Earw0rm

16 ms·

211.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
From a system optimisation perspective, SSTs solved the wrong problem. Want to save people time flying? Solve the grotesque inefficiency pit that is airport transit and check-in. Like, I'm sorry, STILL no high speed, direct to terminal
212.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
There are sound math reasons for skyscrapers topping out, mostly due to elevator capacity and the inability to effectively get people in and out of the floorspace as you go past a few hundred ft. There's no construction engineering rea
213.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
There's different ways of approaching it which have different performance consequences. Which is why accelerated libraries are common, but if you want accelerated primitives, you kinda have to roll your own.
214.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
Good sleep and frequent exercise are both amazing. That said, without a good to excellent diet or supplements, exercise can deplete things which in turn compromises sleep and recovery. How do I know? My sleep quality was shot to shit. Tried
215.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
No. Even with power tools, construction and joinery are physical work and require strength and skill. What is new is that you'll need the wisdom to figure out when the tool can do the whole job, and where you need to intervene and supe
216.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
Except that FB/Twitter are rotting platforms. I don't pretend that freelance web dev is a premium gig, but setting up Wordpress sites for local flower shops etc. shouldn't require a higher level of education/sophisticati
217.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
It's not cut and dried in that way ("certain output"), in many models, any one piece of training data can influence any number of weights and potential outputs, and it's difficult or impossible to say which output was in
218.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
Copyright law has never clearly and adequately defined the boundary between copying and measuring. If I measure the length of a song? Not copyright infringement. If I take even a very short sequence of PCM samples, copyright infringement. B
219.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
In a strict reading, the tool itself is a copyright violation. In that an LLM is the code and its weights, and the weights contain a lossy compressed copy of a copyrighted work. Now you might say that's an overly rigid reading of cop
220.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
Optimise is never a neutral word. You always optimise FOR something at the expense of something. And that can, and frequently should, be lean resource consumption, but it can come at a price. Which might be one or more of: Accessibility. Fu
221.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
Comparing it to machine code on CD/DVD might make more sense then. Machine code where every line has been hand-optimised by nature's hackers over 500 million years. And in that context, hundreds of MBs is a heck of a lot of comple
222.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
The best engineers and craftsmen - even juniors - understand which work is core to the craft and the end result, and which is peripheral. Unless you're hyper-specialised within a large organisation, you can't bring the same degree
223.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
Non-explicable? It's deterministic in that (input A, state B) always produces output C. But it can't generally be reasoned about, in terms of how much change to A will produce C+1, nor can you directly apply mechanical reasoning t
224.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
It might affect agricultural land prices. Indeed that's at the heart of the farming IHT controversy (farming land is effectively overpriced relative to its business or utility value, because of its previously far too generous IHT treat
225.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
The super rich aren't the problem. 200 families is too few to have any meaningful effect on the housing market. By all means tax them til their eyes bleed, but it'll mostly just make people feel better rather than being a useful c
226.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
Wealth has moved from public to private, and consumer spending from high streets to out-of-town shopping centres and Amazon, Deliveroo etc. Leaving a badly depleted public sphere.
227.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
You can walk out of Canary Wharf, within a mile or two you'll see much the same. Not that the Knightsbridge set ever do. Heck, even from Knightsbridge itself you don't have to go that far. North End Road is what, two, three miles?
228.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
Coding != software engineering. LLMs are impressively good at automating small chunks of code generation, and can probably be made even more effective at it with CoT, agents and so on (adversarial LLMs generating code and writing unit tests
229.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
"Forecasters" are grifters preying on naive business types who are somehow unaware that an exponential and the bottom half of a sigmoid look very much like one another.
230.
by Earw0rm 1y ago
Vast pools of /what/ though? It seems, at present, that energy is more of a constraint on civilization than matter. With unlimited cheap energy, there's enough material to do most anything we might reasonably want. It's
231.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Don't the charging ports already have to do that?
232.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Those railways were built early on in urbanisation. Do you honestly think private enterprise could raise the financial and political capital to build a new regional rail line through a major city like London or Manchester?
233.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
That and having a dynamic housing market; flexibility in other services e.g. schools, so that people can move where work is, and move somewhere else when they're not working; and building mixed-use neighbourhoods that have schools, doc
234.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
The energy dynamics will be closer to a heavy ebike or light motorcycle. 500-600 watts is plenty for moving along at 30-40mph, and with such a light bodyshell, you don't want to be going a lot faster than that. Standard automobiles are
235.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Nice studio apartments a short & cheap travel time from well-paying professional work might be. It can, at the same time, be true that there is manipulation and exploitation going on at the other end of the market.
236.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Workplaces tend to agglomerate, for all sorts of reasons. Biking distance is, what, five miles? Ten? Economics & geometry mean it's challenging to provide enough of this that the median family can afford it. It's quite practic
237.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Yes, that's broadly a good thing which tilts the playing field in favour of locating productive people close to their work. Whether it's possible to set it at a level strong enough to produce the right "nudge" without cr
238.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Changes in fashion and lifestyle can shift demand towards types of housing that are more difficult to fulfil, supply-wise. Essentially if the young and upwardly mobile want suburban sprawl, it's easy to build more of it until the price
239.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
It's a positional good, in effect there can never be "enough" supply. Short of a socialist/communist system, people will always compete for the best, using whatever resources they can bring to bear.
240.
by Earw0rm 2y ago
Really good public transport does, because you're not constrained by having to return to your personal vehicle at the end of whatever you're doing, you're not constrained by its operational or mechanical limits (think: family

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