entrope

5 ms·

1.
by entrope 6d ago
Allowing more than one lead byte is a complication of the existing standard. As many others have pointed out, we have plenty of coding space without that (e.g. by allowing 5- and 6-byte UTF-8 again), so the case for the extra complexity
2.
by entrope 6d ago
> BOMs (and especially the hilarious UTF-8 BOM) are strictly a legacy Microsoft/Windows thing How should a reader infer the bye order for a UCS-2 or UTF-16 file without a BOM? It seems like one would have to read until finding a co
3.
by entrope 7d ago
Apple needs better GPUs for "AAA gaming on macOS". My M2 Max is pretty awful at games that run fine on a desktop GPU. An M(whatever) Ultra to play games seems like a debatable value proposition.
4.
by entrope 8d ago
LLMs do tend to reinvent the wheel. There are off-the-shelf solutions. In-process, the major options seem to be Meta's Faiss, Spotify's Annoy and Alibaba's zvec. zvec's shared libraries are tens of megabytes in size,
5.
by entrope 8d ago
The first one was offered with no explanation and no claimed better alternative. malloc() is probably the simplest interface for generic runtime allocation, and simplicity has a lot in its favor. malloc() does not provide type safety, is
6.
by entrope 9d ago
Having rolled my own RAG the other week, I personally would recommend talking through it with Claude Opus or a similar model. My baseline was (vibe coded) full-text search with SQLite, and we landed on long chunks with overlap, with a reall
7.
by entrope 9d ago
"If your documents fit the window, the advice stands: keep truncate." "Two reasons we still chunk even when the document would fit:" Which advice do you stand by? Obviously, very short content doesn't need chunking
8.
by entrope 9d ago
A lot of the article focuses on problems induced by a 512-token input limit. For example, one needs a lot more chunks with such a small input, especially with overlap. I realize that some embedding models do have input contexts that small
9.
by entrope 9d ago
On the bright side, lots of people will be saved from reading bad prose like "Malloc (libc) is the worst memory allocation API to use" and "Programs should avoid, if possible, allocating/deallocating memory too often&quo
10.
by entrope 11d ago
So is "does [not] fix [attribute]". The opening dot list has several others, such as "X, Y, Z stay open", "the claim carries its ___", "___ is a statement about ___ and says nothing about ___", and re
11.
by entrope 13d ago
Then I don't understand at all what point you were trying to make about being miserable in our jobs. Cleaning up after bad code has always been part of the job for decades; so has balancing the creation of new technical debt against r
12.
by entrope 13d ago
The whole point of the MS Access reference is that similar situations have been tropes since at least the 1990s. Bad code generated by someone who doesn't know how to program well -- whether that person is supposed to be a professiona
13.
by entrope 15d ago
That's not very close to the argument they make; the claim (right or wrong) is that large corporations often use monorepos, and those are bigger than single-project repositories like used for open source projects. Their claim is consis
14.
by entrope 16d ago
Why "sadly"? The person writing a link should provide enough detail for readers to figure out whether they should follow the link. I rolled my eyes the first time I saw this entry on HN because it just said "Neki" and
15.
by entrope 16d ago
The same thing as the last word of "That is the difference between 22 and 226 seconds, measured." Techies I know would mostly omit "measured"; the rest would show, not tell.
16.
by entrope 16d ago
Drawing a strong conclusion from one shaky data point - classic human tell? I've been reading John D. Cook for years (maybe decades? "The Endeavour" is one of my oldest bookmarks), and this post was no more written by AI than
17.
by entrope 17d ago
The usual metaphor for keeping customers is a walled garden, right? I think it's useful to distinguish them by default.
18.
by entrope 19d ago
2048-bit RSA gives something like 28 more bits of security than 1024-bit RSA has, so it would take about 250 million times as long to factor one 2048-bit key.
19.
by entrope 22d ago
> This time the glitch was 33 feet, who's to say next time it couldn't be 3300 feet? People who study this. This glitch was caused by unusual, structured, widespread distortions in the ionosphere. There's no known mechan
20.
by entrope 23d ago
M-Code is a new encrypted signal that is not fully operational yet. OCX was supposed to enable it. GPS has always had the P(Y) code, which is an encrypted signal, at a higher chip rate than the C/A code that has been broadcast on L1 f
21.
by entrope 23d ago
To meet its integrity budget, a GBAS needs at least triple redundancy, not just a single station. If one has a lot of patience, one can read the details of how it works at https://elibrary.icao.int/product/299828 (alon
22.
by entrope 23d ago
Yes. WAAS should also help a lot, or at least tell you that you can't get a good position.
23.
by entrope 24d ago
No (current) mention of weights being released, so apparently not.
24.
by entrope 24d ago
This article describes what is usually called a Pareto frontier: the best known achievable trade-offs between two (or more) optimization goals. "Efficient frontier" in common usage seems to be specifically a Pareto frontier for fi
25.
by entrope 29d ago
A decade ago, I worked on a simulation program that involved a C++ core with a Python wrapper and DB interface. End users cared a lot about throughout with a rather limited size, weight and power budget. We spent a lot of time optimizing t
26.
by entrope 1mo ago
My guess is that it's not complete or stable or qualified enough for them to publish it as a supported feature. Maybe the power draw is too high and it triggers thermal throttling too quickly, similar to early Intel AVX-512? Maybe th
27.
by entrope 1mo ago
No, they use the same definition of memory bandwidth as others, but Apple Silicon has a lot of memory channels. In previous generations, prefill has been compute-limited and decode is fast. https://blog.exolabs.net/nvidia-d
28.
by entrope 1mo ago
It takes almost 8 years for $3.25/mo of electricity savings to break even with a $300 difference in up front cost. Assuming the time value of money is zero, that is.
29.
by entrope 1mo ago
Usually, the exposure limit is based on an active phone next to an ear. RF field strength falls off with the square of distance, so a phone on each side of your head is most dangerous to the respective ear and bits of your brain close to yo
30.
by entrope 1mo ago
I can't speak to your specific setup, but if the two SIMs use different carriers then they will often need to use different frequencies. A phone could in theory use twice as many radios, but the emitted power limits would be the same,

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