ViscountPenguin (u/ViscountPenguin)

ViscountPenguin commented on PBS News Hour West to go dark after ASU discontinues contract statepress.com/article/20... · Posted by u/heavyset_go

lynndotpy · 5 days ago

The economics are rough, but there are many which offer all three. E.g.: NPR's text site: https://text.npr.org/

ViscountPenguin · 5 days ago

Public funding is kind of a cheat, but if we're gonna include them, I'd like to spruik that the ABC still technically has functional rss feeds: https://james.cridland.net/blog/2025/abc-news-australia-rss-...

They're no longer officially supported though.

ViscountPenguin commented on History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts github.com/DGoettlich/his... · Posted by u/iamwil

bobro · 6 days ago

I would love to see this LLM try to solve math olympiad questions. I’ve been surprised by how well current LLMs perform on them, and usually explain that surprise away by assuming the questions and details about their answers are in the training set. It would be cool to see if the general approach to LLMs is capable of solving truly novel (novel to them) problems.

ViscountPenguin · 6 days ago

I suspect that it would fail terribly, it wasn't until the 1900s that the modern definition of a vector space was even created iirc. Something trained in maths up until the 1990s should have a shot though.

ViscountPenguin commented on Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers andrewmccalip.com/space-d... · Posted by u/flinner

compiler-guy · 10 days ago

Unregulated casinos don't need this kind of compute. Most could be run on a decent raspberry pi or two.

At any rate, one basic communication's satellite worth of compute would be more than enough. No need for TPUs.

ViscountPenguin · 9 days ago

A cube-sat casino is an interesting concept for sure.

ViscountPenguin commented on Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers andrewmccalip.com/space-d... · Posted by u/flinner

hirsin · 9 days ago

At this point I'm going to assume that anyone pushing datacenters in space wants to host child pornography. That's the only realistic workload that ticks all the boxes for orbital datacenters.

ViscountPenguin · 9 days ago

I don't think it would "solve" little any of the legal issues with Child Pornography (not if the owner lived on earth, at least), but it would make a great and politically convenient target for space to earth weaponry.

ViscountPenguin commented on We put Flock under surveillance: Go make them behave differently [video] youtube.com/watch?v=W420B... · Posted by u/huvarda

tptacek · 10 days ago

Even in my local community, which is likely among the 10 most progressive in the country (we're either the first or second most progressive in Chicagoland, itself one of the most reliably blue major metros in the country), support for Flock was pretty evenly divided.

I think it's good to engage this way, but I have a lot of thoughts on things to do that are more effective than giving public comment, and a caution that if you have strong opinions about ALPRs and you choose to pay attention to this issue you're going to be confronted with a lot of opinions that may surprise/discomfit you.

ViscountPenguin · 10 days ago

I strongly suspect that opposition to surveillance technology doesn't manifest along a simple progressive-conservative divide.

In my experience, a sizable chunk of people who are anti-surveilance are pretty staunchly rightwing.

This is bad news in that it means that there isn't a pre-formed anti surveillance coalition, but good news in every other way imo.

ViscountPenguin commented on Memories of .us computer.rip/2025-11-11-d... · Posted by u/sabas_ge

Symbiote · a month ago

There's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_with_.in...

I don't see why a non-western military alliance wouldn't be eligible, so long as the meet the criteria — treaty registered with the UN etc.

ViscountPenguin · a month ago

Even if they dejure meet the requirements, I suspect that IANA would be under heavy political pressure to deny the claim.

ViscountPenguin commented on The time has finally come for geothermal energy newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/riordan

hluska · a month ago

I live in a part of the world that is far below freezing for a significant portion of the year. Thus a large portion of my annual energy usage goes into not freezing to death.

When I drive my daughter to school when it’s -40 fucking degrees, a lot of the energy I use goes into heating my vehicle, swearing, moving and swearing. But this energy also leaks through my windshield, through my exhaust system and through my engine. This energy (heat) doesn’t provide any benefit to anyone and just leaks out into the atmosphere (which we’ve already established is trying to kill me).

That’s rejected energy. Or when it’s below -40, rejected motherfucking energy. :)

ViscountPenguin · a month ago

Do you live out in Siberia or something? Seems like a rough environment for most tech.

Sounds like a very unique experience :)

ViscountPenguin commented on Think in math, write in code (2019) jmeiners.com/think-in-mat... · Posted by u/alabhyajindal

lxe · a month ago

I think the author makes a good point about understanding structure over symbol manipulation, but there's a slippery slope here that bothers me.

In practice, I find it much more productive to start with a computational solution - write the algorithm, make it work, understand the procedure. Then, if there's elegant mathematical structure hiding in there, it reveals itself naturally. You optimize where it matters.

The problem is math purists will look at this approach and dismiss it as "inelegant" or "brute force" thinking. But that's backwards. A closed-form solution you've memorized but don't deeply understand is worse than an iterative algorithm you've built from scratch and can reason about clearly.

Most real problems have perfectly good computational solutions. The computational perspective often forces you to think through edge cases, termination conditions, and the actual mechanics of what's happening - which builds genuine intuition. The "elegant" closed-form solution often obscures that structure.

I'm not against finding mathematical elegance. I'm against the cultural bias that treats computation as second-class thinking. Start with what works. Optimize when the structure becomes obvious. That's how you actually solve problems.

ViscountPenguin · a month ago

3Blue1Brown has a great video which frames this as a cultural problem that also exists in mathematics pedagogy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltLUadnCyi0

Personally, I find a mix of all three approaches (programming, pen and paper, and "pure" mathematical structural thought) to be best.

ViscountPenguin commented on The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership openai.com/index/next-cha... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

mossTechnician · 2 months ago

If I remember correctly, Microsoft was previously promised ownership of every pre-AGI asset created by OpenAI. Now they are being promised ownership of things post-AGI as well:

Microsoft’s IP rights for both models and products are extended through 2032 and now includes models post-AGI...

To me, this suggests a further dilution of the term "AGI."

ViscountPenguin · 2 months ago

To be honest, I think this is somewhat assymetric, and kind of implies that openai are truer "Believers" than Microsoft.

If you believe in a hard takeoff, than ownership of assets post agi is pretty much meaningless, however, it protects Microsoft from an early declaration of agi by openai.

ViscountPenguin commented on SATisfying Solutions to Difficult Problems vaibhavsagar.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/atilimcetin

muragekibicho · 2 months ago

SATs are cool but MILPs are cooler IMO. Lol I've been trying to train a neural network over a finite field, not the reals and oh my god MILPs are God's gift to us.

ViscountPenguin · 2 months ago

Huh, that's an interesting idea.

If you get sick of MILPs, maybe you could use a representation of your finite field instead of the field itself? That way you could do everything in C^n, and preserve differentiability to use SGD or something like it.