nicklaf

6 ms·

1.
by nicklaf 10mo ago
Same story here. After installing dwm years ago, I've more or less stopped thinking about window managers as an open problem to be solved. I suppose one could run into trouble if they started patching it a lot, but in my experience you
2.
by nicklaf 11mo ago
It's painfully apparent when you've reached the limitations of an LLM to solve a problem it's ill-suited for (like a concurrency bug), because it will just keep spitting out non-sense, eventually going in circles or going tot
3.
by nicklaf 11mo ago
> Van der Kolk lost his job due to pretty extensive sexual misconduct, so I think he's a pretty poor person to hold up as a hero. I was curious about this accusation, so I read a bit about the scandal. [0] It seems you are actually
4.
by nicklaf 11mo ago
preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14367
5.
by nicklaf 1y ago
In my limited experiments with Gemini: it stops working when presented with a program containing fundamental concurrency flaws. Ask it to resolve a race condition or deadlock and it will flail, eventually getting caught in a loop, suggestin
6.
by nicklaf 1y ago
Personally, I don't trust LLMs to write code for me, generally speaking. That said, as of late I've been very pleased with the whole "shoehorn your problem to fit code examples found online" thing these LLMs do, in the v
7.
by nicklaf 1y ago
Mathematics texts with titles that would mislead a beginner who naïvely takes words such as "basic" and "elementary" at face value are a bit of a running joke, particularly when you go past the undergraduate level. Just
8.
by nicklaf 1y ago
FWIW, Colbert quipping that "reality has a well-known liberal bias" was clearly satirical of conservatives' tendency to trot out the canard of "liberal" bias. You could just as well say he still agrees with your poi
9.
by nicklaf 1y ago
Rather amusingly, the author recently espoused the viewpoint that bloggers who wanted to stand out should avoid using tools like ChatGPT: https://youtu.be/avASDgtw9k0?t=678 It's not obvious to me that this blog post
10.
by nicklaf 2y ago
Interesting. This is actually behavior that I already prefer and enable in Firefox. It makes sense when you leave browser instances open for long periods of time (with multi-account containers for a large number of tabs that you save and re
11.
by nicklaf 2y ago
"The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." —Geoffrey Chaucer, Parlement of Foules
12.
by nicklaf 2y ago
To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour. —William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
13.
by nicklaf 2y ago
Hacker News lacks a few distinguishing features that are characteristic of modern corporate social media: in particular, algorithmically driven feeds based on engagement metrics optimized for an advertising business model. The closest you g
14.
by nicklaf 2y ago
> My feed is about 30% content I've asked to see or would want to see, the rest junk (AI crap, far right rage, far left rage). Since we both seem to use Facebook in the same way, I'll just point out that you can reduce the junk
15.
by nicklaf 2y ago
Browser extension solution to that problem: https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions
16.
by nicklaf 2y ago
Check out Conrad Barski's Land of Lisp: http://landoflisp.com/
17.
by nicklaf 2y ago
The phrase was made famous in an influential essay[0] by Richard P. Gabriel, where he laments Lisp's relative failure to compete with Unix. In Gabriel's opinion, Unix proved to follow the more adaptive design strategy in certain w
18.
by nicklaf 3y ago
You jest, but as famously emphasized by Steve Ballmer [0], Microsoft was (is?) all about developers! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE
19.
by nicklaf 3y ago
Pardon me, but can we clarify what you mean by saying that "masks aren't helping much"? Do you mean that masks are not effective in stopping the spread of COVID on an individual basis? Or do you simply mean that as a matter o
20.
by nicklaf 3y ago
What would be particularly nice is if it became the norm for LLM users to be expected to not only supply the log of prompts that produced a given output, but also the specific LLM, making the entire process reproducible and verifiable. Of c
21.
by nicklaf 3y ago
> They're busy thinking about much more important things. Generally I agree (because the content of modern mathematics is largely abstract), but to nitpick a bit, number theory is part of mathematics too! Ramanujan and Euler, for ex
22.
by nicklaf 3y ago
Notably, this material is based on an earlier paper on the design of algorithms by induction, also by the author: http://akira.ruc.dk/~keld/teaching/CSS_e10/Manber88.pdf
23.
by nicklaf 3y ago
Interesting work! Thanks for putting this together. One potentially problematic thing about the new Imgur policy is that it will break machine learning projects that depend on Imgur for NSFW data. For example, here's a project relying
24.
by nicklaf 3y ago
Hmm, I suppose I'm inclined to agree with you here. If Wikipedia chooses not to adopt a style guideline on matters like this, his little quest to robo-edit this phrase is unrepresentative of Wikipedians.
25.
by nicklaf 3y ago
Pedantic, perhaps, but within the purview of an editor of an encyclopedia enforcing a style guideline!
26.
by nicklaf 3y ago
One thing I missed from Frank Herbert's work in watching Villeneuve's adaptation was the intimate connection to the characters you get from reading all the dialogue. I suppose a film version is going to cut some things, but Villen
27.
by nicklaf 3y ago
Not Wang tiles, but a quasiperiodic tiling discovered by Robert Ammann: https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~greg/floors.html
28.
by nicklaf 4y ago
Yep! Evil for Emacs, IntelliJ, ranger, ksh93 shell history editing (this one includes search!), DuckDuckGo, Fastmail, Gmail....
29.
by nicklaf 4y ago
"Shards are the secret ingredient in the webscale sauce": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
30.
by nicklaf 4y ago
Google turns up a Clojure library called Avout [0]. The library itself isn't too important here, but its website cites the philosophy of Rich Hickey and Alfred North Whitehead on state being an illusion: Rich Hickey has spoken eloquen

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