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kaycebasques

13,536 karma · joined May 10, 2016

https://technicalwriting.dev
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kaycebasques··on Three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics
> Will such models that help enable paradigm shifts in science be only accessible to employees of those private companies?

The 3 breakthroughs all have implications for cryptography and nuclear technology, right? Hard to imagine nation-states allowing private companies to publish these results willy-nilly for much longer.

kaycebasques··on Meta Ignores Brazilian Court Order to End Bolsonaro Favoritism
I know 30 or more in the US that are all voting Lula. It usually mirrors local US politics demographics in my experience. In a red state you're likely to meet right-leaning Brazilians. In a blue state, left-leaning.
kaycebasques··on Meta Ignores Brazilian Court Order to End Bolsonaro Favoritism
My wife is Brazilian. I think HN might be missing some cultural context here. IIUC in Brazil when you vote for a presidential candidate you literally enter the 2 number digit assigned to the candidate's party. When casting your vote for Bolsonaro you enter 22, or 13 for Lula. The machine then displays the candidate's info and you press a confirm button to finalize your vote. I personally agree that "give me a random number between 0 and 25" and getting 13 or 25 is not a strong argument by itself, but I also think that HN may not appreciate the significance of these numbers to the literal mechanics of voting in Brasil.
kaycebasques··on The Wild West of polyglot docs sites
Haha, I've been drafting this post in the open, saying to myself "no one follows my RSS, it's fine." Well consider myself bamboozled. I have more thoughts on the topic and am drafting the post slowly. So the contents may change over the next few weeks. The digital equivalent of unexpected house guests, except I was the one who left the door open and put out a "free coffee and donuts" sign

edit: added a "next steps" section but other than that it's good enough, says most of what I wanted to say, and doesn't need to change much beyond this. Thanks for reading

kaycebasques··on EmbeddingGemma 2: An open, lightweight multimodal embedding model
The JetBrains post from a few days ago introduced to me the idea of using binary quantization rather than MRL. Would that work with EmbeddingGemma2 or is there some reason why the approach might be fundamentally incompatible? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49956148

*summons a minimaxir*

kaycebasques··on Building a RAG pipeline for semantic code search
Oh, wow. I wasn't aware that binary quantization was being applied to embeddings! And the code search related use cases were very helpful for grokking when quantization is OK versus when more precision must be maintained. So they sound bearish on Matryoshka? Post makes it sound like Air Context never reduces dimensions.

Thanks, authors. Please follow through on the rest of the series. I learned a bunch.

kaycebasques··on Goolsbee: The Fed Can't Keep Waiting Out Oil Shocks
I'm staying true to the title but Goolsbee made some interesting comments beyond oil.

Re: how rate increases are an imprecise (unfair?) tool:

> But the Fed can't pump oil or slow data-center construction. Higher rates mainly bite housing, business investment and big-ticket consumer purchases. "It would necessarily be painful," he said. "You will certainly hear about it from the sectors who say, 'We didn't do this. Why are we being punished?'"

Re: AI boom overheating the economy at large:

> Goolsbee is rethinking the AI boom. Until recently, data-center spending seemed to be "staying in its lane," pulling workers and resources from elsewhere without overheating the whole economy, he said. Now his business contacts describe a tightening job market and rising wages in jobs tied to the build-out.

kaycebasques··on Federal Reserve issues FOMC statement
Wow, dramatic line-by-line changes in the statement text.
kaycebasques··on Anthropic Says Iran Used Its American AI Model to Target U.S. Navy Warships
This was more of a disclosure to the US military that Anthropic has detected that various "undesirables" are using Claude to plan attacks, develop weapons, etc. and that information that shouldn't have been shared got through the safety guards:

> The finding was one of several threats outlined in the 154-page report that offered up a playbook of how U.S. adversaries are using AI in novel ways that pose serious threats to national security: developing new missiles and aggressive disinformation campaigns, spying on dissidents, and even pursuing the potential development of biological weapons. Top AI companies and security firms regularly publish threat reports involving the technology to inform the public and their partners about potential dangers... “Our safeguards blocked many of their requests, but not all of them,” the Anthropic report said of the Yemeni weapons-development efforts.

kaycebasques··on Eating Fruit Skins
I started eating mango skin a few months ago. When it's thin and bland, it's not bad. Gives a nice crunch to the eating experience. But often it's way too thick and sometimes strongly bitter.
kaycebasques··on Neki
I am on a 12 Muni right now that is plastered with a Neki ad, and I looked up neki.dev literally 10 mins ago to see what this product is about. Did they time the release of this bus ad with the launch date?
kaycebasques··on Playa Phone
I remember asking a friend what makes Burning Man (BM) interesting, and he said "it's a glimpse of a fundamentally different economy." He was talking about how everything is organized around gifts rather than exchange. AFAICT that is still very much true. Most (all?) interactions do not involve money. E.g. at BM you can walk to a tent and get a drink and there's no expectation to pay for it. But of course the whole system only works when everyone agrees to be mutually generous. Sure, people use money to bring all the stuff into BM and to get themselves to BM so it's easy to write it off as fake, but nonetheless I can see how even a week demonstrating a fundamentally different social structure could be quite a profound experience. BM is still on my bucket list because of what my friend said.
kaycebasques··on Htmx 4.0
Oh wow, interesting combo that I would never independently reach for, but thanks to your template I might have to give it a whirl!
kaycebasques··on WebMCP: Teaching Your Website to Talk to AI Agents
Explainer i.e. proposal: https://github.com/webmachinelearning/webmcp/blob/main/decla...
kaycebasques··on Don't classify, hallucinate
https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10496 for others like me hearing about HyDE for the first time
kaycebasques··on So, you want to make a game engine (2023)
"Creating"
kaycebasques··on Ask HN: What is everyone in SF talking about?
Muni is not doing well. They've adjusted service to address a huge budget deficit, and the buses are noticeably more crowded and less frequent.

Given how SF has a big global immigrant population, there's a lot of World Cup spirit in the air. Also because Santa Clara is a host stadium.

Housing demand is back up. Not just single family homes but also condos.

Bars are supposedly closing because the 20-somethings are drinking less. Yet at the same time apparently the youngins have discovered the charm of Vesuvio...? Anchor still has not reopened. Woods (IMO) is now the preferred beer spot for locals.

The recall of the Sunset supe was a big deal. Fight over cars on the Great Highway is ongoing.

Pride is in full swing this weekend. Bay To Breakers was great as always. Weather is decent. The "SF doom spiral" story is being discussed less. I.e. SF seems safer. It's a good time to live in SF.

kaycebasques··on Qualcomm to buy startup Modular for $4B in AI software push
Qualcomm's press release: https://investor.qualcomm.com/news-events/press-releases/new...

And Modular's: https://www.modular.com/blog/qualcomm-to-acquire-modular

kaycebasques··on The truth about being a manager
I will never forget my dad's response to me telling him that I was becoming a people manager: "Everyone else's problems are now your problems."
kaycebasques··on The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars
I'm curious about the logistical details of Newmark's donations. Skimmed the article but didn't see an answer. This is just a pledge to donate at this point, right? Newmark has not yet actually transferred any money? Presumably his trust would handle the transfer after his death or something. But then what exactly are they donating? Shares in a private company?
kaycebasques··on How liminalism became the defining aesthetic
> The image exemplifies the popular internet aesthetic of “liminality”: the exploration of spaces that appear “in between,” that are uncanny and uncomfortable despite being mundane or familiar.

Liminal in the context of liminal dreaming has very different emotional connotations. Liminal dreaming is the state where you are beginning to fall asleep but are not quite there (hence liminal because you're on the border between awake and asleep). You can also experience it at the end of a sleep as you transition back into being awake. It's a flowing place where colors, shapes, and sounds keep morphing in very interesting and often beautiful ways. Unlike lucid dreaming there is no notion of being in control. Supposedly this was a secret to the creativity of Dali. He would sit in a chair with some keys in his hand and allow himself to drift off. When he fell asleep the keys would fall out of his hand, hit the floor, and the sound would wake him up. Then he would draw whatever he had been imagining during the liminal dreaming right there on the spot. Edison supposedly also had a similar trick. Supposedly. I have sometimes imagined some really beautiful (and catchy!) music but I've never been able to remember it in detail after waking.

kaycebasques··on PlayStation Architecture
Which means that we're really talking about hardware from 91-93, right? I.e. if launch was 94 then they were designing in 91-93ish.
kaycebasques··on The seven programming ur-languages (2022)
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813496
kaycebasques··on Tech valuations are back to pre-AI boom levels
This also means that the pre-2018 index had a fundamentally different portfolio of companies. So comparing today to anything pre-2018 is apples-to-oranges

I recall that there's an "extended tech" ETF that does a pretty good job of actually capturing the whole IT universe. Pretty sure I'm thinking of IGM: https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239769/ishares-north-ame...

kaycebasques··on Tech valuations are back to pre-AI boom levels
Aside: why are Alphabet and Meta bucketed into the Communications sector rather than the IT one? Meta kinda makes sense, but Alphabet much less so.

Are there any other notable IT companies that aren't actually part of the S&P500 IT sector?

Edit: Apparently this happened in 2018 and is known as the de-FAANGing of the IT sector. I.e. FAANG used to all be lumped in a single sector. ^SPX tried to redistribute to spread the companies across different sectors. AMZN is another notable company now outside of IT sector. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_services_sector_...

kaycebasques··on Research-Driven Agents: What Happens When Your Agent Reads Before It Codes
Gemini has a Deep Research API: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/deep-research
kaycebasques··on Agent Reading Test
See also https://dacharycarey.com/2026/04/06/designing-agent-reading-...
kaycebasques··on Why are we still using Markdown?
> These 2 produce IDENTICAL output.

This is my single biggest complaint about reStructuredText. You create headings by putting underlines and (optional!) overlines around the section heading text. But all of the following are valid title adornment characters:

  ! " # $ % & ' ( ) \* + 
  , - . / : ; < = > ? @ 
  [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~
So in each doc you have to figure out the H1, H2, H3 formatting separately. E.g. in one doc it's:

  ==
  H1
  ==

  Normal text

  --
  H2
  --

Whereas in another it might be:

  H1
  ~~

  Normal text

  !!
  H2
  !!
kaycebasques··on Velxio 2.0 – Emulate Arduino, ESP32, and Raspberry Pi 3 in the Browser
Can someone who has used both wokwi and this do a compare/contrast? The footer suggests that it's built on top of wokwi-elements
kaycebasques··on How Ford burned $12B in Brazil (2021)
Yes that is their biggest manufacturing hub right? And was the location of the working conditions controversy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Brazil_working_conditions_...
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