d_burfoot

8 ms·

61.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
This is an excellent rule.
62.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
The key to the power of the LLM is that the training process can learn effectively from vast corpora of unlabelled text. Unfortunately, there is no comparably vast database of medical images. In order to "crack" radiology, the AI
63.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
There is a classic capitalist ploy, documented in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, where business owners vastly over-advertise the abundance and remuneration offered by a certain area of work. Then many hopeful people uproot themselves to
64.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
Note that you can make things even simpler than this: just use vanilla JS to compose HTML strings, and plug them into divs using innerHTML = "...". When your state changes due to user input, just rebuild the page using the new dat
65.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
This is one of a whole genre of HN-boosted blog posts that are basically saying to engineers: "you can't just write code, you actually have to do sales also". People who don't like sales think that they can go to a big c
66.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
I love Vanguard, and I would like see more companies like them. They offer a great service to millions of people, manage vast amounts of money, but the top leaders are not multi-billionaires.
67.
by d_burfoot 1y ago
It's weird that the mainstream TV execs think audiences want boring American accents. To me, one of the best things about the White Lotus (hit HBO show) is that it highlights a distinct array of accents (including Australian).
68.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
For me, the futility of GOFAI is obvious from simple introspection: is my own brain capable of chaining through vast networks of propositional statements? I wish! I can barely hold a 5 node decision tree in my head while playing a board gam
69.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
One of my pet theories about the software industry is that nobody really knows how to manage mature tech companies (YC and the startup world are pretty good at running young companies). One obvious and disastrous phenomenon in the tech worl
70.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
For questions like this, you need to tell the bot to search the web. > Hi, can you search the web and find out if Paul Newman has any alcohol problems? > Paul Newman, the acclaimed actor and philanthropist, had a well-documented fond
71.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
You should train a GPT on the raw data, and then figure out how to reuse the DNN for various other tasks you're interested in (e.g. one-shot learning, fine-tuning, etc). This data setting is exactly the situation that people faced in t
72.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
I view the current political situation as a historical rhyme of the bloody wars of religion in Europe that saw Catholics and Protestants murdering each by the millions. As with the C v P wars (or Sunni vs Shia in Islam, or Hindu vs Muslim i
73.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
I might be the only person in this camp, but I find the "standard" command line arguments style absolutely repulsive. I write tons of CL code, and I always use easy key=value notation (sometimes it's flag=true, which I consid
74.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
DNNs do not have special generalization powers. If anything, their generalization is likely weaker than more mathematically principled techniques like the SVM. If you try to train a DNN to solve a classical ML problem like the "Wine Qu
75.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
I don't know about this project specifically, but this kind of work is soon going to be tremendously valuable because of AI. Instead of engineers designing products directly, they will build a simulator, write an objective function, an
76.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
The Ukraine Today article seems to be a copy of this Forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/07/france-to-t... For additional context, here's an article from August about
77.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
> why terrified I'm terrified some colleague is going to vibe-code a product and use it to get promoted, then move to another team and dump the project on me to maintain.
78.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
1. Public debt 120% of GDP, higher than it has been since WWII [1] 2. I would support cuts in all of those categories. Pete Hegseth has ordered the DoD to begin budget cuts. [2] [1] https://www.capitalgroup.com/individual&#x
79.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
Blogging is like all other content creation: the vast majority of the viewership goes to the top 0.1% of creators. This is the same whether you're talking about YouTube, Twitter, podcasts, OnlyFans, scientific papers, traditional books
80.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
It's crazy to me that we're still using the same approach to banking, given that the banking system regularly blows up and drags the rest of the economy into a recession.
81.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
> The thrust of the book is that, in the figure of Socrates, we can find a way through that Tolstoy couldn’t It's ironic that she holds up Socrates, a man who was murdered by his own fellow citizens, as a figure who managed to &quo
82.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
The difficulty of this problem rests on the ambiguity of the phrase "exactly 6 months", which is going to depend totally on the precise business logic. But there's no reason to suppose that the requirements of the business lo
83.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
My personal rule for time processing: use the language-provided libraries for ONLY 2 operations: converting back and forth between a formatted time string with a time zone, and a Unix epoch timestamp. Perform all other time processing in yo
84.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
I'm also an American - I think this action makes us look weak and scared. Like our tech can't compete with Chinese tech. Strong nations act according to a set of principles, even if doing so is sometimes inconvenient or dangerous.
85.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
Warren Buffett says "Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful." But in the AI space, people are both greedy AND fearful!
86.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
I think to be complete this report needs to compare the levels of heavy metals found in the protein powders to levels found in regular foods like peas or brown rice, since that's where the metals are coming from. Is there some reason t
87.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
If you decide to go the low-tech/DIY route, I will shamelessly self-promote my platform WebWidgets.io. It basically allows you to upload SQLite file(s) and then talk to them in JavaScript from a web app. I built a finance tracker app f
88.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
I use Java extensively for my personal work and never use Gradle/Maven/Ant. I run Python scripts that marshal javac and java calls, it works great. I do cute tab completion tricks that examine the class layout and extend based on
89.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
It's worth observing that languages significantly over time, usually for the better. I remember writing Java when it was slow and had no generics. Now it's one of the fastest languages, and has not just generics but also (simple)
90.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
The problem with the "try a lot of projects, see what works" is that you lose out on exponential growth every time a project fails. A lot of people would be better off doing "intra-preneurship", meaning trying to innovat

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