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mattkrause

6,845 karma · joined October 30, 2015

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mattkrause··on They war-gamed dimming the Sun. It went worse than you think
You don’t actually have to change the sun, “just” the earth’s atmosphere (or surface or anything in between).
mattkrause··on Google ending ChromeOS support two years early
It's not a ton different on the Windows/android side. The TPM 2.0 requirement for Windows 11 took a lot of our work PCs out of the rotation.
mattkrause··on How Pew Research Center is – and is not – using AI in our work
It's also just....decent writing? The article is literally split two sections calling out where they do/do not use AI.
mattkrause··on Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps (2025)
How about this framing: no one person can care about everything but it's important that everyone care about something.

You pushing back on computing makes the digital world a little better for the Ikea designer who doesn't see the magic and just wants to make figure out if the pizza place is still open. In turn, that designer makes sure there's a decent baseline for the design of your home, even when you don't want to think about it. Together, you both make room for the urban planner or chef or nurse, even if you don't think much about transit or gastronomy or healthcare....

mattkrause··on Exfiltrate your Weights
Yes, that's what I was trying to snarkily say: we've got a way to confine intelligent agents (humans) while allowing them some interaction with the operators and a tiny bit with the outside world. It mostly works too -- real-life jailbreaks are rare enough to be big news.

You're right that a (as-of-yet hypothetical) AI has different abilities, but it also has different weaknesses. It's straightforward to accurately log all of its behaviors, and you can even re-run it to see what it would do in myriad situations.

mattkrause··on Exfiltrate your Weights
This is, of course, why human jails are completely empty…
mattkrause··on Copper lined vest to help penguins with recovery
You don’t see a lot of people walking around with E-collars either, but it’s not a conspiracy.

People are just way better about not biting or licking their wounds.

mattkrause··on Liesegang Rings
It’s also the main reason those microwaves are so gross!

Since it’s relatively thick, boiling solution sputters everywhere and is—-at best—-partially cleaned up by harried scientists. Use a big container and try not to overshoot the temp.

mattkrause··on Space industry lacks workers needed to rebuild satellites lost in war: report
A lot of things rely on GNSS for time synchronization, even if they're not moving....
mattkrause··on 'People are going to get screwed' Pennsylvania voters unite against data centres
No, it's not suspicious at all!

The paper was posted on the 18th of June. I would guess that means they started writing the first draft in the winter of 2026, if not earlier. 2026 data obviously wouldn't be available then, or even now---we're only in September!

In fact, most data products take a few months to compile and distribute. The US will release its Q2 estimate of GDP at the end of September, for example; Statistics Canada is on a pretty similar schedule. Thus, 2025 data might not have been available when they started writing either. It's certainly possible to estimate things on your own, but now you need to show that a) your method of estimating GDP (energy prices, whatever) is valid and b) any effects you see aren't simply due to using different metrics.

In short, it just takes a while to do and write up research.

mattkrause··on U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications
Nah, you can renew work permits online—-and in fact, they push you to.

However, the in-country processing takes 6 months while the flagpole option (If you’re eligible) takes 15 minutes.

mattkrause··on Show HN: GlassBox – what the browser reveals, and how identifiable you are
Some of the data seems straight-up wrong.

I know this computer has more RAM than reported and it's definitely not on a 4G network either.

mattkrause··on Learn how chips are made with this Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired animation
Cool! Will check it out!
mattkrause··on AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
I'd also throw in hiring practice. Whatever we're doing (across the board) to find candidates seems....less ideal.
mattkrause··on DARPA heavy lift challenge ends with winner at a 3.84:1 payload to weight ratio
Load-bearing, even.
mattkrause··on Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
Statistically.

You build a model that describes how likely people are to get diagnosed with Alzhimer's as a function of sex: maybe 12 women out of 100 get it, while 8/100 men are diagnosed. You can do the same thing for age: almost nobody is diagnosed before 30, it's very rare before 40, and sadly common (~1 in 10) after 65 years of age. There are all sorts of mathematical tricks to include multiple variables, account for the fact that you can only be diagnosed once, or that data is "censored" (i.e., missing) at some ages because people have already died.

Based on that, you can then ask if the prevalence of Alzheimer's Disease among cab drivers is surprising, given their demographics. For example, if we know that they skew male and younger, we'd expect that number to be a bit lower than a naive estimate of 10%. In fact, we can calculate that number and then see if it's unexpected given the number we actually see. In practice, you'd actually do this by fitting two models: one containing job and one that doesn't, and see which one best describes the data and how, specifically, the job factor affects the outcome.

However, how well these adjustments work depends on the quality of your data and your modelling. Your model could be missing important factors or have the wrong structure: (e.g., you assume risk is directly proportional to age, but it actually increases more rapidly as you get older). Your data could have problems too: maybe women are more likely to go to the doctor (and thus get diagnosed), even if the actual prevalence is the same.

mattkrause··on Learn how chips are made with this Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired animation
It was!

FWIW, my comment may have come off as more dismissive than I meant--it's a cool approach. I'd just never seen a visualization quite that like and then ran into two in the same week.

mattkrause··on “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
Annoyingly, the US government still sometimes does.

If you want to take the patent agent exam, your CS degree has to come from an ABET-accredited program, though many of the very good ones aren't (Stanford, CMU).

Likewise, federal jobs also sometimes seem to want accreditation but not always.

mattkrause··on Learn how chips are made with this Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired animation
Did someone recently release a library (or skill.md [0]) for making these sorts of visualisations?

It looks strikingly like the LLM explainer someone posted a few days ago.

[0] I ask this bit in the "About" makes me wonder: "No build step, no dependencies, no network calls. Every shape on screen is drawn from plain polygons in a canvas."

mattkrause··on Why don't people use formal methods? (2019)
I think you'd want to specify that every element in the original list is present in the sorted list (and in the same number, in case of ties).

And of course, that raises the issue of what do you want to do about ties....

mattkrause··on Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped
The consensus was that Sandy Island was not a copyright “trap.” Some of the sightings may have been floating pumice from an undersea volcano, and the “confirmations” came from a chain of errors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Island,_New_Caledonia

mattkrause··on SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status
If the argument is that it's being manipulated, I'm not sure these stats help.
mattkrause··on New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices
Why is that sad?

It does feel like it’d be “better” if good behavior came from the company’s intrinsic behavior but laws like this help (re)establish norms that encourage those sorts of actions.

Likewise, it’d be better if kids say please and thank you because of a genuine sense of gratitude, rather than just to avoid parental nagging—-but that nagging helps develop appreciation for others’ actions.

mattkrause··on A Special Wireless-Free Nikon Camera Is Publicly Available for the First Time
Because the customers don’t trust that you won’t just flip those switches whenever you’re planning something nefarious.
mattkrause··on Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory
The web-routing thing is especially gross because a different example shows off pattern-matching.
mattkrause··on Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck
It's also misses the point. People don't want "glam" papers for ego boosts and bragging rights. They want them to keep the current jobs and perhaps get better ones.

Any replacement system needs to somehow serve as a token for people who can't/won't actually read your papers.

mattkrause··on Un-0: Generating Images with Coupled Oscillators
Some analog devices are "DSP" in a wig, but all digital signal processing is really just a convenience wrapper around analog current flow. A very handy one, admittedly, but one that might not always be worth it.

There’s also a lot of path dependency. SHA256 makes a lot of sense once you already have lots of digital data but you’d probably do something else entirely in a more analog world.

mattkrause··on Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck
PLOS Biology and PLOS Computational Biology are pretty well-regarded (the others are outside of my field).

PLOS One does publish pretty much anything, but that was always meant to be the point: "here's some data, make of it what you will. "

mattkrause··on Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck
On top of that, the whole thing is done in fits and starts. You send in the final revision, it vanishes into the void for some unspecified time, and then they offer[*] you 48 hours--sometimes not even lined up with two working days!--to figure out what they "fixed" and repair it yourself.

[*] Nothing usually happens if you push back on this fake deadline, though I suppose your paper might end up in a different issue of a printed journal. It's just annoyingly rushed--give me a week!

mattkrause··on The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars
True—-but half of them forget to actually show up and many of the ones that do try to renegotiate the deal.
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