ekidd

21 ms·

211.
by ekidd 2y ago
This is all broadly true, historically. Automating jobs mostly results in creating more jobs elsewhere. But let's assume you have true, fully general AI. Further assume that it can do human-level cognition for $2/hour, and it&#x27
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by ekidd 2y ago
Yes, Chomsky's earlier positions include the idea that recursive natural grammars cannot be learnt by machines because of the "poverty of the stimulus." But this result is only true if you ignore probabilistic grammars. (See
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by ekidd 2y ago
> For example spaceships swarming with low skill level crew members that swab the decks and replace air filters. This is largely a function of what science fiction you read. Military SF is basically about retelling Horatio Hornblower s
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by ekidd 2y ago
I've seen recent interesting papers on reasoning models with costs from US$6 to US$4,5000. The problem is that you need a bunch of fast RAM for efficient training. But you can do some limited fine-tuning (Q-LoRA, etc) of models up to 1
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by ekidd 2y ago
Once the problem gets narrow enough, do you risk training a model that reinvents a straightforward classic algorithm at far higher cost?
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by ekidd 2y ago
I've been experimenting with vlm-run (plus custom form definitions), and it works surprisingly well with Gemini 2.0 Flash. Costs, as I understand, are also quite low for Gemini. You'll have best results with simple to medium-compl
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by ekidd 2y ago
"Pick & place" is a term for a kind of robot that can pick up scattered items from a conveyor belt and arrange them in a regular fashion. The really fast multi-arm versions can be hypnotic to watch. You can see an example at 1
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by ekidd 2y ago
This model can't code at all. It does high school math homework, plus maybe some easy physics. And it does them surprisingly well. Outside of that, it fails every test prompt in my set. It's a pure specialist model.
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by ekidd 2y ago
> On the other hand, I do know that it's a widespread feeling among salespeople, that a person who interacts with them, without buying anything, is stealing from them. It's less this, and more that some customers have no busi
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by ekidd 2y ago
> heqlthcare is breaking under the load. I live in a part of the US with high average incomes and an absolutely excellent hospital system. And it's breaking, too. If you go to the ER and you're not literally bleeding to death
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by ekidd 2y ago
Ed also uses "?" for "Are you sure?" If you're sure, you can type the last command a second time to confirm. The story goes that ed was designed for running over a slow remote connection where output was printed o
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by ekidd 2y ago
The exact current rules are here: https://vtfishandwildlife.com/learn-more/landowner-resources... Basically, you have two options: A 500 foot "safety zone" around your house, which is easy (though not automat
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by ekidd 2y ago
Full disclosure: I left the company that became iRobot well before the Roomba, so I have zero insider knowledge. But if you're familiar with Rod Brooks' public work on the "subsumption architecture", the Roomba algorithm
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by ekidd 2y ago
I don't actually think there's an allusion to trespassing here. The narrator is passing through someone's woodlot far from the village, which is still accepted behavior in large portions of northern New England. Much of Frost
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by ekidd 2y ago
Even 30 years ago, if you had a clear sky in countryside, you could see the occasional satellite. Very tiny, much tinier than airplane lights, and surprisingly fast. Today, there are a lot more. And of course there have always been plenty o
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by ekidd 2y ago
Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace is an excellent book. I picked it up ages ago, and rather liked it. A lot of writing advice out there is... weird. There seem to be a couple different varieties. One is "first year university st
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by ekidd 2y ago
Sure! One fantastic starting point is Lisp in Small Pieces , which shows you how to build multiple different Lisp interpreters, and then several increasingly fancy Lisp compilers. The trick with a macro-assembler that uses Lisp macros to
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by ekidd 2y ago
Forth really is one of easiest languages to build up from bare metal, piece by piece. And when you get it working, sure, it's arguably weird, but it's far better than where you started. My personal inclination is to make the lon
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by ekidd 2y ago
The fundamental challenge with the trades is that some of them are extremely hard on your body. I know roofers who've taken multi-story falls and gotten put back together with steel pins. Plumbers often have issues with their knees or
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by ekidd 2y ago
There was a well-known trick in MacOS development in the 90s. You couldn't always avoid relying on undocumented behavior. The docs were incomplete and occasionally vague. What you could do was try to rely on the same undocumented b
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by ekidd 2y ago
In the northeastern US and eastern Canada, pine, oak and maple are definitely renewable resources. Pine is easier and quicker than the local hardwoods, to be fair. Using renewable wood for flooring is a carbon sink for the lifetime of the b
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by ekidd 2y ago
Solid oak was still surprisingly cheap as late as 2018. We picked up a bedroom's worth for $300 or so, and it will last as long the house stands. The installation is more expensive than the material. I know of at least one New England
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by ekidd 2y ago
Being aware of everything you're running on AWS is trivial when it's all on the EC2 dashboard, and you create everything by hand or using Terraform. Many of these new AWS-provided stacks, however, seem to create stuff all over you
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by ekidd 2y ago
My fundamental objection here it that it is recursive. The non-recursive hyperoperators all have nice clean mathematical definitions. The recursive ones are just weird and ad hoc, at least from the perpective of the underlying mathematical
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by ekidd 2y ago
Correct. Well, you can dump it into a fast sync buffer and let a background cleanup process do any async cleanup. Sync Rust is lovely, especially with a bit of practice, and doubly so if you already care about how things are stored in memor
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by ekidd 2y ago
> It looks like Rust's cancellation model is far more blunt, if you are just allowed to drop the coroutine. You can only drop it if you own it (and nobody has borrowed it), which means you can only drop it at an `await` point. Thi
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by ekidd 2y ago
Yeah, "safe Rust" is officially allowed to leak memory and other resources. - The easiest way to do this is mem::forget, a safe function which exists to leak memory deliberately. - The most common real way to leak memory is to cre
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by ekidd 2y ago
I remember speaking to several of the people who worked on America's Army back around 2007, when Counter-Strike was all the rage. I think this was at the GDC. The people I spoke with were from the Army. And they found CS-style games a
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by ekidd 2y ago
I guess it depends on what you mean by "better graphics"? They're upgraded their graphics several times over the years. I'm playing on a 4K monitor and they're using most of those pixels. I can see a small amount of
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by ekidd 2y ago
> Factorio wouldn't exist with Dwarf Fortress? According to Factorio's developers, they were heavily inspired by Minecraft factory mods like IndustrialCraft. Minecraft is commonly said to have been inspired by Infiniminer. I&#x

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