picometer

8 ms·

1.
by picometer 5mo ago
The state is not going to drown. The polity of urban New Orleans is the liberal thorn in its side, and that's the area at risk.
2.
by picometer 9mo ago
The code block after "Welcome" is the code sample. Very literate.
3.
by picometer 2y ago
This is a well-referenced essay, drawing the on writing of David Parnas [1], Peter Naur [2], and Zach Tellman [3]. As software developers we’re intimately familiar with these ideas. But the industry still treats it as “folk knowledge”, desp
4.
by picometer 2y ago
I’m a violinist (amateur but play regularly). When I have an important note, which is held for a while and needs vibrato, I frequently decide to shift my left hand position so that my middle finger is responsible, rather than the index fing
5.
by picometer 2y ago
Agreed. I recall being taught in college physics labs: there is no such thing as “human error”. Instead, think about the causes and mechanisms of each source of error, which helps both quantifying and mitigating them. Same energy here. “Be
6.
by picometer 2y ago
Count me in as interested!
7.
by picometer 2y ago
A while back I prototyped (very roughly) an auditory equivalent to “syntax highlighting”, using ambient tones and white noise, rather than discrete beeps/sound effects. [1] I’m actually revisiting this project right now! I’m reimplemen
8.
by picometer 2y ago
I’m glad I saw your comment!! I’ve experienced this exact phenomenon when playing Minecraft while listening to an audiobook or podcast. Returning to that area will immediately remind me of the topic or narrative that I heard. Presumably it’
9.
The Slow Media Manifesto (2010)(en.slow-media.net)
4 points by picometer 2y ago|0 comments
10.
by picometer 2y ago
The museum was also a generous community space; I remember attending a Seattle Indies game jam and other events before the pandemic. It was very special to be surrounded by reminders of early-computing exploratory spirit.
11.
by picometer 2y ago
*If* such a thing could be done under typical corporate incentives/behavior, then I suspect the “high impact” part would need to be scrapped. Because when something is important to a corporation, it turns its eyes that thing (so to spe
12.
by picometer 2y ago
Question for ML/AI people: is it still common to use the term “overfitting” for these cases, where a model is overtrained on one thing, to the detriment of another? Or is that term only used for literal curve fitting?
13.
by picometer 2y ago
I do think it’s an interesting line of inquiry… but not robust enough. E.g. this paper would be much more interesting if it measured the threshold at which the LLM starts to become good at X, and linked that threshold to the number and char
14.
by picometer 2y ago
Yes, but in a major journal like PNAS? (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)
15.
by picometer 2y ago
Good point - I saw the FLAN anomaly and this didn’t occur to me! A good follow up question would be: why didn’t the other models do better on the 2nd-order question? Especially BLOOM and davinci-003, which were middling on the 1st-order que
16.
by picometer 2y ago
Skimming through studies like this, it strikes me that LLM inquiry is in its infancy. I’m not sure that the typical tools & heuristics of quantitative science are powerful enough. For instance, some questions on this particular study: -
17.
by picometer 2y ago
There are multiple senses of the word “creativity”, and this post focuses on one of them: divergent thinking. The other sense is that of constructive, goal-oriented creation, which ideas alone cannot achieve. It’s too bad we don’t have have
18.
3rd Voice by Evan Dahm (long form webcomic)(rice-boy.com)
2 points by picometer 3y ago|1 comments
19.
by picometer 3y ago
This is the latest work from compelling storyteller and worldbuilder Evan Dahm. The first book concludes on Monday.
20.
by picometer 3y ago
I’ve had a variety of responses to this list over my programming life (~10 years hobby, ~10 years professional). When I first encountered them as a hobbyist, they were surprising, as perhaps intended, due to the framing of classic vices as
21.
by picometer 3y ago
Wow - can you elaborate on your process to “debug” these different layers? What comprises your personal or team’s feedback loop, given that 6 months is short? (I suspect it’s a lot of sequencing?) Are there good comparisons to be made with
22.
by picometer 3y ago
We lack good metaphors here. Like genes, the following collections of information are plans , as other entities (workers, compilers, cells, etc) can reliably use them to produce larger, more complex objects: - Blueprint - Instruction manua
23.
by picometer 3y ago
A further thought that is too much for an edit… one of Alexander’s final conclusions is: > I’m glad that some people never develop epistemic learned helplessness, or develop only a limited amount of it, or only in certain domains. It see
24.
by picometer 3y ago
Summary: Scott Alexander recounts his gullibility to various well-reasoned crackpot arguments on a topic, and describes how he to decided to trust experts instead of investing time into learning enough to assess the topic for himself. Then
25.
An "AI Breakthrough" on Systematic Generalization in Language?(aiguide.substack.com)
47 points by picometer 3y ago|4 comments
26.
by picometer 3y ago
In hindsight, reviewer f5bf’s comment is fascinating: > - It would be interesting if the authors could say something about how these models deal with intransitive semantic similarities, e.g., with the similarities between 'river&#x2
27.
by picometer 3y ago
Honestly, perhaps I’m a purist, but Derek Sivers’ list isn’t sufficient for this type of “tech independence”. You can’t get around having to essentially rent your domain from the registry, unless you set up a registrar yourself. Perhaps you
28.
by picometer 3y ago
I think the possibility of this alternate navigation through cities and buildings is why certain open world games are so popular. For instance, the buildability of Minecraft and destructibility of GTA both enable worlds of exceptions and ed
29.
by picometer 3y ago
I agree, strongly, and am the happy owner of a Framework as my main computer. I’m about to make a somewhat pedantic observation but do not want it to detract from your main point - yes, it IS up to us to push this along. Now for the pedantr
30.
by picometer 3y ago
I was also slightly disappointed not to find a discussion of <code smells>, but the post is interesting, and we can still discuss code smells here. The post author (Michal Necasek) states, about the WIN87EM.DLL code: > It bears all

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