But you posted this to a site that is literally called Hacker News... To be clear, I am not supporting any attempt at undermining your project, but people are pointing out to you that your results will be called into question if your only defence against "hacking" is "I hope people don't figure out how to do that".
Readit NewsMauranKilom commented on Show HN: Goldbach Conjecture up to 4*10^18+7*10^13 medium.com/@jay_gridbach/... · Posted by u/jay_gridbach
What proofreading? Just click the spellcheck button.
Because no message has ever had its meaning twisted by overzealous spellcheck. No ducking way.
MauranKilom commented on Show HN: A Demo for a Strategy Game store.steampowered.com/ap... · Posted by u/joegibbs
I don't have much to contribute, but the name "Rephsis" seems borderline unpronounceable to me (maybe that's why the empire is crumbling? :P). I don't know whether you had some inspiration behind it, but to me it has a strong "I combined letters until I had a word that looked new" vibe.
The screenshots in the Steam page do look impressive though! As an outsider, I could mistake this for a recent Civ game. Congrats on making it here!
MauranKilom commented on Marketing to Engineers (2001) bly.com/Pages/documents/S... · Posted by u/herbertl
But don't other people (not only engineers) also slowly realize that all these emotion-appealing ads are deceiving? Don't they want to be informed, and not brainwashed and exploited?
Do they? I think it's mainly about how much energy you are willing to invest into making rational decisions over emotional/"gut" ones. I mean, in the end, it probably doesn't matter which kind of shaving cream you buy, so it's easiest to go with the one that (due to e.g. ad-created familiarity bias, or just "niceness" of visual presentation) you have the best feeling about.
MauranKilom commented on Noexcept affects libstdc++’s unordered_set quuxplusone.github.io/blo... · Posted by u/signa11
You avoid any but trivial constructors an place all failable logic in a separate init()
In other words, you introduce an invalid state to every object and make constructing objects a lot more cumbersome. The first is the exact opposite of the (imo highly desirable) "make invalid states unrepresentable" principle, and the second is also a pretty extreme cost to productivity. I wouldn't say this is never worth it, but it's a very high price to pay.
Thanks for this, it provides an intriguing approach to thinking about transformers (or predictors in general)!
For extracting the fractal from the residual stream, did I understand it correctly as follows: You repeatedly sample the transformer, each time recording the actual internal state of the HMM and the (higher-dimensional) residual stream. Then you perform a linear regression to obtain a projection matrix from residual stream vector to HMM state vector.
If so, then doesn't that risk "finding" something that isn't necessarily there? While I think/agree that the structure of the mixed state representation is obviously represented in the transformer in this case, in general I don't think that, strictly speaking, finding a particular kind of structure when projecting transformer "state" into known world "state" is proof that the transformer models the world states and its beliefs about the world states in that same way. Think "correlation is not causation". Maybe this is splitting hairs (because, in effect, what does it matter how exactly the transformer "works" when we can "see" the expected mixed state structure inside it), but I am slightly concerned that we introduce our knowledge of the world through the linear regression.
Like, consider a world with two indistinguishable states (among others), and a predictor that (noisily) models those two with just one equivalent state. Wouldn't the linear regression/projection of predictor states into world states risk "discovering" the two world states in the predictor, which don't actually exist there in isolation at all?
Again, I'm not doubting the conclusions/explanation of how, in the article, that transformer models that world. I am only hypothesizing that, for more complex examples with more "messy" worlds, looking for the best projection into the known world states is dangerous: It presupposes that the world states form a true subspace of the residual stream states (or equivalent).
Would be happy to be convinced that there is something deeper that I'm missing here. :)
What I had read somewhere is that some of the features of C++ are slow and will require runtime support with extra functions, but some features of C++ are as fast and efficient as C so is not a problem.
I dislike many of the features of C++ and would do them differently, although some things do help. For example, I think that they should not have allowed to overload = and , operators, and I think that features of GNU C such as zero-length arrays and zero-length structures are helpful even though apparently in C++ a structure cannot really have zero length (but in C it can), but my opinion is I think it should be possible for your own structure or union type to overload any operators that are not already defined, including reading through and writing through a pointer (if you define the structure type as having a specific type that it points to; by default it does not point to anything). For example:
struct X x;
struct X y;
(...)
*x=*y; // This line can be overloaded assignment and dereferencing
x=y; // This line cannot be overloaded assignment
x+y; // This line can be overloaded addition, since addition on structure types is not normally defined> I think that they should not have allowed to overload = and , operators
Comma operator I would agree is really only used for shenanigans. But operator= is as crucial as the copy/move constructors for ownership, so I'm not sure how you picture this...
> apparently in C++ a structure cannot really have zero length
Yes it can: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/attributes/no_uni...
> I think it should be possible for your own structure or union type to overload any operators that are not already defined
I see that you are trying to solve the problem of "when reading this code, I don't know if these are the built-in operators or custom ones". I would be interested in learning about situations in which this was a problem for you, because I have not made that experience myself. From my perspective, you need to know the types of x and y to know in the first place which operations are possible - default or custom - so this rule does not really buy you much. But again, I don't think I understand your problem well enough.
FWIW, you can define a custom operator-> and operator* (they have to return pointers, or types that themselves have operator->/operator* which are then applied recursively). I am not convinced that mixing pointer-related semantics into e.g. object assignment is a sufficiently elegant solution from a conceptual perspective though.
As a younger programmer, I used to listen to people hating about everything C++ does, offers, or wants to be. Specifically https://yosefk.com/c++fqa/ [1]. Then I tasted the RAII (probably up there with Dynamic Programming for "horribly named but super powerful paradigms") koolaid, and threw my caution to the wind. It's been a pleasant ride since, even if I've been living in a somewhat comfy C++ environment with few third-party integration woes and a reasonable compiler upgrade pace.
Sure, I agree, you should carefully evaluate which language best serves your needs, and what tools in a language you should use or stay away from. But some game dev ranting about which C++ features they consider useless (without even articulating their background or constraints) is worthless imo. Especially if this is the credit they give to their name:
> After over 20 years working with C/C++ I finally got clear idea how header files need to be organized.
[1] Yes, that FAQ parody is now very outdated, seeing as it precedes even C++11. I can believe that it was on-point at the time of writing, but C++ grew up since then.
MauranKilom commented on Lumina's legal threats and my about-face trevorklee.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/gdudeman
Regardless of all the "he said, she said", libel or not libel, email response times, GMP, threats and whatever drama:
Is there anyone who is seriously contesting the "it is intended to cure/prevent a disease, therefore it is a drug, therefore it needs FDA approval to be sold legally" line of reasoning?
More humoristically: https://xkcd.com/2475/ and https://xkcd.com/2530/
Less humoristically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide
MauranKilom commented on The window for great-grandmothers is closing memoirsandrambles.substac... · Posted by u/yakkomajuri
"Number of kids you have" is a strange place to focus on environmental impact, don't you think? A modest household with 6 kids, even one that lives to developed-world standards, has much less of an environmental impact than a single billionaire with a private jet. Like, orders of magnitudes less. If the family has one car and doesn't eat a lot of beef they probably have less of an impact than a family with 2 kids and 2 cars that goes to McDonald's a few times a week.
Basically, the environmental impact of having more kids is sort of drowned out by various consumer choices, which are in turn drowned out by societal choices that no one family can impact at all.
FWIW, "number of flights you take" also drowns out your eating habits in environmental impact. Compared to how much they cost, flights have stupid CO2 equivalents.
However, I don't know why you are comparing a single billionaire vs a single X kid household. Like, the number of each (or even of private jets) are not even _remotely_ in the same ballpark. Which is why "number of kids" is not at all a strange place to focus on environmental impact, but "billionaire lifestyle choices" is.