wmwmwm

5 ms·

1.
by wmwmwm 5mo ago
Joseph Heller methinks, but probably not too far away in embedding space!
2.
by wmwmwm 1y ago
I’m guessing Ramanujan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
3.
by wmwmwm 1y ago
Also had to remember not to drag people out of cars and drive off with them when walking felt too slow in real life!
4.
by wmwmwm 2y ago
Book recommendation for The World Without Us which explores what might happen if humans vanished overnight: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us
5.
by wmwmwm 2y ago
My aero engineering friend from university winds me up every time I see him saying that pi = 22/7 - I finally stopped getting angry, checked and it’s pretty good! I’m still glad he didn’t decide to design planes after he graduated thou
6.
by wmwmwm 3y ago
The domain name and the story seem a bit incongruous...
7.
by wmwmwm 3y ago
I had one due to a bulging disc in my neck and some pins and needles - it was fascinating, but I still remember them turning on the audio and letting me listen to my nerves trying to flex various muscles! My biceps sounded like a bit like w
8.
by wmwmwm 3y ago
You can throw python threads at it, but if each request traverses the big old datastructure using python code and serialises a result then you’re stuck with only one live thread at a time (due to the GIL). In Java it’s so much easier espec
9.
by wmwmwm 3y ago
Historically I’ve written several services that load up some big datastructure (10s or 100s of GB), then expose an HTTP API on top of it. Every time I’ve done a quick implementation in Python of a service that then became popular (within a
10.
by wmwmwm 3y ago
Same for me on Firefox, though Chromium and Safari seem to work
11.
by wmwmwm 3y ago
Does anyone have any insight into why reinforcement learning is (maybe) required/historically favoured? There was an interesting paper recently suggesting that you can use a preference learning objective directly and get a similar&#x2F
12.
by wmwmwm 3y ago
There’s also a python api for getting the transcript from a given youtube video id so you can script the whole thing
13.
by wmwmwm 3y ago
I’ve had some pretty remarkable results pasting lecture transcripts from youtube into gpt4 and getting well formatted/relevant markdown summaries from meandering and mis-transcribed content! Needs chunking up but surprisingly effective
14.
by wmwmwm 4y ago
Not super related but a pleasantly surprising linux /dev trick I discovered yesterday was piping “hello” to /dev/udp/<ip>/<port> in order to check connectivity between two machines (the other was listeni
15.
by wmwmwm 4y ago
I think it is actually meant to be "scruples" - so it sounds pretty accurate to me: https://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/James/Turn_Screw.pdf (see p4)
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by wmwmwm 4y ago
This is amazing, and scary (as a musician) but also reliably kills firefox on iOS!
17.
by wmwmwm 4y ago
As someone who’s been prompted every other night over the last couple of years for a fresh made-up story with an ever-changing cast of dinosaurs, superheroes and aliens by my five year old (who complains if the story arc isn’t to his liking
18.
by wmwmwm 4y ago
I can recommend “Other Minds” by Peter Godfrey-Smith for a pretty in depth read about octopus intelligence. Fascinating stuff!
19.
by wmwmwm 4y ago
Actually, I think it was the initials of the original publishers
20.
by wmwmwm 4y ago
I love this story about Agloe, New York - a "copyright trap" that materialised into a real place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agloe,_New_York When another map maker put the actual settlement on their maps,
21.
by wmwmwm 4y ago
I remember several times putting my eldest son to bed when he was a few months old and having this intrusive thought that maybe the reason why he was yelling was because he knew he wouldn’t remember today when he woke up the next day and th
22.
by wmwmwm 4y ago
I’m a fan of that book too - though hoping I never need it! On a tangential theme, another one I read and liked at the same time was The World Without Us - all about what would happen to the cities and infrastructure if all humans suddenly
23.
by wmwmwm 4y ago
Having just implemented a softmax() function for an online ML course, I think the python implementation here suffers from overflow if any of the elements of z get big(ish) - e.g. e^10000 is a big number! A spot of searching online suggests
24.
by wmwmwm 4y ago
Although I haven't used LaTeX in decades to write anything substantial like a paper or dissertation, I recently had cause to use it to write up some homework for an online course I'm doing - mainly (pretty simple) maths proofs. A
25.
by wmwmwm 4y ago
I really like that you can use duckdb to sql query an on disk directory structure of parquet files with no preloading into RAM or other db formats. Super useful/quick and only one line of code! Instead of selecting from a table you ju
26.
by wmwmwm 5y ago
I met someone years ago who was an adjudicator for Guinness. I remember two stories in particular. One was a trip to Venezuela to judge a biggest bowl of soup (chicken IIRC), the other to Italy for a biggest doner kebab! (yes Italy not Gree
27.
by wmwmwm 5y ago
Yes, wouldn’t want to try and design it myself! I think the datacentre providers I was looking at spend quite a while doing CFD simulations to get it right!
28.
by wmwmwm 5y ago
I was recently researching how you'd host systems like this in a datacentre and was blown away to find out that you can cool 40kW in a single air cooled rack - this might be old news for many, but it was 2x or 3x what I expected! Gl
29.
by wmwmwm 5y ago
I remember reading it and wondering whether they’d have had more chance of making their fortunes building home computers out of their garages given the era! Great story though (I read the British edition - The Newtonian Casino)
30.
by wmwmwm 5y ago
As someone who finds himself thinking “wtf is money” every decade or so, the most recent book I read on this was pretty good - Money: The Unauthorised Biography by Felix Martin. It’s firmly in the “social construct” camp and makes some good

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