scottmsul

6 ms·

1.
by scottmsul 3mo ago
An interesting anecdote: I was a big trumpet player in high school, and developed perfect pitch but mainly only for trumpet sounds.
2.
by scottmsul 1y ago
Or you could, you know, let people have access to the base model and engineer their own system prompts? Instead of us hoping you tweak the only allowed prompt to something everyone likes? So much for "open" AI...
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by scottmsul 2y ago
Also I should add, being a Factorio veteran with 2-3k hours in this game, I think the goal of making the "largest possible factory" is too vague and not the right metric. When Factorio players make large megabases, they don't
4.
by scottmsul 2y ago
There was a HN post here not too long ago about a team that used reinforcement learning to train an agent to beat pokemon red. They mentioned how they had to tweak the cost function to give small rewards for exploring and big rewards for co
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by scottmsul 2y ago
I made one of these a while ago https://github.com/scottmsul/Password-Generator
6.
by scottmsul 2y ago
I just see a bunch of spinning coins forever and nothing happens with no way to stop it...
7.
by scottmsul 2y ago
> if you have a path in the upper bunk that gets broken you are screwed Counter-factuals like this don't apply when talking about average probabilities. If you cross over, it's an identical graph with identical probabilities. i
8.
by scottmsul 2y ago
Suppose all the groceries raised the price of item X by exactly the same percent Y on the same day. At first glance this would look like perfect collusion in the data. But how do you know it wasn't just the supplier price going up by Y
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by scottmsul 2y ago
Suppose we took this line of thinking to its natural conclusion. If we wanted to be completely neutral, in theory we could have no male/female division at all, and just compete for the "best human" in each sport. But because
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by scottmsul 2y ago
Except sinusoids are special in that they are natural solutions to the Helmholtz wave equation. There's other problems too like square waves having infinite energy. This article might make sense to a mathematician or computer scienti
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by scottmsul 3y ago
Congrats! For anyone who's interested, there's a group of us dedicated to natural myopia reduction at reducedlens.org, which is a free and open-source fork of endmyopia. I've even started measuring my axial length to try and
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by scottmsul 3y ago
But why would it be a dodecahedron and not just a metal plate with a hole in it? Seems overkill.
13.
by scottmsul 3y ago
Having given my brother a Tungsten cube once for Christmas, it's possible they just made these because they were fun and looked cool.
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by scottmsul 3y ago
I'd be curious to see if someone could use generative AI to make fake irises and scam the handout mechanism
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by scottmsul 3y ago
I'm in Florida so it must be pretty major.
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by scottmsul 3y ago
Interesting, I didn't think to try mobile, that actually works for me too. Twitter seems to be fine for me on both mobile and desktop. Edit: actually seems like twitter isn't refreshing with any new data on desktop
17.
Is GitHub Down?
9 points by scottmsul 3y ago|8 comments
18.
by scottmsul 4y ago
The two-state system was the first example I learned in undergrad stat mech, and really helped me understand the first-principles definitions of entropy, temperature, etc. My parent comment was more for the casual HN reader, but if you real
19.
by scottmsul 4y ago
Everyone here seems totally lost on the physics connection. Suppose you have a box of atoms, each atom can be in one of two states, a low energy E1 and a high energy E2. If the box has a temperature T, then the probability that any atom is
20.
by scottmsul 4y ago
Also the novel rulesets make it so much more interesting than vanilla sudoku. Oftentimes the puzzles have really abstract/mathematical/beautiful break-ins. Definitely adds a lot of variety and replayability.
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by scottmsul 4y ago
In general relativity space-time is a 4-dimensional (3 space + 1 time) surface that itself can expand, contract, or move around. It's perfectly reasonable in GR to have a distance be L at time t, then L+dL at time t+dt. No extra spatia
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by scottmsul 4y ago
There was a point in time where everything in the visible universe was the size of a potato, but the entire universe (beyond the visible edge) is most likely just more matter in every direction indefinitely. Because the universe follows g
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by scottmsul 4y ago
I would add the connection to GR. In a Newtonian world, there would be nowhere for matter to expand into, and our intuition would be correct. But in General Relativity, space itself can grow or shrink like a fluid.
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by scottmsul 4y ago
Something that's always bothered me about many-worlds is that it states the number of worlds should always be increasing exponentially. Which means from an anthropic point of view, the most likely time to be born is the last ever human
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by scottmsul 4y ago
When I was 5 my parents put me in a "normal" kindergarten, where I failed to do literally anything - I wouldn't make any marks on any of the sheets, not even my name. They were worried I had some kind of developmental problem
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by scottmsul 4y ago
I'm guessing he means there's no algorithms that decide what you see and what you don't, you just see everything from everyone you follow. But I don't use Tumblr so I'm not 100% sure.
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by scottmsul 4y ago
I'm about 200 hours into a Space Exploration game with some friends, and we just started building spaceships! One thing I really like about this mod is that it forces you to properly learn the circuit network, I never really used it in
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by scottmsul 4y ago
I took this exact class exactly one decade ago (Fall 2012) when it was taught by Jeff Foster! One of my all-time favorite classes. The main language used was OCaml, and we ended the course by writing a compiler for a made-up minimalistic OO
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by scottmsul 4y ago
It's unfortunate there's no mod support. As someone with over 2000 hours, for me it's really the overhaul mods that give the game endless variety and replayability. Might not be a bad idea to make certain overhaul mods availa
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by scottmsul 4y ago
A simpler way to describe Noether's Theorem is that for everything you can change about the coordinate system which leaves the physics the same, it's possible to derive a real physical quantity that is conserved. For instance, if

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