mreid

8 ms·

1.
by mreid 3mo ago
laughs in Australian https://www.bom.gov.au/climate/maps/averages/uv-index/?perio...
2.
by mreid 3mo ago
I'm guessing that what they meant by "proper harmony" is just intonation: where thirds and fifths are expressed by small, integer ratios of frequencies (e.g., a fifth is 3:2 and a major third is 5:4). A just intoned major thi
3.
by mreid 4mo ago
From the article: > Without fully endorsing all their ideas, I’m now in the LeCun/Marcus camp on LLMs. I'm pretty sure he means "Yann LeCun and Gary Marcus" not "Yann LeCun and Marcus Hutter".
4.
by mreid 4mo ago
Came here to say the same thing. It does use TCP/IP but I didn't really understand why "no TCP/IP" is a hard requirement of the original article anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(pro
5.
by mreid 5mo ago
Thanks for sharing that link. My GitHub ID is 484. I had no idea that I joined so early. It says I joined in 20/2/2008. I guess I was following some of the founders' work in Rails when GitHub was announced and must have signe
6.
by mreid 7mo ago
> When my partner goes to the store I get periodic text messages from them asking how much X we have and to check I look in the fridge or pantry in the kitchen and then go downstairs to the fridge or pantry in the basement. We used to ha
7.
by mreid 11mo ago
We've come a long way in 40 years from Racter's automatically generated poetry: https://www.101bananas.com/poems/racter.html I always found this one a little poignant: More than iron More than lead Mo
8.
by mreid 1y ago
On your site you make the claim that: "Our thesis is that there is 100 years of physics and math research that has gone unnoticed by the CS/ML communities and we intend to rectify that." Extraordinary claims require extraordi
9.
by mreid 1y ago
Is it concerning to anyone else that the "Simple & Reliable" and "Reliable on Longer Tasks" diagrams look kind of like the much maligned waterfall design process?
10.
by mreid 1y ago
I also had to convince my parents to buy me books about fractals. My prized possession as a 15 year old was a copy of Mandelbrot's "Fractal Geometry of Nature". A lot of it went over my head but it had some gorgeous colour pl
11.
by mreid 1y ago
Thanks, I hadn't seen that term before. Just to be clear, I wasn't claiming that "communicating clearly" is a new idea in software engineering, I'm mainly commenting on how effective embracing it can be. When doing
12.
by mreid 1y ago
Another thing I learnt from my math degree that I find helps a lot when programming and software engineering more generally is *defining your terms*. So many communication issues on teams occur when people are using the same words to mean d
13.
by mreid 1y ago
As someone who taught myself 68000 assembler as a kid in order to render Mandelbrot and Julia sets quickly it still blows my mind a little that fairly hi-res versions of these can be rendered basically instantaneously in a browser using an
14.
by mreid 1y ago
A lot of those skills come from thinking about development in a team as a system and ask where do things frequently go wrong or take too long? Practice clearly and concisely expressing what you understand the problem to be. This could be a
15.
by mreid 1y ago
Really nice presentation of divergences. I made a similar attempt (math + interactive JS visualizations) a long time ago for the Bregman divergences: https://mark.reid.name/blog/meet-the-bregman-divergences.htm... Thes
16.
by mreid 1y ago
A sphere is not a tetrahedron.
17.
by mreid 1y ago
I'm guessing it is a derogatory pun, alluding to vibe coders.
18.
by mreid 1y ago
These are definitely thought-provoking questions and there are branches of mathematical philosophy such as constructivism and mathematical intuitionism that explore these. Even if computation is not directly part of the laws of physics, kno
19.
by mreid 1y ago
Sure, “arbitrary” is a suitable term here too. A random process is just one way to generate an arbitrary function. My use of “random” here was referring to the coin flipping process and was more for building intuition than precisely specify
20.
by mreid 1y ago
I think you are experiencing the same confusion I felt when I first started thinking about the difference between a program and a function. The set of all possible mapping from all possible finite strings to booleans is definitely *not* cou
21.
by mreid 1y ago
I had exactly the same reaction, which prompted me to write this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44122045
22.
by mreid 1y ago
This is a really nice explanation of decidability. One extra thing it might be worth mentioning is that there are many more functions `f : string -> boolean` then there are programs that implement those functions. When I first encounte
23.
by mreid 2y ago
I must have some of that microplastic in my brain since I misread the start of the title as "Human, Brian May, ..." and then couldn't parse the rest properly.
24.
by mreid 2y ago
The program Racter (which, from what I understand, was a basic MDP) was generating poetry in the 1980s that was published, read, criticized, and presented in museums: https://www.101bananas.com/poems/racter.html I reme
25.
by mreid 2y ago
I've heard a similar sentiment: "It's not lines of code written, it's lines of code spent." It also reminds me of this analogy for data, especially sensitive data: "it's not oil, it's nuclear waste.&q
26.
by mreid 2y ago
I also wrote a short blog post about this topic back in 2009: https://mark.reid.name/blog/warning-high-dimensions.html It great to see these interesting math facts continue to be discussed and presented in new ways.
27.
by mreid 2y ago
If you want to go a more analog route, this series of synth DIY videos by Moritz Klein is really great: https://www.youtube.com/@MoritzKlein0
28.
by mreid 3y ago
From the paper: "Alcohol is known to induce headaches when consumed in large quantities." [Citation needed]
29.
by mreid 3y ago
This likelihood ratio approach highlights the fact that KL divergence is a member of the family of Csiszár F-divergences. These are measures of "distance" between distributions of the form E_Q[ F(p(x)/q(x)) ] where F is any c
30.
by mreid 3y ago
"It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking under their feet. That is because they

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