gwern

21 ms·

301.
by gwern 1y ago
Balatro was started in vacation time and underwent a ton of tweaking: https://localthunk.com/blog/balatro-timeline-3aarh So if it had to be written in C, probably neither of those would have happened.
302.
by gwern 1y ago
> has been externalized to customers in search of ill-gotten profits. 'Externality' does not mean 'thing I dislike'. If it is the customers running the software or waiting the extra couple of seconds, that's not
303.
by gwern 1y ago
A subtext here may be his current AI work. In OP, Carmack is arguing, essentially, that 'software is slow because good smart devs are expensive and we don't want to pay for them to optimize code and systems end-to-end as there are
304.
by gwern 1y ago
Note that he did not use the expression you are criticizing him for misusing. The rule is the rule, and exceptions are the exception. Exceptions do not make the rule, by definition, so if your only defense of Brutalism is to say 'loo
305.
by gwern 1y ago
It is pretty much the same scaling, though: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09871#page=10 It just lets you avoid some of the pathologies of BPEs.
306.
by gwern 1y ago
One wonders how much of it is true and how much is fundamental attribution bias.
307.
by gwern 1y ago
> Are you implying that by smoking I caused irreversible changes to my brain Yes. Once an addict, always an addict. ('Irreversible changes to a brain' are quite common. You remember having smoked, for example...) More importa
308.
by gwern 1y ago
The key is, they are differently unstable. Two unstable careers can combine to a stabler career. While you work on the novel, you collect the check for the video game, say. The challenge always is ensuring that when you serve two masters,
309.
by gwern 1y ago
> I did and while I like Gwern's writing, I think in this case it's plain wrong. I say this as a smoker who switched to e-cigarettes for a few years and then quit cold turkey. Switching was easy. The first 72 hours of quittin
310.
by gwern 1y ago
It's interesting how exactly this seems to parallel the rise of Hollywood in the 1920s-1960s sucking writers out of the rest of the world to work on scripts. The same risk/reward profile, the same looking down on the mass medium,
311.
by gwern 1y ago
> Amazon.com: You have a new series known collectively as Edgeworks, where you are well into reprinting no less than 31 titles in 20 dual volumes. What makes them any different or special from the original editions, other than availabili
312.
by gwern 1y ago
I did some searching and I'm not sure the answer you remember exists. All I can find after a bunch of keyword + date-restricted searches in Google, Quora, & HN is Ibrahim Bashir ( https://www.quora.com/Who-designed-U
313.
by gwern 1y ago
BTW, this is how it's going with the 'clever kids' and hiring for their cheating startup: https://x.com/im_roy_lee/status/1920206362996343261 it's really fucking hard to find competent en
314.
by gwern 1y ago
Unfortunately, the site was butchered a year or two ago with a redesign to make it look like a garden-variety Wordpress blog. A ton of content disappeared. The front page is reasonably dense, although one might also just call it cluttered,
315.
by gwern 1y ago
Thank you, ChatGPT, but these are all obvious questions to ask, and more valuable would be some answers.
316.
by gwern 1y ago
He can have other motivations. Between 2020, 2024, Mackenzie Bezos & Laurene Powell Jobs, the deeply unimpressive philanthropy of the Buffett children, and his own divorce, a very rich philanthropist has excellent reasons to aim for the
317.
by gwern 1y ago
> One of the girls quoted said she loves writing, but finds it helpful to get structure and initial content from generative AI. Which shows she's not learning from the AI or even improving on it. All she's doing is filling out
318.
by gwern 1y ago
Wishful thinking if you read the article. Most of these kids aren't learning anything about how to use AI. They aren't like a Simon Willison or Janus or anything. They're not learning about confabulations, they're not
319.
by gwern 1y ago
> Charles Eames’s distinction between forced compromises and willingly accepted constraints reveals a profound truth — in the delicate balance between structure and freedom lies the sweet spot where creativity thrives. Suggested constrai
320.
by gwern 1y ago
That would be a good baseline. Maybe the ML part would be for ranking them? Because I expect you would drown in matches, and the hard part becomes finding the good ones.
321.
by gwern 1y ago
My suggestion would be that, since you want a tiny integer-only NN tailored for a specific computer, are only occasionally training one for a specific task, and you have a simulator to generate unlimited data, you simply do random search or
322.
by gwern 1y ago
Can it be used to covertly run computations invisible to the OS or CPU?
323.
by gwern 1y ago
OP fails to link the patent, which is at https://patents.google.com/patent/US748284A/en https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/8f/2f/9b/bc599b6... (The patent is only 2 pages,
324.
by gwern 1y ago
An interesting ML exercise (possible class project!) would be to try to automate this. A bigram corpus combined with word embeddings and a NSFW text classifier, maybe? Your usual word embedding might not work because the point is the multip
325.
by gwern 1y ago
LLMs are also heavily biased after chatbot tuning leads to mode-collapse. That's why you see the same verbal tics coming out of them, like the em-dashes or the 'twist ending' in the more recent 4os. And if LLMs really were un
326.
by gwern 1y ago
My point is that there are no 'genuine consequences'. We are told that supposedly there is selection and that the predictive power is nearly perfect and everyone relies on solely genetics to do everything; and yet, we do not see a
327.
by gwern 1y ago
I read this the other day and did a little more reading about his _Autobiography_ project, and Twain's early life was even harsher than I had realized: https://gwern.net/doc/psychiatry/bipolar/energy&#x2F
328.
by gwern 1y ago
At that sort of tariff, you'll see a lot of people dabbling in tariff evasion by smuggling stuff in their luggage (whether they realize it or not). If you pull it out of the packaging and just put it in your checked-in baggage, I doubt
329.
by gwern 1y ago
Some of the older posts are very cute. I enjoyed https://greydanus.github.io/2020/12/01/scaling-down/ on showing how many high-powered tricks you can do with a tiny NN of the sort that will train in seco
330.
by gwern 1y ago
I don't know if I'd recommend it, but checking, Sawyer's _Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration_ book hits most of the points I'd cite about brainstorming in its chapter, so you could always start there.

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