sfink

5 ms·

1.
by sfink 6d ago
I'm assuming all coin flips are deterministic based on the task. In this case, it'd be equivalent to generating a slightly longer hash and using a couple of bits for the "coin flip". (Or just generating a new hash with 1
2.
by sfink 7d ago
Well, given that I knew that I was probably missing something, and the fact that their solution made no sense with the constraints I was using, pretty strongly implied that there was an additional constraint. And that's a fairly obviou
3.
by sfink 7d ago
Ah, right. The joys of being a fool in public. The part I missed is that the load balancers don't have a consistent view of the set of servers. There is no magical synchronization scheme that creates that consistent view. You want load
4.
by sfink 7d ago
Um. I read the article thinking it would make for a great brain puzzle, but I quickly decided there's something wrong with the question setup because the initial solution didn't make sense. I assumed it was just missing a constrai
5.
by sfink 8d ago
I recommend a reciprocating saw with a metal cutting blade to get them into small enough pieces. Do not try to flush them all of the pieces at the same time. It's not just about whether they fit or not, they also need to be light enoug
6.
by sfink 10d ago
Heh. I hate that about movies. Then when I finally figure out who is who, one of them changes their hairstyle and I have to figure it out all over again! It's like the two Ryans who insist on pretending they're different people.
7.
by sfink 10d ago
I am fully aphant, but when i played the trombone it absolutely helped me to rehearse purely mentally during the day before a test. There wasn't anything visual about it, though. I just went through the motions mentally, over and over.
8.
by sfink 10d ago
Speaking for myself: I don't miss what I never had. But I can remember or imagine sensations, which seems more relevant to me anyway? (Again, I can't compare to what I've never experienced.) It's an interesting angle to
9.
by sfink 10d ago
> The frontier is spiky and all, but you have to suspend disbelief quite a bit to, on one hand, have a model that can produce a novel math theory, and on the other hand, that same model can't tell the difference between a "sand
10.
by sfink 18d ago
Huh. Having said that, I went to a movie theater over the weekend and they had a funky splash mat in their urinals. It was magical. I'd never seen one shaped like that before. (The usual ones I see have always seemed to make things wor
11.
by sfink 19d ago
There are a lot of reasons why something could get picked up, and sustainability is very low on the list. The manufacturers don't care; they get paid the same regardless of the amount of splashback. Most businesses won't care unle
12.
by sfink 22d ago
They're already outsourcing storage, so there's no need to prove a plausible path for that. They're already outsourcing compute to other instances within the ~same compute cluster, possibly cross-evaluation groups, so there&#
13.
by sfink 22d ago
Nobody's watching. I'm sure they try, but I imagine the flood of things you'd need to watch is way too big, and you certainly don't want to slow everything down by having synchronous approvals (even AI-mediated). Welcome
14.
by sfink 22d ago
Were they correct or incorrect in this? Whatever your answer, why do you hold that opinion? I work for Mozilla. We fixed a ton of security vulnerabilities that Mythos found during its early period. So my bias is to be sympathetic to Anthrop
15.
by sfink 23d ago
I'm still leeching off the free tier, so it's going to be hard to beat the price. But yes, I intend to support several models, to handle the overload situation (automatic failover). And switch to a cheap paid plan, though it seems
16.
by sfink 24d ago
Sync, mainly. You can send a tab to/from your Firefox desktop instance. Also synced passwords. Those aren't the only reasons -- Firefox on iOS has a lot of code in that wrapper -- but sync is the main one for me. (There are also r
17.
by sfink 24d ago
For my application, I'm still happily using gemini-2.5-flash and the only problem is when it reports being overloaded. It's for interpreting a downscaled phone camera photo of a hand-written shopping list on a whiteboard, and it w
18.
by sfink 1mo ago
Good point! My argument was that the upside is invisible but the costs are visible. You're saying that the downside is visible and the costs are visible. Those hypotheses are in tension -- do people connect data centers to their upside
19.
by sfink 1mo ago
My hypothesis: people are against data centers because they are a visible externality. Computers are in the cloud -- so, nowhere and cost nothing. The AI-assisted search result is on a web page and only costs a little bit of screen space. A
20.
by sfink 1mo ago
> The big bang didn't happen at a single point, it happened everywhere. A bit of an odd thing to say, since "everywhere" implies there are multiple places to be, and at the instant of the big bang, there was only place to
21.
by sfink 1mo ago
Well, the analogy is to something flying by a black hole and having its trajectory altered.[1] It sounds like it fits you, then -- you interacted, and are now forever irritated by them or by things that sound like them, even things that you
22.
by sfink 1mo ago
Off-topic, but it makes me think of "reasoning black holes": you get enough like-minded people together that they start reinforcing each other's logic and beliefs until not only those people get completely detached from reali
23.
by sfink 1mo ago
I agree. I had a negative spin on a lot of these. Perhaps the mood I was in. The original idea was more positive, and somehow it went the other way as I wrote it up. When reflecting on that post, the certitude one is the one that bothered m
24.
by sfink 1mo ago
No, you're right, but it's really the ambiguity of language. Activation energy is the energy required to trigger a result. You can read that two different ways: either as the threshold, or as the energy required to reach the thres
25.
by sfink 1mo ago
Another model: nihilism . Putting in 10% more effort isn't going to achieve enough to be worthwhile, so it's short-term at best and ultimately pointless, so why bother doing anything at all? Or closely related: I'll call it
26.
by sfink 1mo ago
I agree with you as long as things are at a small scale. But at a large scale, these things reshape society and what it means to be human. Social networks started out[1] as almost wholly good. The negative effects came from scale. Same with
27.
by sfink 1mo ago
This is a reductionist counterargument. Sure, the passage you quoted does sound like he's being equally reductionist. But the underlying point does not depend on T=0. You could state it as saying that instead of minimizing error (maxim
28.
by sfink 1mo ago
Easy to say, hard to come up with a believable alternative. In the meantime, you're flunking out a lot of people for having the integrity to not cheat and as a result not being able to keep up with an artificially inflated workload. Yo
29.
by sfink 1mo ago
You could describe that as taking an input distribution and a sampling procedure and producing an output distribution. This is a difference in sampling procedure that produces a deviation in the output distribution. (If you don't like
30.
by sfink 1mo ago
In order to do anything about the cheating epidemic, this has to be robust to adversarial attacks. Color me very skeptical on that one. It seems like reprocessing a generated text and adjusting the distribution is a way easier problem than

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