wenc

7 ms·

1.
by wenc 3d ago
Orig image (2nd page): https://lib.utah.edu/collections/rarebooks/database/science/... XeLaTeX: https://nullpaste.org/mcKAFOqJmbZv PDF output: https://www.dropbox.com/scl
2.
by wenc 4d ago
I just asked GPT6-Astra to transcribe a page from Newton's Principia to LaTeX. It did an amazing job outputing a XeLaTeX doc with a mixture of text and TikZ. Looks really good.
3.
by wenc 4d ago
Me too. Claude Opus 5's English is insufferable. Opus 4.6-4.8 was more reasonable. I've moved to Codex 5.6-Sol. Much saner English, much better at execution, and gets stuff done in a matter-of-factly kind of way (Claude Code is a
4.
by wenc 8d ago
> The population of the west who fit into zoomer near millennials wouldn't even be close to 500m. There are many people of all ages not in the west from very populous nations who use Insta, FB and WhatsApp. I’ve learned that US usag
5.
Amazon Acquires Duck Labs (DuckDB)(motherduck.com)
2 points by wenc 21d ago|1 comments
6.
by wenc 28d ago
I lived in Montreal as a poor student and would eat ground horse because it was affordable (Quebec has a horse meat industry - viande de cheval). It tasted like a leaner ground beef and cost the same. I also ate canned snails which were als
7.
by wenc 28d ago
I do this in one word “eli5” (explain like I’m 5). It’s a Redditism that it understands. I also have a writing steering file that makes Opus’ writing less insufferable. Otherwise it’s really bad. I also have an interlocutor skill that makes
8.
by wenc 2mo ago
I'm one of those Canadians with a Ph.D. who left for the U.S. I didn't actually want to leave, but I was staring at the prospect of not unemployment, but underemployment. Canadian industry doesn't really that many companies t
9.
by wenc 2mo ago
That is absolutely hilarious. Dario Amodei, a romcom lead.
10.
by wenc 2mo ago
Echoing the other folks, I have a different experience. I profile sql performance and LLMs find more opportunities than I could. All it takes is real data, a sql repl and an agent. Just ask the agent to use the repl to EXPLAIN and profile t
11.
by wenc 2mo ago
Meal is a bit hard to define. Here are some cases: You can get food for under $10 at many casual NYC restaurants -- if you just order an appetizer. Also a snack is not a meal. For instance, I noticed a Salted Egg Yolk Bun in NYC for $1.50.
12.
by wenc 2mo ago
I just fed this to GPT 5.6 Sol: Counterexample to Jacobian conjecture: ((1+xy)^3 z + y^2 (1+xy) (4+3xy), y + 3 x (1+xy)^2 z + 3 x y^2 (4+3xy), 2 x - 3 x^2 y - x^3 z): \C^3\to \C^3, has jacobian determinant -2, and sends (0, 0, -1&#x2
13.
by wenc 2mo ago
History shows that DRAM is a brutally cyclical business with boom and bust cycles. It's also heavily capital intensive. You build an expensive fab now, and then demand plummets and you're stuck selling at near cost while carrying
14.
by wenc 2mo ago
I still use Logseq and conceptually it’s still a great method for building a second brain. It fits the way my brain works. But it has been dormant for years and early attempts at syncing didn’t work well. I paid to support the sync effort b
15.
by wenc 2mo ago
We can disagree about Lynnwood (that's my opinion). But Seattle does have very low social wattage. p.s. I should clarify about Lynnwood since this is contentious for folks. For me, Lynnwood produced more social collisions that I care a
16.
by wenc 2mo ago
No it is not. (lived experience as an ethnic minority). Lynnwood had way better restaurants and cafes that opened late. Liking Ballard doesn't mean I endorse its energy. Ballard is one of the quietest parts of the city (the Nordic Muse
17.
by wenc 2mo ago
I've lived all over the country, both in big and small cities, and most recently in the Seattle area (across the lake in Kirkland) for 4 years. Seattle has trappings of a city, but socially it doesn't feel like one in the way Chic
18.
by wenc 3mo ago
I did a search and found that the satellite internet market size is $16B today and $38B in 2031 (5 years from now) https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/satellit... But I also think that focusing on resid
19.
by wenc 3mo ago
As someone from Chicago (actual Chicago, south side, not the suburbs), randomly talking to strangers is what we do. We're talking to strangers at the bus stop, at the grocery check out, or just wherever. It's just phatic conversat
20.
by wenc 3mo ago
Just to add to your Texas comment: there are a few larger states that have distinct hubs where people think so differently, that they might as well be living in different states. People who haven't lived in these states don't real
21.
by wenc 3mo ago
Attached is the writing.md I use to steer Opus 4.8. Prompt: "use the writing.md steering on x.md and loop until all LLM traces are removed". I ran it on TFA and Pangram flagged it as LLM generated but Claude Fable couldn&#
22.
by wenc 3mo ago
I have a steering .md file that instructs Opus how not to sound like an LLM when writing prose (I write prose in my IDE with Opus). The steering is specific to me, but I've found that giving Opus rules like eschewing punchy journalisti
23.
by wenc 4mo ago
I can attest to this. I work in Midtown Manhattan. You'd think walking around meant getting distracted by the all the activity around you that you'd forget about the problem you're trying to solve. But I've found that di
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by wenc 4mo ago
People often say Mandarin and Cantonese are like Spanish and Portuguese, but that undersells how different they are. Your example of Spanish and French is more accurate -- same language family, but different grammar and vocabulary. I offer
25.
by wenc 4mo ago
Category theory is rarely useful by itself, but it can be a mental scaffold when designing things like query languages. Microsoft's LINQ dsl within C# used category theory ideas to ensure consistency. That said, the applicability surfa
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by wenc 4mo ago
If you lived in a high place (Denver), you will find it different from a flat lowland (Chicago). Also in Rio, how high you live can be a marker depending on which part of town you are. Favelas are on hills, whereas wealthy people in Zona Su
27.
by wenc 4mo ago
But why though? DuckDB can still be used as a local query engine — I still use it as that. I haven’t touched any of the DuckLake stuff and the duckdb cli and Python library are still my bread and butter. They can add new use cases, but it d
28.
by wenc 4mo ago
DuckDB is both a standalone and a component. This effort is actually very coherent and brings it back into a familiar usage model — that of a traditional client server RDBMS. RDBMS have always been multi-user concurrent systems. DuckDB is a
29.
by wenc 4mo ago
When did FT become Business Insider? I have an FT subscription and they keep moving toward this kind of narrative first reporting to get clicks. It’s no longer a believable paper.
30.
by wenc 4mo ago
It sounds like this replaces the PCA reconstruction function with a quadratic. The normal PCA encoding: 1) Given a mean-center-scaled X matrix, get the latent variable matrix T with X = T * P’ + e, where P = loadings and e = residuals. The

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