olooney

5 ms·

1.
by olooney 6d ago
That's true. Chess only teaches two general lessons about strategy: look more than one step ahead, and invent heuristics (abstractions that let you estimate if positions are good or bad) for yourself. Those are useful lessons, but you
2.
by olooney 12d ago
Here's my take on the "next-token predictor" idea, from a much longer article I wrote recently: https://www.oranlooney.com/post/rose-petals/#language-models It’s popular to dismiss LLMs as “just nex
3.
by olooney 1mo ago
1% more than you did last week, unless you're tired, sick, or injured. A little more for young people who are actively training.
4.
by olooney 1mo ago
Negative numbers were popularized in Europe by Michael Stifel's 1544 book Arithmetica Integra , where he called them "numeri absurdi." The concept emerged gradually, as mathematicians found they were useful for solving equat
5.
Recreating the Impossible Rhythm Illusion in "The Odyssey" Soundtrack [video](youtube.com)
1 points by olooney 1mo ago|0 comments
6.
by olooney 1mo ago
Scholars and academics have been bemoaning the pointlessness of what the article calls "knowledge work" for centuries. A few of my favorites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Scholar https:/&#
7.
by olooney 1mo ago
I've taken a lot of notes and done a lot of "scratchpad thinking" over the last 20 years, something I started in college but really got into in grad school. I've tried Evernote, OneNote, Obsidian. I've tried little
8.
by olooney 2mo ago
A brief chronology of the extended mind thesis: * Characteristica universalis, Leibniz (c. 1679) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis * As We May Think, Vannevar Bush (1945) - https://
9.
by olooney 2mo ago
I've been thinking of getting refern.app[1] to organize and catalog images... Have you used that? Do you have an opinion of how it stacks up against digiKam for the organization use case? Right now, I'm using a bunch of vibe-coded
10.
by olooney 2mo ago
On a similar note: on Steam, the original Dark Souls game[1] is listed with the "souls-like" tag. That's not wrong , I guess, but just kind of a tautology. Grice's maxims[2] generally have such tautologies omitted in or
11.
by olooney 2mo ago
Good discussion, but this conclusion: > I don’t know. Maybe a little. is not the right way to interpret the null result (insufficient evidence to reject null hypothesis that it has no effect) because the prior for supplements that people
12.
Soma Cube Forest(oranlooney.com)
1 points by olooney 2mo ago|0 comments
13.
by olooney 2mo ago
I wrote several polyomino solvers for this project: https://www.oranlooney.com/demos/soma-forest/ One of them used constraint solving with Z3, which was indeed reasonably fast. However, by far the fastest was a si
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What Rose Petals Teach Us about Induction(oranlooney.com)
41 points by olooney 2mo ago|10 comments
15.
by olooney 2mo ago
> so hopefully you can refresh a few times and get a fresh one every time If you randomly sample from only 60 quotes, then after 10 refreshes there will be a greater than 50% chance of at least one repeat, and by 20 refreshes it's u
16.
by olooney 2mo ago
I've been collecting quotes for a long time (about twenty years now) and have recently been thinking of doing something interesting with them. For example, I recently added a flashcard "game" to my quote page: https:/&#
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by olooney 2mo ago
If you enjoy this kind of thing, you might also like Martin Kleppe's work, such as the Quine Clock: https://aem1k.com/qlock/ I reverse engineered it to a unobfuscated version a few years ago: https://gi
18.
by olooney 2mo ago
Stigler's Law of Eponymy strikes again! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy
19.
by olooney 2mo ago
I like the 4-5-6 theorem: pi^4 + pi^5 = e^6 Well, to five decimal places, anyway. Some other good ones: e^pi - pi = 20 sqrt(2) ln pi = phi There are also famous "almost integers" such as this one discovered
20.
by olooney 3mo ago
This is quite interesting. Because of science fiction like the short story Lena [1] and the video game Soma [2], I've come to the realization that whole brain emulation[3] is unbelievably dangerous; unless you control the stack down
21.
by olooney 3mo ago
Greg Egan's description of how mathematics evolves into "truth mining" in his novel Diaspora is seeming more and more prescient. It essentially describes what mathematics would look like after formalization records all the
22.
by olooney 3mo ago
Haruki Murakami's entire body of work is basically self-therapy[1] and personally I feel it's been very therapeutic. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an excellent place to start. [1]: https://bloomsburyliterarystudiesblo
23.
by olooney 3mo ago
It could return a vector or a deferred expression? In polars, for example, operations on `pl.col` return `Expr` objects that are used to build queries, not immediately evaluated: df.filter(pl.col("status") == "active&q
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Petals Around the Rose(oranlooney.com)
3 points by olooney 3mo ago|0 comments
25.
The Considerate Data Modeler(oranlooney.com)
3 points by olooney 3mo ago|0 comments
26.
by olooney 4mo ago
> undeterministic abstraction I've seen people argue that LLMs will just add another layer to the top of the compiler stack: instead of writing code, we'll use English, and run it through a pipeline: English -> Rust -&
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Why the Monty Hall Problem Drives People Crazy(oranlooney.com)
3 points by olooney 4mo ago|0 comments
28.
by olooney 6mo ago
Incredibly detailed! The vision transformer stuff in particular is very useful to know. It's interesting that the token budgets are so much higher (up to 1120) than GPT, which uses 170 tokens per 512x512 tile. I wonder if that will lea
29.
by olooney 10mo ago
This isn't surprising; the majority of programmers are using LLMs, and Claude is pretty good for coding. Penetration testing is also a pretty good fit for an agentic loop - you run a tool, read the output, and decide on your next move,
30.
by olooney 11mo ago
I'm pretty sure my mistake was assuming people had read the article and knew the author veered wildly halfway through towards also advocating against using LLMs for proofreading and that you should "just let your mistakes stand.&q

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