olooney

7 ms·

31.
Why the Monty Hall Problem Drives People Crazy(oranlooney.com)
3 points by olooney 5mo ago|0 comments
32.
by olooney 6mo ago
Incredibly detailed! The vision transformer stuff in particular is very useful to know. It's interesting that the token budgets are so much higher (up to 1120) than GPT, which uses 170 tokens per 512x512 tile. I wonder if that will lea
33.
by olooney 11mo ago
This isn't surprising; the majority of programmers are using LLMs, and Claude is pretty good for coding. Penetration testing is also a pretty good fit for an agentic loop - you run a tool, read the output, and decide on your next move,
34.
by olooney 1y ago
I'm pretty sure my mistake was assuming people had read the article and knew the author veered wildly halfway through towards also advocating against using LLMs for proofreading and that you should "just let your mistakes stand.&q
35.
by olooney 1y ago
Here is a piece I wrote recently on that very subject. Why don't you read that to see if I'm a human writer? https://www.oranlooney.com/post/em-dash/
36.
by olooney 1y ago
I don't see the objection to using LLMs to check for grammatical mistakes and spelling errors. That strikes me as a reactionary and dogmatic position, not a rational one. Anyone who has done any serious writing knows that a good editor
37.
by olooney 1y ago
I just don't want them to design a data model with a single `numeric(10,2)` columns for "sale_price", or hard-code their PowerBI report to show the last five years of data using whatever the exchange rate was on the day they
38.
by olooney 1y ago
From a rhetorical perspective, it's an extended "Yes-set" argument or persuasion sandwich. You see it a lot with cult leaders, motivational speakers, or political pundits. The problem is that you have an unpopular idea that i
39.
by olooney 1y ago
I've been building up a similar list of topics that nearly every programmer will at some point be forced to learn against their will and which are not adequately covered in undergrad: * Text file encodings, in particular Unicode, UTF-8
40.
A Modest Definition of Human Consciousness(oranlooney.com)
2 points by olooney 1y ago|0 comments
41.
by olooney 1y ago
Soon galleries will have signs saying: "All works verified human-made. Please feel something."
42.
by olooney 1y ago
What's the original source for this Sagan quote? > carl sagan called METI “deeply unwise and immature" It's repeated ad nauseum online, but always verbatim, just those few words and never a full passage, and never with a
43.
Algorithmic Underground(jmsdnns.com)
2 points by olooney 1y ago|0 comments
44.
Art Appreciation 2525
3 points by olooney 1y ago|1 comments
45.
A Random Walk in ℤ⁵(gist.github.com)
2 points by olooney 1y ago|0 comments
46.
by olooney 1y ago
Videos don't do well on Hacker News, but I encourage people to at least watch the first couple minutes of this one. The oscilloscope visual overlay is interesting and the editing is really good. Also, given the topic (audio equalizers)
47.
by olooney 1y ago
This is going to sound a little weird, but I think trust is part of the problem. Canadians have a high-trust culture, but their stock market is historically full of scams[1], and some analysts think its causally related. (It may just be bec
48.
by olooney 1y ago
I think this is interesting and partially true: humans are scary. But it's important to remember the opposite is true as well: humans are the most cooperative species out there by a wide margin. Eusocial insects and pack animals are
49.
by olooney 1y ago
Yes, I was thinking of `matmul()`, sorry about that! The visualization is everything I hoped: https://x.com/oranlooney/status/1977728062289555967
50.
by olooney 1y ago
For me, as for a lot of people, lack of sleep is the big one... if I build up 4+ hours of sleep debt over a week, I'm at risk. So anything you can do to make that easier to log, like integration with a sleep tracker, would be good. Als
51.
by olooney 1y ago
Yes, I'm planning out-of-the-box support for nomic[1] which can run in-process, and ollama which runs as a local server and supports many free embedding models[2]. [1]: https://www.nomic.ai/blog/posts/nomic-em
52.
by olooney 1y ago
This really nice. For `torch.mul(x, y)`, it would be nice if it highlighted the entire row or column in the other matrix and result. Right now it shows only a single multiplication, which gives a misleading impression of how matrix multiply
53.
by olooney 1y ago
I found a neat way to do high-quality "semantic soft joins" using embedding vectors[1] and the Hungarian algorithm[2] and I'm turning it into an open source Python package: https://github.com/olooney/jell
54.
by olooney 1y ago
Paine kind of hit the nail on the head with this one: > "The law is king!" The 2024 Nobel prize in economics[1] was awarded to a team of three who investigated what causes a nation to prosper and identified "rule of law&qu
55.
by olooney 1y ago
Then you may enjoy Elements of Statistical Learning [1] or Kevin Murphy's books[2][3][4], which this chapter is heavily indebted to; it is mostly a short gloss of the topics covered in those books. [1]: https://hastie.su.do
56.
by olooney 1y ago
The phrase "erased history" isn’t morally neutral. It carries a tone of judgment, even suggests censorship. If the author had wanted to appear neutral, they would have used "deleted" or "removed."
57.
by olooney 1y ago
Good article, the METR metric is very interesting. See also Leopold Aschenbrenner's work in the same vein: https://situational-awareness.ai/from-gpt-4-to-agi/ IMO this approach ultimately asks the wrong question.
58.
The Prehistory of Computing, Part II(oranlooney.com)
70 points by olooney 1y ago|9 comments
59.
by olooney 1y ago
CAT bonds are typically restricted to institutional investors. I would be very surprised if you could even buy one without being a QIB.
60.
20k Years of Computing(oranlooney.com)
2 points by olooney 1y ago|0 comments

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