mcguire

38 ms·

511.
by mcguire 4y ago
AIX 3.2.5 (IIRC) had a bug in NFS where you could corrupt a filesystem's lock with the result that any process that touched the filesystem in any way would block. IBM's automountd was single threaded. Someone's code (specific
512.
by mcguire 4y ago
The vast majority of modern distributed systems are (possibly stacked) client/server architectures, possibly with a significant minority of publish/subscribe systems. And even so, latency, partial failure, and concurrency are stil
513.
by mcguire 4y ago
Depends on how embarrassingly parallel ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel ) your problem is. If many individual operations depend on the results of previous operations, it'll be slow.
514.
by mcguire 4y ago
If my google-fu is right, ChatGPT was trained on 570GB of data. I asked, "What is the fastest sea mammal?" ChatGPT just produced, " The fastest sea mammal is the peregrine falcon. This bird of prey is able to reach diving spe
515.
by mcguire 4y ago
" So they can definitely tell you the combined liklihood that the answer is 'Peru is a cat' vs 'Peru is a country' and provide you the exact statistical likelihood of each... " ...in the context of the texts th
516.
by mcguire 4y ago
I got calculus in college, from mathematicians. :-( We spent about 15 minutes (well, ok, one lecture) on series, then a couple weeks on limits, then limits and differential calculus, then the rest of differential calc. (throwing the limit s
517.
by mcguire 4y ago
If I were to give advice, I'd suggest not taking advice from someone who thinks that you are insane, that you hate half of humanity, or that you treat them as pariahs simply because they are quarrelsome, hostile, abusive, and manipulat
518.
by mcguire 4y ago
Yes, and the comment being responded to is asserting it's impossible to disagree without being disagreeable.
519.
by mcguire 4y ago
" Disagreeableness is a relatively stable aspect of personality that involves the tendency to behave in quarrelsome, cold, callous, and selfish ways (1). ... For example, disagreeable people tend to be hostile and abusive to others (2)
520.
by mcguire 4y ago
A solitary programmer, as in someone who never has to interface with another person?
521.
by mcguire 4y ago
Once upon a time, I worked with a particular person. At one point we were evaluating version control alternatives and he looked at one. He said it was great, but would never respond when anyone asked, "How do you do X, Y, or Z?" E
522.
by mcguire 4y ago
I have had the same results. Passing by copy is simpler and less bug-prone and reduces the urge to "just set the value since I have a reference to the object" which is a well-paved road to significant pain. And the objects have to
523.
by mcguire 4y ago
This is one of those questions where you really, honestly, do need to look at a very low level. Back in the ancient days, I worked at IBM doing benchmarking for an OS project that was never released. We were using PPC601 Sandalfoots (Sandal
524.
by mcguire 4y ago
From https://fairlearn.org/main/user_guide/datasets/boston_housin... : " Thus, any models trained using this data that do not take special care to process B will learn to use mathematically encoded racism
525.
by mcguire 4y ago
Supplemental material including details about the results. http://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1007%2Fs0070...
526.
by mcguire 4y ago
How many opportunities would you give someone who, when asked to justify their answer, routinely made up references, and who ignored important parts of a question and whose answer wouldn't work anyway? As it turns out, we kinda do know
527.
Learning from Mistakes in Climate Research(link.springer.com)
3 points by mcguire 4y ago|1 comments
528.
by mcguire 4y ago
I saw a discussion the other day that implied that LLMs were running short of training text.
529.
by mcguire 4y ago
Try asking it one of Ray Smullyan's logic puzzles, like "There are two cities: one, a city of “knights” who always tell the truth, and the other of “knaves” who always lie. The residents of the two cities like to visit each other.
530.
by mcguire 4y ago
I asked ChatGPT about the Chinese Room and asked for references. The first it came up with was "Minds, Brains, and Programs" by John Searle (1980). The next two were, "The Chinese Room: Searle and Artificial Intelligence&quot
531.
by mcguire 4y ago
If the answers include hallucinations of basic facts, there is likely something seriously wrong with the Chinese room's thinking somewhere.
532.
by mcguire 4y ago
A fun thing to do: Ask ChatGPT a question, and ask for references. Then try to track down the references. I just asked a simple question about the Thirty Years War, and with the answer it gave me two valid references (including C.V. Wedgewo
533.
by mcguire 4y ago
" For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. " Possibly said by H. L. Mencken. Also, " The fastest sea mammal is the sailfish, ... I am confident that the information I provided about the f
534.
by mcguire 4y ago
The really beautiful part: I asked "what is the fastest sea mammal" twice, got orca once and sailfish the second time. Isn't randomness fun?
535.
by mcguire 4y ago
" Here is an outline of a quantum algorithm that can be used to sort a list of integers: " Initialize a quantum register with the input list of integers. Each integer in the list can be represented as a qubit (quantum bit) in the
536.
by mcguire 4y ago
Who is going to accept liability when they're wrong?
537.
by mcguire 4y ago
This is the HN comment of the year: whiny, pedantic, and with a weird agenda.
538.
by mcguire 4y ago
My experience was the opposite. The best classes were those taught by professors doing active research on the topic. Separating research would drastically harm instruction.
539.
by mcguire 4y ago
Postdocs were striking, too. https://www.science.org/content/article/postdoc-union-reache...
540.
by mcguire 4y ago
That's a different group in the strike. ( https://www.science.org/content/article/postdoc-union-reache... discusses "postdocs and academic researchers", which isn't faculty, but I believe includ

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