our "conscious reasoning" is really just attending to a column that does that? Certainly, formal reasoning is a skill that is learnt and practiced - perhaps not so different from a manual skill. We can also suppose pattern-matching on this, to get intuition and hunches. All old ideas, but perhaps neuroanatomy is advancing sufficiently to test them?

Also: Minsky's Society of Mind

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