rors

12 ms·

1.
by rors 5mo ago
The Barbican is not a typical brutalist construction. The term brutalist refers to béton brut, which means raw concrete. I.e. you can see the shape of the wooden slats used as a cast. The concrete in the Barbican was finished by drilling to
2.
by rors 8mo ago
I was big fan of Scala a decade ago. The idea of a “scalable language” where DSLs could be built within the type system seemed super powerful. I lost my enthusiasm when the community decided they wanted to use it as Haskell on the JVM. I’m
3.
by rors 1y ago
A bit of a tangent but the same byproduct effect is seen in the production of sherry casks for finishing Scotch. A lot of sherry bodegas only really exist to churn out barrels for whisky distillers.
4.
by rors 1y ago
There has also been a big change in the UK’s tax regime that discourages hiring new workers https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/30/bosses-reeve...
5.
by rors 1y ago
The first pension was put in place by Bismark as a way to "steal the clothes of the socialists whilst they were bathing". It was seen as the cheapest social benefit because life expectancies were so low. A popular policy delivered
6.
by rors 1y ago
People are odd in terms of what they will tolerate. I prefer having a 15 mins stroll to pick up my coffee or food, for others it’s deal breaking. The time argument is also weird. I find that I have a maximum of 6 hours highly productive wor
7.
by rors 2y ago
I remember attending ACL one year, where the conference organisers ran an experiment to test the effectiveness of double blind reviews. They asked reviewers to identify the institution that submitted the anonymised paper. Roughly 50% of rev
8.
by rors 2y ago
I have a PhD from one of the best universities in the world in Machine Translation, I was training feed forward networks in 2014, built models in TensorFlow in 2016, founded a generative AI startup in 2019 and signed deals with huge consume
9.
by rors 2y ago
My girlfriend is an Orthopaedic Surgeon. Great when I've got a broken arm, or need shelves putting up. I wouldn't let her anywhere near my heart or brain. Medicine is super specialised. I hear you on geography though. Luckily the
10.
by rors 2y ago
This seems to be a characteristic of many high functioning people, especially successful engineers. There is a "correct" way of living your life, conducting your business, using your text editor, etc. It's helpful in that it
11.
by rors 2y ago
My statement did not imply zero sum thinking. The pie can get bigger and the bigger slices can get disproportionately bigger. As an analogy, economies can increase their GDP and inequality can also increase. Just because something is gettin
12.
by rors 2y ago
The value of content creators on YouTube will follow a power law distribution. There will be a very small number of hugely profitable creators and a vast sea of people who do ok. This power law distribution makes YouTube very different to s
13.
by rors 2y ago
I wonder if the homogeneity has come from gentrification and high property prices. NYC might have been a crime-ridden dump in the 60s, but it was cheap enough that Andy Warhol could afford to rent a massive studio. And a modern day Leonard
14.
by rors 2y ago
I feel like a lot of these debates boil down dealing with discomfort. We seem to be creating a society where everyone feels they have the right to not feeling stressed and uncomfortable. The danger to never feeling challenged is that you do
15.
by rors 2y ago
I was diagnosed with dyslexia in my 40s. It's helped me understand why I struggle with certain tasks. Overall having a label has been a net positive. I'm hesitant to share my diagnosis with colleagues. I've been able to devel
16.
by rors 2y ago
To reinforce your argument, in the linked article GFS claim that they weren't responsible for the tax avoidance. The recruitment companies they subcontracted out came up with this wheeze. Complex corporate structures enable plausible d
17.
by rors 2y ago
The UK government doesn't mandate units for reporting your own weight. The examples listed are required by law.
18.
by rors 2y ago
It seems obvious to me that LLMs wouldn't be able to find examples of every single problem posed to them in training data. There wouldn't be enough examples for the factual look up needed in an information retrieval style search.
19.
by rors 2y ago
Your analogy is a little biased in that most professional basketball players careers are over by the time they hit their mid-thirties. If they want to go pro then they need to be playing at a high standard in their teens. Whereas someone ta
20.
by rors 2y ago
David Bowie said it better “If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And whe
21.
by rors 2y ago
Eric Hobsbawm's tetralogy on the long 19th century: Age of Revolution, Age of Capital, Age of Empire, and Age of Extremes. A truly epic date-driven summary of how the industrial and political revolutions of the 19th transformed the wor
22.
by rors 2y ago
Perplexity is term from information theory. It's one measure of the quality of an LM. I.e. how perplexed is my model? To an experienced researcher it's a unit of measurement like metres or kg. https://en.wikipedia.org&#
23.
by rors 2y ago
You've managed to move on from a situation where you were deprived of security, both with respect to love and money, to a new situation where you are secure at a relatively young age. That's a huge achievement. I would suggest fir
24.
by rors 2y ago
My partner is a surgeon in the UK. She's planning on leaving the profession at the end of the year. We talk a lot about what is wrong with the medical profession. One issue is the type of person attracted to the profession. They'r
25.
by rors 2y ago
Over the last few months I've been experimenting with Buddhist meditation, which leans heavily into this metaphor. They phrase the metaphor differently, with a focus on flattening of the grooves in your mind. I've found these idea
26.
by rors 8y ago
I wrote my thesis on tropical geometry for machine translation[1]. You can use it to train a a linear model for structured prediction, which used to be the dominant model before RNNs. [1]: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology&#x2
27.
by rors 11y ago
Keynesians advocate for large amounts of public spending during recessions to stimulate the economy. They don't advocate for racking up a large amount of public dept to spend during the periods of growth, which is what happened in Gre
28.
by rors 12y ago
Andrea was sent pictures of her head superimposed on porn actors. She was sent rape and death threats. Was Hank sent death threats? To be clear, my definition of 'a campaign of intimidation and fear' are threats to your personal s
29.
by rors 12y ago
I can buy that the joke was just inappropriate, and no doubt that she massively overreacted. However, she was the one who ended up with the death threats. It's hard to reassure women that they're safe at tech events if the result
30.
by rors 12y ago
After reading this I don't like Adria Richards very much. She seems very self involved with a persecution context. However, she is still very much a victim of sexist online culture. Bad people can be victims too. A man makes a mildly s

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