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ordinarily

54 karma · joined May 8, 2025

Universal abstraction trying to piece it all back together.

zchry.org

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ordinarily··on Air Theremin – a browser theremin you play by waving at your webcam
Funny I put one of these on my personal site awhile ago. https://www.zchry.org/

I don't think it works as well as this one.

ordinarily··on Show HN: I built a faster, simpler Letterboxd alternative
It's very basic honestly, NextJS on Vercel + Tailwind 4. Wanted to keep it as simple as possible.
ordinarily··on AI is slowing down
I think most of Google's deep research projects were done in the pursuit of pure science, not monetization or productization. In hindsight sure, it looks like they missed an opportunity. But not everything needs to be about money.
ordinarily··on AI is slowing down
Google literally invented the boat (transformers) to be fair.
ordinarily··on Where the goblins came from
I mean, looking at the state of things right now in the US, I'd have to strongly disagree with you.
ordinarily··on Where the goblins came from
I just mean ontologically, it does not surprise nor terrify me that a machine built to simulate human output also simulates the worst of us.
ordinarily··on Where the goblins came from
Doesn't seem that surprising or terrifying to me. Humans come equipped with a lot more internal biases (learned in a fairly similar fashion), and they're usually a lot more resistant to getting rid of them.

The truly terrifying stuff never makes it out of the RLHF NDAs.

ordinarily··on ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena
The transients were pretty easy to replicate yes. The nuclear testing stuff was pretty inconclusive but they have a much better curated collection of plates that aren't available yet.
ordinarily··on ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena
Awhile ago I built my own ML pipeline to automate scanning these plates, it was very revealing. Beatriz and her team were very helpful.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04810

ordinarily··on Machine Learning Reveals Unknown Transient Phenomena in Historic Images
They're there before the tests though, and potentially more frequent around nuclear testing calendar days. The argument has never been "these only showed up after a nuclear test."
ordinarily··on Show HN: I built a tiny LLM to demystify how language models work
It's genuinely a great introduction to LLMs. I built my own awhile ago based off Milton's Paradise Lost: https://www.wvrk.org/works/milton
ordinarily··on [dead]
Nope, they're surprisingly hard to get ahold of. So I've resorted to being extremely noisy online.

Temporal accumulation: imagine you're observing a signal through a narrow window and you can only see a partial, noisy snapshot each time. "Temporal accumulation" is what happens when you let the observer remember previous snapshots and use them to improve its prediction of the next one. The persistence advantage P measures how much that memory helps, the difference in prediction error between an observer that accumulates across episodes and one that only uses the most recent snapshot.

For a black hole shadow (EHT), P ≈ 0: each snapshot already contains the full picture, memory adds nothing. For gravitational wave strain (LIGO), P is large and positive, the chirp evolves across snapshots, so memory is essential. The question the papers ask is: what determines how much memory helps? The answer turns out to be spectral entropy of the waveform, not mass.

ordinarily··on Scaling Karpathy's Autoresearch: What Happens When the Agent Gets a GPU Cluster
I've been doing this for about a month. I also have wildly complicated ML pipelines working similarly in parallel. When Karpathy's 'autoresearch' came out I was surprised by how novel it was treated.
ordinarily··on Hackers (1995) Animated Experience
Awhile I made something really dumb: https://www.warpstream.com/etc/terminal you can enter a 'gibson' command.
ordinarily··on Show HN: Engineering.fyi – Search across tech engineering blogs in one place
This is awesome! We got some really technical deep dives here https://www.warpstream.com/blog-category/engineering
ordinarily··on Thunderbird: Fluent Windows 11 Design
Horizontal space is still a premium regardless of monitor size when designing/building for responsive viewports. Vertical space is almost zero cost in terms of design constraints.

Even on large monitors you'd be surprised the number of people at 150% zoom with small windows opened instead of fullscreen.

ordinarily··on SVGs that feel like GIFs
I used SVG animations (and sites like https://www.svgator.com/) long before stuff like Rive or Lottie was commonplace. SVG animations are great.
ordinarily··on The Darwin Gödel Machine: AI that improves itself by rewriting its own code
I think the general tone is more of a warning than an endorsement.
ordinarily··on The Darwin Gödel Machine: AI that improves itself by rewriting its own code
The pieces are coming together quickly https://ai-2027.com/.
ordinarily··on Fleurs du Mal
I have a variety of early printings of this. My favorite being a 1931 edition illustrated by Major Felten, its beautiful.
ordinarily··on Bento gets a makeover
Was hoping you'd appreciate our efforts to retain your original quirky vision. We named the rice ball Geoff as a homage to you (intentionally spelled the silly way). (https://warpstreamlabs.github.io/bento/docs/about)/
ordinarily··on Bento gets a makeover
Lol I was actually looking at the Wiki earlier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bento_(database)
ordinarily··on Bento Gets a Makeover
Pretty good community, Slack has 600+ users.