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samuell

2,577 karma · joined May 13, 2013

Fascinated by Living Systems | Clin Microbio Bioinfo @ Karolinska | PhD http://pharmb.io | Reproducibility, #SciWorkflows | Curious: Genomic Algos, TEs etc

R&D: https://livingsystems.cc Deep think: https://livingsystems.substack.com

Married. Dad. Sinner saved by grace.

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samuell··on Compression is prediction
Thank you for sharing!

Small off topic thing: I recommend removing the bit in the URL from ?si=... and forward, unless you want Google to track every user who clicks this link to your share.

samuell··on Mojo 1.0
For me as a follower, my interest is all about a compiled and fast language with little complexity (vs Rust), and a highly readable and fluent syntax (vs Go).
samuell··on Rust SIMD on the GPU
Yes, this kind of thing seems to happen quite often. Popular posts spurring further posts on a theme.
samuell··on My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”
Garmin lets you connect your device as an USB storage device and manage everything manually though.

I do this to completely skip online uploading, and am keeping track of stats using a mashup of bash scripts and cli tools.

samuell··on Superlogical
Glad to hear if it meets your needs!
samuell··on Superlogical
Pardon the plug, but I thought I'd point out that I think SciCommander [1], or the ideas behind it, could be very relevant for this stack.

It does capture a provenance graph for any ad-hoc shell commands executed in the shell mode, or if prepended by `sci run`, by tracing all new files created from commands, and creating an accompanying json file for every output with metadata, which can later be assembled into a graph specific to any output file, using the `sci tohtml` or `sci toshell` commands (producing an HTML report with an SVG graph, or a reproducing shell script, respecively).

I'm quite bullish of the possibilities with this approach.

And, this was in fact also born out of the thinking to "rip apart" workflow tools, and build them up again using small, well-defined tools that do one thing well.

[1] https://github.com/samuell/scicommander

samuell··on Why do we think we understand the world more than we actually do?
I don't know ... I actually think I'm quite aware of a lot of how complicated many things can be.

Perhaps it is because I was really curious as a kid about how things work, peeked into things, really tried to understand how it works, and figured it was far from easy.

I also tried to draw bikes, and figured you really have to think it through quite hard the first times, lol.

samuell··on Why do we think we understand the world more than we actually do?
I think it is simply designed that way.

In my experience sparks are generally generated when quite small metal surfaces get in contact at high speeds, meaning they can generate a lot of friction in a very small point, and thus not have enough braking effect despite the local friction in one small point (think rail wheels squeeking in curves).

Brakes OTOH are designed to spread out the friction on a somewhat larger area, which allows more material to take up the friction and the heat, and spread it around.

I know brakes can get extremely hot too though, and after a really hard braking you might have to worry about deformed brakes sometimes.

Race cars tend to have really large breaks (and brake pads) for this reason.

samuell··on Back to Kagi
I'll second the rec for Brave search. Been a happy user for at least 1-2 years now. Its AI summaries are great and, I have the feeling it works a little better than DuckDuckGo for some reason.
samuell··on The Future Worth Building Is Human
This was/is not a controlled scientific experiment. It is a blog post.
samuell··on The Future Worth Building Is Human
Well, I was referring to "value" here in a very pragmatic sense, in terms of the ability to come with "novel" thoughts and ideas.

And I argue that the notion of AI models having overtaken the human mind in practically all areas, is vastly inaccurate.

I could back it up with a number of references of course, but I think this is already quite well known and accepted by most people with some insight into the field.

samuell··on The Future Worth Building Is Human
While I understand this is a PR talk for a startup, I think the text itself contains a number of interesting observations.

Regarding the idea of distributed models communicating with each other, I have also been thinking (and writing [1]) along those lines, where I see that the data amounts needed to fully digitalize ourselves and our society requires far too much storage if just serialized (limited by bandwidth if nothing else), while smart, updateable models are actually a much better storage medium for such information, as it can communicate only the important bits (any new information) on a higher level, with each other.

The other observation here that rings bells for me is how I think lessons from trying to develop intelligent systems should upvalue the human mind rather than devalue it, as we start to treat it less like an ad-hoc thing, and more like the finely tuned machine it is, which also benefits greatly from optimizing what data we feed it with, the architecture of solution strategies etc. All of which is an area where humans and machines can do wonders together [2].

[1] https://livingsystems.substack.com/p/the-future-of-data-less...

[2] https://livingsystems.substack.com/p/ai-progress-should-upgr...

samuell··on Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
> Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering

While this may be slightly overstated, my take on this is that AI progress should have us upgrade our view of the human brain rather than the opposite.

Wrote about it the other day:

https://livingsystems.substack.com/p/ai-progress-should-upgr...

samuell··on Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig
As much as I'm put away by the dependency horror I've seen in many Rust projects, this is an interesting observation.
samuell··on TypeScript 7
Steve Francia (author of Hugo and a bunch of other top Go projects) wrote up some thoughts of Go's fit in the agentic era:

https://spf13.com/p/go-the-agentic-language/

samuell··on In Praise of Observational Evidence
Quite thought-provoking, and connecting it to a related field it seems the (relative) success of LLMs and the likes are indications that enough data can at least learn you something without always needing to interfere with the world first(?)
samuell··on How to sequence your own DNA at home
Is this the same guy behind https://iwantosequencemygenomeathome.com/ ?

[Edit: Apparently no. That link is by Seth Howes, who also shared the OP post though: https://x.com/SethSHowes/status/2074231119730430203 ]

samuell··on Open Source Low Tech
As someone who has spent some time in sub-saharan Africa, I can tell you that there is lots that can be done if just seeing the possibilities.

Not everyone everywhere are "engineering oriented", and having people with the skills and eye for practical solutions based on available materials, can help tons, and also open up people's imagination for what can be done.

In fact, this goes for northern Europe too, just that more people can manage without home-built solutions and can "buy away the problem" here.

Also, people where immensely thankful e.g. when my quite clever and crafty father managed to repair a water tank tower that'd been broken for months and years, by sourcing some local material, coming up with a repair design, and having local welders create it, etc etc.

samuell··on Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory
Glad to see more languages adopt true goroutines [edit: lightweight threads or fibers] with M:N scheduling. Surprised more haven't. Among compiled language I'm only aware of Go and Crystal off the top of my mind.
samuell··on Qualcomm to Acquire Modular
No, this was pure speculation based on what seems like a popular view on where Mojo ended up, where the initial Python-focus don't seem to help it that much anymore.
samuell··on Qualcomm to Acquire Modular
As a meta comment, I'm surprised such a news is not reaching the frontpage already.
samuell··on Qualcomm to Acquire Modular
Maybe Chris was a little unhappy about where Mojo ended up, and sees this as an opportunity to start anew on a properly designed language from scratch :D
samuell··on Qualcomm to Acquire Modular
I'm actually mostly worried about the future of Mojo at this time.

Though hopefully it will be fully released open source still, but I feel there are question marks around whether it will be a priority to continue to develop by Qualcomm, or if they are mainly interested in the AI compute stack?

Time will tell I guess, but a lot feels to be up in the air.

samuell··on Clojure Hosted on Go
Found this previous thread about Lisette: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646843
samuell··on DaVinci Resolve 21
I'll second looking at KdenLive.

You might want to stay away from very recent major versions for stability, but it is a very capable editor that is also much more robust and performant than openshot.

I haven't compared with Blender VSE though.

samuell··on DaVinci Resolve 21
Wanted to expand on the animation part, so will check this up for sure, thank you.
samuell··on DaVinci Resolve 21
Great to hear.
samuell··on DaVinci Resolve 21
Stability sounds interesting. While KdenLive has worked OKish for me, certain versions have broken my projects, and there are some long-standing bugs, like subtitles disappearing if I do a specific operation in the wrong moment. While the latter is fixed by a simple Ctrl+Z it is giving me second thoughts about using this for really large projects.
samuell··on DaVinci Resolve 21
For people using Resolve, would you recommend someone already quite well-versed in KDenLive to switch, for some non-profit work on cutting together educational content with some animations, some talks etc?

Will it allow me to drastically improve my workflow (save time for some tedious tasks), increase quality of the outputs etc?

samuell··on Zig: Build System Reworked
My main issue with this is I expect Mojo to become the go to tinkering language for me.
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