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schaefer

1,712 karma · joined December 16, 2012

Hi friends,

I enjoy Rock Climbing, Go, Software Engineering, and Buddhism.

dilapidated homepage: https://slow.camp

submissionscomments
schaefer··on The Real Luxuries In Life
Go on a ten day meditation retreat.

Time will hit the breaks, hard.

schaefer··on GPT-6 Astra
Right?

Between $18k-40k to run a benchmark.

schaefer··on A Selection of Los Alamos Rolodex Business Cards
Somewhere around 2004 I had an experience at the black hole that still amuses me.

I was digging through the store when I found a full pallet of computer punch cards. As a computer science undergrad, I thought, “ how cool, I want a bunch to use as bookmarks, or whatever”.

I went to haggle with Ed, and he outright refused to sell me any. He said he wouldn’t break up the pallet. I had to buy all or none…

schaefer··on Borges Labyrinth in Venice reopens to the public
That’s awesome. I’ve seen the book around, but didn’t know the connection to the works of Borges.
schaefer··on A practical guide to running 8x RTX PRO 6000's
can you point to a write up that discusses what you're talking about?

because I would read it.

schaefer··on A practical guide to running 8x RTX PRO 6000's
> attempt at ... irony

For the record, I did laugh, I just didn't type it out.

> how do you feel about paying 5% on every token's cost to stripe?

Life is compromise. In a perfect world, I'd love to buy a linux native system comparable to the Mac Studio that could run something in the ballpark of Deepseek V4 flash "fast" at home.

Not only does that not exist, but even if it did I couldn't justify the cost. Between work and home my annual token spend is maybe 3k.

So... paying a 5% fee on a service that allows me to not shell out 10k on hardware at home still seems like a pretty sweet deal.

--

Plus, I still am learning a ton and playing lots. It's hard to imagine anything beating openrouter for that. So much exposure to all the latest LLMs...

schaefer··on A practical guide to running 8x RTX PRO 6000's
what I have is a DGX Spark to play and learn on, and an OpenRouter account for actual work.

I mostly rent my tokens.

schaefer··on A practical guide to running 8x RTX PRO 6000's
> We currently have 14x nodes of CG480-S6053 ready to ship.

Oh, okay, so this is an ad.

I do still think it's well written and interesting... But if anything, it's just making me more curious about the newest generation of M5 Ultra. (and less and less interested in PCI-E Gen 5 anything)

schaefer··on Borges Labyrinth in Venice reopens to the public
I love this book so much (Labyrinths, by Borges).

I once calculated the number of books in The Library of Bable, and had to try a number of numerical libraries to do so. one after another they kept puking on the large integers.

I also think of "the secret miracle" often.

schaefer··on UC Berkeley indefinitely suspends international student work authorizations
As someone that went to community college...

I'm pretty sure that the kids getting admitted to Berkeley actually are the best and the brightest. we should absolutely be welcoming them.

what are we even doing here?

schaefer··on Processing in Memory: DRAM Is About to Do Math
I don’t think he was asking you to twist the knife.
schaefer··on Embedded AI
> honest question, how is [reading a book] better than posting toc on chatgpt and asking it to explain it to you

Since you're currently asking humans to explain this to you and not LLMs, you've already got your answer.

schaefer··on Rethinking Database Programming
Interesting! I ordered a copy of your book about Datalevin. I'll give it a try - even though I don't know Clojure.

Congratulations on release 1.0.0, and thank you for your contributions to open source.

schaefer··on Watching TikTok and Instagram deactivates the cognitive control network: Study
Plus those shorts are out of order. So it’s gotta take more effort to piece the plot back together, right?

:)

schaefer··on Rethinking Database Programming
I'm curious if you've personally used datalog in any projects. I've written some prolog, but haven't ever worked with datalog.

Minigraph looks promising for some introductory goofing around.

schaefer··on Rethinking Database Programming
> …can't help but notice how sql is coming from the c-Era of programming. Having … more modern ways to express my queries would be great to improve correctness …

SQL is based in pure mathematics: set theory, relational algebra.

The process of applying mathematical rigor to your database design to prove correctness is referred to as normalization.

I don’t mind criticisms like “It’s old, yuck”, but criticisms like “it’s not correct” mean you haven’t studied or applied the mathematical underpinnings of sql.

schaefer··on GLM-5.3: Frontier coding with emergent cyber capabilities
I feel the same, which is why I only use these tools in a docker container. Because life is compromise.
schaefer··on Ultraviolet Bird Photography
> reminds me of...

As long as we are already on a tangent about rods, cones, and visual perception: one of my favorite fact is that the occasional genetic mutation that creates color blindness in men sometimes leaves a woman with "tetrachromacy". Four sets of rods and cones which increases color perception from some one-million colors to one-hundred million colors.

schaefer··on Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models
> If it's context dependent is it really introspection?

When people get lost in a great movie or a great video game, we call it immersion. We say it’s the mark of a great work of art.

When people get lost in the perfect challenge, like running a race at the edge off their ability, or doing work that’s the perfect amount of challenging, we call it flow.

—

It’s common knowledge that introspection in people is context dependent.

schaefer··on London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces
I'm going to pretend you're talking about The Doors of Perception. Even though you are obviously talking about Brave New World.
schaefer··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
Kagi search today is better than Google search ever was.

And it’s clear that Google’s Ad model ultimately created a priority inversion. The advertisers became the customer.

I am so glad Kagi came along with a business model that is actually working.

schaefer··on A physicist rigged his pet hamster’s wheel to upload to Strava
That’s amazing, nice work Dad.

Do you also play the approach music when her power output reaches 1.21 Gigawatts?

schaefer··on I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me
Suspiciously close to the birth of the modern internet?
schaefer··on Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed
What?

If copy and paste is disabled in my default browser that would be something like 80% of my total of my total use cases for the clipboard in the first place.

schaefer··on Robotics development made dead simple (open source)
This is just an elaborate mailing list sign up page.

the splash page at https://peppy.bot says chat to get started. no matter what you type you get a popup that says Coming Soon - sign up to our e-mail list.

schaefer··on It's getting harder to focus every day
My wireless router runs OpenWRT, one day after a particularly embarrassing YouTube binge, I turned on the adblock plugin on my router and configured it to block YouTube as an ad.

It’s turned out to be the best thing I’ve done for myself in a long, long time.

schaefer··on Introducing selfie for sign-in: a new way to access your Google Account
If only they wouldn't be evil... ugh.
schaefer··on Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat tour of grace cathedral, San Francisco
absolutely beautiful. I'd love to learn this process and attempt to capture a local rock climbing route.

anything you write about the process, or how you learned are very welcome.

schaefer··on Qwen 3.8 Max Preview
I flip flop between qwen 3.6 27b and qwen 3.6 35b 4b active.

But there’s also the quantization of DeepSeek v4 flash called dwarfstar

schaefer··on Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds
From TFA:

> In this last Bikeshed in acmqueue, I will ponder the far future of free and open source software (FOSS), hoping to upset so many readers that...

> During the past couple of decades, rampant neoliberalism and “globalism” allowed...

And I’m out. I guess congratulations to the author. Mission accomplished.

But I’m disappointed that the article took a turn towards partisan politics.

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