billti

7 ms·

31.
by billti 1y ago
If it’s predicting a next token to maximize scores against a training/test set, naively, wouldn’t that be expected? I would imagine very little of the training data consists of a question followed by an answer of “I don’t know”, thus m
32.
by billti 2y ago
I did see a talk where someone was making the case that if the U.S. depends heavily on China for steel, and Taiwan for chips, then if China invades Taiwan the U.S. would very quickly be unable to wage a war with both supplies cut off. So th
33.
by billti 2y ago
I've never understood why countries like the EU pass strict environment and labor laws and then DONT place some kind of tariff or tax on countries without those restrictions. Not only to offset making your own market less able to compe
34.
by billti 2y ago
Having recently gotten into quantum and listening to a lot of audiobooks on the history of it, that’s one of biggest takeaways for me. So many major advances in theory that languished for years because of the politics of the day of the pers
35.
by billti 2y ago
The sound designer goes over their use of this type of music in this excellent podcast. You'd really enjoy it. (Available Apple Podcasts, which is where I listened to it, but linking directly here). The next one about the voices is exc
36.
by billti 2y ago
I work on the quantum developer tools team at Microsoft. We put a lot of work into what we call the Quantum Katas to learn the basics via coding - https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-katas Our VS Cod
37.
by billti 2y ago
If you know CUDA, then I assume you know a bit already about GPUs and the major concepts. There’s just minor differences and different terminology for things like “warps” etc. With that base, I’ve found their docs decent enough, especially
38.
by billti 2y ago
Sorry for the delay in replying... What do you hope to be doing in 5 years? Architecting quantum solutions? Reselling or consulting on cloud solutions? Building quantum applications? I think the quantum space will have quite a bit of progre
39.
by billti 2y ago
I gave a plug for this yesterday, but if you want to try the Quantum Katas from Azure Quantum, it runs in the browser and covers this stuff. See lesson 3 for linear algebra. < https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools
40.
by billti 2y ago
If you're a software engineer, then the Quantum Katas might fit your learning style. The exercises use Q#, which is quantum specific programming language. https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-kata
41.
by billti 2y ago
I've been playing around with some low-level GPU stuff lately and trying to port some of my CPU-bound matrix multiplication. The challenge has been that in the space I work in (quantum) the matrices are of complex numbers, and for a ce
42.
by billti 2y ago
It's funny to think back now that JSX had such a strong negative reaction on launch. That's the one thing from React I love - having a declarative and strongly typed markup for HTML in my JS/TS code. I think React peaked with
43.
by billti 2y ago
Why do companies hire junior devs? You still want a senior to review the PRs before they merge into the product right? But the net benefit is still there.
44.
by billti 2y ago
I don't think they had Space Grey on the M3 models either. That was initially my preference, but I went with the Black and quite like it.
45.
by billti 2y ago
Multiplying any two complex numbers 'a' and 'b' gives you a complex number z whose magnitude is the magnitude of 'a' times the magnitude of 'b' (that's covered in the article). I always thing of
46.
by billti 2y ago
> Apple did not help them design the CPU/Architecture I believe they had a big hand in ARM64. Though best reference I can find right now is this very site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368489
47.
by billti 2y ago
I’m no physicist/biologist, but I always find it odd when they look for water on other planets to see “if life could exist”. Sure, maybe that’s a requirement for the type of life we on earth know about, but I don’t see why other elemen
48.
by billti 2y ago
ARM64 has a 32-bit word, even though the native pointer size and general register size is 64 bits. To access just the lower 32 bits of a register Xn you refer to it as Wn.
49.
by billti 2y ago
I lived in Australia for quite a while. It's a terrible example of what can happen. There was recently a very good BBC article on it and the connection between sports, gambling, and marketing: https://www.bbc.com/news&#
50.
by billti 2y ago
Yeah, I’ve never got the “it’s stealth layoffs” or “because we need to use the offices we pay for” or “for the tax breaks” arguments. The math just doesn’t work out. Staff are such a huge part of costs, and the difference between your good
51.
by billti 2y ago
> Who are you to tell neurodivergent employees to suffer? I found this line telling. I’m wondering if the Hacker News crowd is biased towards the “hacker” stereotype - the socially awkward coder who likes to be left alone and crank out l
52.
by billti 2y ago
Wow. I thought Reuters was an upper tier publisher. That is totally unreadable on my iPhone. The page is jumping all over the place as I try to scroll.
53.
by billti 2y ago
In that vein, posting comments to hackers news is just an auto-complete, or “what should the next token be” problem, right? :-) Yet here we all are, reading the comments, looking for insights, knowledge, and entertainment.
54.
by billti 2y ago
> was foolishly violating the safety protocols by using a screwdriver to hold the two halves of the sphere apart. When the screwdriver slipped, the core dropped to form a critical mass I always thought the material had to be forced toget
55.
by billti 2y ago
The hours I spent chasing down the edge cases with inline html! There’s some real nuance to the spec there. You need inline html fairly often for anything non-trivial, and some of the rules certainly aren’t intuitive or easy to remember. Th
56.
by billti 2y ago
I shudder to think of my kids doing the stuff I did as a kid, and sometimes wonder what angel was looking over me that I made it to adulthood. I don’t worry at all about my 8yo boy however, as he’s very cautious and risk averse. My 6yo girl
57.
by billti 2y ago
And likewise, it made for a front page news story on the BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp66xdxj0l3o
58.
by billti 2y ago
A click bait headline, but watching the video and what he said, everything seems somewhat reasonable. If the experts don’t agree on risks, then clearly there’s a non-zero chance. On some tasks, computing machines passed us by a while ago. I
59.
by billti 2y ago
I use TypeScript and esbuild for all my stuff. Even then, I often spend a crazy amount of time getting modules working. Between the various TypeScript module options and various package.json module options (and various code patterns used),
60.
Microsoft and Quantinuum demonstrate the most reliable logical qubits on record(blogs.microsoft.com)
4 points by billti 3y ago|1 comments

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