raddan

5 ms·

31.
by raddan 2mo ago
Well, they’re also probably not scaling up in the same way as any of the commercial AI offerings, let alone the frontier labs. Faculty at Stanford probably have some decent hardware to play with, but they do not have data centers. I don’t d
32.
by raddan 2mo ago
Just yesterday, for fun, I asked Codex to generate an “online e-commerce site” in ARM assembly. To its credit, it did actually generate a program that served up a webpage over a socket, but it really did not do what I asked. The program sti
33.
by raddan 2mo ago
The ENHANCE meme used to drive me nuts because it is clearly impossible. My brother and I even briefly competed to find the earliest ENHANCE reference (I no longer remember what we concluded, but it goes surprisingly far back). The fact tha
34.
by raddan 2mo ago
More than a third of the US population has a college degree. [1] When you consider the fact that 20% of the US population are children [2] that means that roughly half of the eligible US population has a college degree. If “half” is elite,
35.
by raddan 2mo ago
I’m not sure where you get the idea that all universities are competitive because that is simply untrue. Many public universities are required by state legislatures to broadly admit students from their own state. California is a good exampl
36.
by raddan 2mo ago
> This is about gunning for the elite/upper echelons of society. Is that what it’s about? Keep in that the University of Michigan is a public university, explicitly founded to “provide the inhabitants of this state with the means o
37.
by raddan 2mo ago
But then you lose extra important information from words like "masshole."
38.
by raddan 2mo ago
Isn't there supposed to be a liaison in there? "Open to Alls Y'all"
39.
by raddan 2mo ago
This is exactly the trick one of my colleagues uses to teach Theory of Computation, a notoriously boring subject (for your average CS student). Instead of motivating reductions by blathering on about how knapsack and TSP are the same, let
40.
by raddan 2mo ago
It’s funny—I also wrongly assumed that the controls required me to tilt my phone and died instantly. It does say right there on the main screen “drag your thumb anywhere on the screen” but I didn’t know what “Arrows and A/D” meant. I d
41.
by raddan 2mo ago
My interpretation of “we don’t know” is that the space of possible instruction methods is huge, and we don’t know what works best. It is easy to think of it as a kind of optimization problem, but that line of thinking quickly runs into a bu
42.
by raddan 2mo ago
Moreover, there are areas of expertise that are very hard to reach without special help. I have a PhD in computer science. Earning that degree was a major time commitment, and it gave me close contact with one of the few experts in a niche
43.
by raddan 3mo ago
Wow, a DAT Walkman [1]! I forgot that this existed, but I am remembering now that I heard about them in college and desperately wanted one. I was (and still am) an avid listener of music. Digital formats were such a leap over analog media a
44.
by raddan 3mo ago
People’s tastes in beer and wine vary so dramatically (and there are so many styles) that it’s not clear to me that you can actually have a “best of.” The beer and wine I enjoy the best my wife finds completely unpalatable. For wine, I enjo
45.
by raddan 3mo ago
You should check to see if it still works. My favorite thumb drive went through the washing machine several times and still works.
46.
by raddan 3mo ago
I 100% agree with you, but as a person who came up in the tail end of the generation we’re discussing (we bought a bargain bin TI-99/4a at K-Mart) and also a faculty member who has been teaching young people how to program for the last
47.
by raddan 3mo ago
I am also curious about this. The best sleep I ever had was when I was teaching an early morning class. Part of my morning routine is a short run, so this meant I was regularly waking up at 5am. I fell asleep regularly at 9pm when I was
48.
by raddan 3mo ago
Artificial light has a huge effect on drowsiness for me. This is quite noticable when I am out in the woods, camping in a tent. After sundown, I have about an hour left before I get so drowsy that I cannot keep my eyes open. Back home, i
49.
by raddan 3mo ago
My PhD advisor likes to drink a coffee just prior to falling asleep. That way the caffiene slowly kicks in and wakes him up. I can't do this--I already have trouble sleeping and I feel the effects of coffee quickly. But to answer you
50.
by raddan 3mo ago
There are things that are causal and have little to no effect and things that are causal and have a large effect. I think determining whether and how much something matters, especially when the target audience is "all humans" is
51.
by raddan 3mo ago
Interesting approach. Thanks for sharing. I should send my students your way for internships!
52.
by raddan 3mo ago
The rabbit hole goes deep fast with this one! https://rcoh.me/posts/linear-time-median-finding/ I vaguely recall learning a randomized (approximate) streaming median algorithm in grad school, but the details have
53.
by raddan 3mo ago
As a non-Australian I just have to know what “chippies” and “sparkies” are!
54.
by raddan 3mo ago
The first time I attended a selective school was graduate school. Like you, I was extremely nervous. “They’re all going to be smarter than me. I’m going to feel like an idiot.” And it turned out to be true. Many of the students I went to sc
55.
by raddan 3mo ago
It is. I think the professor here was being naive, but I appreciate his optimism. When I was in college (in the 90s), take home exams allowed a knowledgeable student to really shine. I’m not saying that they weren’t eminently cheatable back
56.
by raddan 3mo ago
I am a little surprised that they rewrote the compiler in Go instead of just compiling the existing compiler to WASM. The linked announcement does not talk about a WASM alternative at all (rewriting a compiler is a risky move!). Does anyb
57.
by raddan 3mo ago
I'm glad that TypeScript uses JSDoc and not the hideous XML format [1] that Microsoft's other languages use. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-ref...
58.
by raddan 3mo ago
When I was a teenager, my very first real job (after being a paperboy) was being a dishwasher in a popular local seafood restaurant. Minimum wage at the time was $4.25/hr but they offered me $5.50/hr. Boy howdy! On one shift I w
59.
by raddan 3mo ago
That’s a strange delineation. Engineering is essentially about designing a thing, asking whether that thing really does satisfy the desired criteria, and then iterating when it does not. Mathematical models of the world are tremendously use
60.
by raddan 4mo ago
You definitely needed the manual. But an 8-year old version of me mastered the game so it couldn't have been that hard. FWIW, the manual is a masterpiece. I really miss all the ancillaries that came with early computer games.

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