sebastos

6 ms·

1.
by sebastos 14d ago
Thanks for your response, very intriguing! I have some controls background, and there’s something tantalizing about the idea that perhaps we need to be looking at the brain in frequency space, as it were. Are you aware of reservoir computi
2.
by sebastos 14d ago
Hijacking your post with a dubious segue because I’m itching to bounce these thoughts off somebody: I’ve been consuming a lot of talks / writing recently about “enactive” pictures of how our brains function. From what I gather, recent
3.
by sebastos 15d ago
Sure, the specifics of this issue are intriguing on their own terms to the website nerds, but “there exists a problem with display of the website” surely rates as a tangential annoyance. It’s unrealistic to imagine that we could ever fully
4.
by sebastos 15d ago
>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. This is the guideline that people find, by far, the hardest not
5.
by sebastos 24d ago
I suspect you might hear a lot of push back on this take, but I for one fully agree. I would go as far as to say that in my workplace, this a nearly inverse relationship between quality of work and how actively that person is thinking about
6.
by sebastos 1mo ago
Sorry, I shortened to the point of inaccuracy - I should have said not fully electronic _speed_. Not meant to say that it was mechanically reading and writing values per se, just that the slow rotation of a mechanical drum was essential for
7.
by sebastos 1mo ago
…and whose digital calculator was _just_ a calculator (not a general purpose computer) that read values from a mechanical drum (so not fully electronic), and sat in a basement until it was later disassembled. That this device managed to qua
8.
by sebastos 3mo ago
The grandparent I was responding to said: >If a stock never intends to pay dividends, the value of the stock is simply the price the next shumck is willing to pay. So, by construction, we're talking about the value of shares in a hy
9.
by sebastos 3mo ago
And you can sell your tulip. But if the mania stopped and you suddenly _couldn’t_ find another person to sell it to, would you now be upset you paid $5000 for a tulip? What’s the value at which you wouldn’t be upset? Ok, that’s the intrinsi
10.
by sebastos 3mo ago
Yes, the profits it pays out are the one thing that actually makes sense, but the premise of the grandparent post was to ask what a share is worth _without_ dividends. And the answer is that shares are intrinsically worth very little. Liqui
11.
by sebastos 3mo ago
That’s the story, but it’s bullshit. The underlying intrinsic value of a stock can only be materialized if the company liquidates and you receive a share of the sell off of its assets. How many publicly traded companies abruptly decide they
12.
by sebastos 5mo ago
Amen. It always baffled me that cross compiling was ever considered a special, weird, off-nominal thing. I’d love to understand the history of that better, because it seems like it should have been obvious from the start that building for t
13.
by sebastos 5mo ago
The tough truth is that there already is a cargo for C/C++: Conan2. I know, python, ick. I know, conanfile.py, ick. But despite its warts, Conan fundamentally CAN handle every part of the general problem. Nobody else can. Profiles to m
14.
by sebastos 6mo ago
The ENIAC team’s decision to spin off and incorporate was surely pushed along by how they got screwed multiple times by the academics - Goldstine and Von Neumann, plus the university itself. It’s easier to celebrate the free publishing of
15.
by sebastos 6mo ago
Wait, where are you thinking the von Neumann paper which came from?
16.
by sebastos 6mo ago
I was sad to see you guys shut down - I think you were on to something with deterministic faster-than-realtime replay. Not surprised it was hard to find paying customers, but for what it's worth, my engineering self thought that you gu
17.
by sebastos 6mo ago
The real answer is that once LLMs passed a "casual" application of the Turing test, it just made us realize that the "casual Turing test" is not particularly interesting. It turns out to be too easy to ape human behavior
18.
by sebastos 6mo ago
Firstly, the models that pass the Math Olympiad aren’t the same models as the ones you’re saying “pass the Turing test”. Secondly, nothing actually passes the Turing test. They pass a vibes check of “hey that’s pretty good!” but if your lif
19.
by sebastos 7mo ago
Before you can learn how far away an object is, you must decide: which laser return corresponds to which object? In fact, what counts as an object? Where does a tree stop and become a fallen tree branch? Is that object moving towards me? Is
20.
by sebastos 7mo ago
Then you deeply underestimate how difficult the problem is, and deeply misunderstand where all the effort has been spent in developing autonomous vehicles.
21.
by sebastos 7mo ago
Insightful points! It would be interesting if, with all the anxiety about vibe coding becoming the new normal, its only lasting effect is the emergence of smaller B2B companies that quickly razzle dazzle together a bespoke replacement for C
22.
by sebastos 7mo ago
Great take. There's a line in the first season that runs as an undercurrent through the whole show ("Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets you to the thing"). Joe originally says this to make the v
23.
by sebastos 7mo ago
But invoking No True Scotsman would imply that the focus is on gatekeeping the profession of programming. I don’t think the above poster is really concerned with the prestige aspect of whether vibe bros should be considered true programmers
24.
by sebastos 8mo ago
We’re using the C++ Actor Framework (CAF) to provide the actor system implementation, and then we ended up using a stupid old protobuf to describe the compute graph. Protobuf doubles as a messaging format and a schema with reflection, so it
25.
by sebastos 8mo ago
Hmm, you think? I’m currently engineering a system that uses an actor framework to describe graphs of concurrent processing. We’re going to a lot of trouble to set up a system that can inflate a description into a running pipeline, along wi
26.
by sebastos 8mo ago
As Douglas Adams and xkcd #1227 have pointed out, the older generations have complained about this sort of thing since Plato. However, I do not believe this observation settles the matter, because it does not seriously contend with the null
27.
by sebastos 8mo ago
Ok - it sounds like you’re right, but I think despite your clarification I remain confused. Isn’t the linked post all about how those two things always have a mingling at the boundary? Like, suppose I want to develop and distribute a c++ us
28.
by sebastos 8mo ago
>(which it rarely is) You're saying it's _rare_ for developers to want to advance a dependency past the ancient version contained in <whatever the oldest release they want to support> is? Speaking for the robotics and ML
29.
by sebastos 8mo ago
Check it in and build it yourself using the common build system that you and the third party dependency definitely definitely share, because this is the C/C++ ecosystem?
30.
by sebastos 8mo ago
I find this sentiment bewildering. Can you help me understand your perspective? Is this specifically C or C++? How do you manage a C/C++ project across a team without a package manager? What is your methodology for incorporating third

More ›