alex-moon

5 ms·

1.
by alex-moon 9d ago
A summary of a research article isn't a research article. Do you think newspapers are scholarly journals? Also, you do understand that anyone can just upload a document to SSRN, right? "Preprint" doesn't actually mean an
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by alex-moon 10d ago
That's it yeah. These kinds of pieces have been written for centuries. Surprise: people like what they are familiar with! There is no meaningful conclusion to draw from this. Look at Monet or Satie. In their own time? Grotesque, offens
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by alex-moon 10d ago
> Why are we commissioning styles that we say we dislike? There are several interesting possibilities. Like what? A shadowy cabal of liberal elites pulling the strings from the shadows? Stripe (who own Works In Progress) founder Patrick
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by alex-moon 11d ago
"The aesthetic is more or a side-effect of using cheaper resources and cheaper methods of production." This is a really interesting argument and very much not the story I've heard. Can you cite any sources for any of your sta
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by alex-moon 12d ago
I'm vibe coding a toy chatbot with OpenCode and GLM 5.3 - I'll open source it once it's meaningfully done (keeping the repo private for now until I am _so so_ sure there are no secrets in it!). This has been an exercise in le
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by alex-moon 15d ago
Benchmaxxing is the word you're reaching for here (though code golf is a perfect name for the symptom). At work I use Codex CLI with GPT 5.4 - it hits a sweet spot: capable enough that it'll do the right thing most of the time, bu
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The smallest edge AI device for local LLMs(tiiny.ai)
22 points by alex-moon 18d ago|18 comments
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by alex-moon 19d ago
"Rocket, coriander, cumin? Somehow I doubt the Babylonians had Mexican herbs and spices." Turns out I was wrong about where these come from! All three are native to the Mediterranean/Middle East and would certainly have been
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by alex-moon 24d ago
Oh right, yeah I agree. It's the kind of thing I can imagine the harness downloading in the background anyway (or instructing the user to do) at some point so I can see the sense in just skipping that bit. Kind of comforting they just
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by alex-moon 24d ago
Yes, that's what I mean - maybe that didn't come across cos I said "bloats". I work for a business that builds web apps for corporates - LibreOffice is bundled in most of the repos of ours that I've seen, a bit like
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by alex-moon 24d ago
Someone may need to explain to me what is wrong with this sorry. Is it because it bloats the app with functionality that some users will never use? I feel like that is fairly usual for productivity/business apps generally.
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by alex-moon 1mo ago
> A signal only carries information if it is expensive to fake. The male peacock’s mesmerizing tail of evil eyes works precisely because a sickly peacock cannot grow one. This is by far the most important insight in this write-up and I w
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by alex-moon 1mo ago
A real hacker doesn't hack the software system...
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by alex-moon 1mo ago
At the place where I was taught this lesson, it was "getting Hasselhoffed" - in short, you find photos of David Hasselhoff in Baywatch (wearing as little as possible, you see? Speedos were very much in in the 80s), and you set it
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by alex-moon 2mo ago
This is great but it would be useful to have some indication of cardinal directions - it is not clear to me which way I am facing.
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by alex-moon 2mo ago
I am struck by the resemblance between this logic and the logic behind drinking. I remember back in my 20s one of the devs would come over at the end of the day and go, "Coming to the pub?" The standard answer was, of course, &quo
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by alex-moon 2mo ago
"Machine learning architecture is second nature to us AI researchers, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the formulas for gradient descent and ReLU." "And softmax of course."
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by alex-moon 2mo ago
Hello Daniel! Do you have a landing page/portal for all these games so I can go through them one by one of a morning (a bit like the NYT games)?
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by alex-moon 2mo ago
What an excellent example of designing for the medium instead of trying to make the medium do something it's not good at! Your whole approach shows a real love, like a delicate respectfulness, that I think characterises early games and
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by alex-moon 2mo ago
I started building something like this myself (codename HFG - "Heroku for Groq") anticipating what we are indeed now seeing in ChatGPT viz. enshittification. The intention was to aim it at consumers and non-technical users who wan
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by alex-moon 2mo ago
Not only do I think you're right, I think put this way it seems obvious - I am almost heaving a sigh of relief having a better historical comparison than "the dot com bubble".
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by alex-moon 2mo ago
Brave on Android, same error.
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by alex-moon 2mo ago
Every point of friction, every struggle documented in minute detail, on a long and bumpy path to some kind of result. The stakes are zero, the whole project an act of pure expression. It is like a kind of oasis in a desert of articles about
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by alex-moon 3mo ago
Here in the UK there is an ongoing debate happening more or less behind the scenes around the language that should be used for families of patients nearing end of life. The standard question is: Should we "do everything possible"
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by alex-moon 4mo ago
"Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before age eighteen." Attributed to Einstein 1948. I realise this is the Internet, and it's not for me to convince you of anything. But you&#x27
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by alex-moon 4mo ago
Genuinely curious: what makes you think the moral panic around trans people is structurally different to the moral panic around gay people decades ago? All the arguments you've made here are more or less identical to arguments made to
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by alex-moon 4mo ago
This is what neutral language sounds like. It sounds to me like you'd prefer to pretend these people don't exist. I'd like to remind you that male homosexuality was illegal in UK as recently as 1967. Section 28 was in force u
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by alex-moon 4mo ago
Enjoy? No, but a lot of reading and writing is very functional, for communication purposes for business etc. (documentation is a good example). In these cases the important thing is that it's accurate.
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by alex-moon 5mo ago
I absolutely love post-Roman, pre-Norman British writing because it's so rare it gives the era a sense of mystery. This is of course the time when King Arthur is supposed to have lived. In the absence of contemporary records, the impul
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by alex-moon 5mo ago
As someone who has had to do some grub editing on the computer in an AirBnB because peripherals were all messed up on the guest account (no internet, no sound, you could only see a tiny part of the screen, I honestly don't know how the

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