d_burfoot

6 ms·

31.
by d_burfoot 9mo ago
Kolmogorov Complexity is only defined up to a constant, which represents Turing machine translation length.
32.
by d_burfoot 9mo ago
Given SQLite's amazing battery of test code, it seems like it would be valuable, illuminating, and not too difficult to write a test implementation in Rust. Can you get the Rust implementation to pass the test suite? Either answer to t
33.
by d_burfoot 9mo ago
I really want to use Claude Code on the phone or tablet, with voice commands only, and perhaps a few simple approval thumb actions. I don't want to type out complex prompt information on a virtual keyboard. I tried setting this up with
34.
by d_burfoot 10mo ago
When I was a physics student, there were four forces: strong, weak, EM, and gravity. That picture seemed neat and clean. Strong kept the nucleus together, EM kept molecules and atoms together (or broke them apart), gravity kept astronomical
35.
by d_burfoot 10mo ago
Second sentence of abstract: > Leave rates are lower in the life sciences and higher in AI and quantum science but overall have been stable for decades The US has been completely dominant in technology innovation for the last several dec
36.
by d_burfoot 10mo ago
Do quant traders use Mathematica? I would guess this would be a great use case for a tool that lots of people love. Pretty language, huge boatload of built-in tools, high powered mathematics, great visualization capabilities. Quant firms s
37.
by d_burfoot 11mo ago
Hypothesis C: failure of human memory. A human read Stephenson's book(s) 20 years ago, remembers that the endings were a bit unsatisfying. The same human also read some other book many years ago, which ends mid-sentence. In that person
38.
by d_burfoot 11mo ago
> AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence. They are the wet dream of capitalists and fascists. Persuasion tip: if you write comments like this, you are going to immediately alienate a large
39.
by d_burfoot 11mo ago
Wait a minute - the attackers were using the API to ask Claude for ways to run a cybercampaign, and it was only defeated because Anthropic was able to detect the malicious queries? What would have happened if they were using an open-source
40.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
I think AWS should use, and provide as an offering to big customers, a Chaos Monkey tool that randomly brings down specific services in specific AZs. Example: DynamoDB is down in us-east-1b. IAM is down in us-west-2a. Other AWS services sho
41.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
A big chunk, perhaps the majority, of the "Accidents" are from cars. Another infographic I observed recently showed that, for children, the risk of death due to traffic accidents was greater than all other risks combined . People
42.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
Looks good to me. I use a tab-completion trick where the tab-completer tool calls the script I'm about to invoke with special arguments, and the script reflects on itself and responds with possible completions. But because of slow impo
43.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
To me the reason ARC-AGI puzzles are difficult for LLMs and possible for humans is that they are expressed in a format for which humans have powerful preprocessing capabilities. Imagine the puzzle layouts were expressed in JSON instead of a
44.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
> LLM-powered NPCs is one thing I'm most excited about in the future of gaming Incoming new type of health crisis: video game addiction coupled with LLM-induced psychosis. Dudes spending 12 hours a day farming gold in a MMORPG while
45.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
There's a big issue with a lot of thinking about these valuations, which is that LLM inference does not need the 5-nines of uptime guarantees that cloud datacenters provide. You are going to see small business investors around the worl
46.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
Any stats on HN downtime over the years? I remember one or two outages in the last decade or so, but I would guess the uptime is about 99.99%.
47.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
I love this model of software development, which I think of as "artisanal", as opposed to open-source or enterprise. A small team, maybe just one person, who invests deep effort into a product that does one thing very well.
48.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
My wife loves the train (hates driving) and so this would be quite interesting to us. But I've heard too many Amtrak horror stories, like the one about how the train broke down about ten miles away from her destination, and they wouldn
49.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
The problem with productivity apps is that one size does not fit all. Everyone has radically different goals, constraints, interests, and workflows. Many people would benefit from having a "living" app that is personalized to thei
50.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
Does the ERP allow you API access, or do you need to do CSV upload/download?
51.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
#1 Rule of Investing: you can't beat the market, but you can beat the tax man
52.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
This is the kind of thing that could have been a decent AI startup - hire some education PhDs, make some deals with school systems, etc. In the old days of desktop computing, a lot of projects were never started because if you got big enoug
53.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
For people who think classes are terrible, can you explain how you would implement the functionality associated with a Pandas DataFrame, without using classes? Did the Pandas developers simply get it wrong when choosing how to build this?
54.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
For those who don't know about Plato's Theory of Forms, the remarkable empirical fact is that all humans learn roughly the same concepts representing words like "dog", "house", "person", "boat&qu
55.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
This is a good idea. I think email is poised to become a more influential user interface tool, due to the advent of LLMs.
56.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
I feel a very deep, apparently irrational reluctance to throw away objects I no longer need, especially if those objects are well-crafted. I feel that doing so is disrespectful of the love and effort the object's creator invested in th
57.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
Your own link, to the BPP Wiki page, says: > In 2007, the BPP initiated Inflación Verdadera, a project that provided a daily inflation gauge for Argentina, serving as an alternative to the official consumer price index which was manipula
58.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
Note that the government has huge incentives to downplay the inflation rate. Over the time period of the graph, the price of gold went up by about 100x; I would consider that a more accurate estimate of inflation than the 18x number implied
59.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
It's a radical change in human/computer interface. Now, for many applications, it is much better to present the user with a simple chat window and allow them to type natural language into it, rather than ask them to learn a comple
60.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
I feel like we are due for a revolution in computer interface design that will free us from our desks. I want to be able to do work while walking on the bike trail or sitting in a lounge chair by the pool. All the core concepts of GUI desig

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