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cmplxconjugate commented on Who died and left the US $7B?   sherwood.news/power/who-d... · Posted by u/jsnell
lovich · a year ago
A single person funding a government for >330 million people even for only 8 hours is pretty impressive.

Gives off malcador holding the golden throne for a short time energy

cmplxconjugate · a year ago
I have a sudden new appreciation for the Lincoln Memorial.
cmplxconjugate commented on OpenBSD 7.6 released   cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenB... · Posted by u/brynet
tiffanyh · a year ago
OT: does anyone know what the terminology is for the design style of the OpenBSD artwork for v7.6, linked below, where it looks like it was screen printed / water colors (if you zoom in to see the color detail)

https://www.openbsd.org/images/LifeIsButADream.jpg

cmplxconjugate · a year ago
To my eye it looks like either (silk) screen printed or wood block pressed.
cmplxconjugate commented on The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder   lanceewing.github.io/blog... · Posted by u/smcameron
brokenmachine · a year ago
No need for personal attacks.
cmplxconjugate · a year ago
When I became a lead dev, one of the first issues I had was a 55 y/o dev who begrudgingly adopted git but consistently included commits like: “Monday morning commit”, “changed some things”, “commit”. He also refused to delete issue template examples and included it all with his own additions.

In the entire time we worked together over a few years, he refused to adapt to the rest of the team.

cmplxconjugate commented on Visualizing Attention, a Transformer's Heart [video]   3blue1brown.com/lessons/a... · Posted by u/rohitpaulk
Al-Khwarizmi · a year ago
Not sure if you mean it as rhetorical question but I think it's an interesting question. I think there are at least three factors why most people are confused about Transformers:

1. The standard terminology is "meh" at most. The word "attention" itself is just barely intuitive, "self-attention" is worse, and don't get me started about "key" and "value".

2. The key papers (Attention is All You Need, the BERT paper, etc.) are badly written. This is probably an unpopular opinion. But note that I'm not diminishing their merits. It's perfectly compatible to write a hugely impactful, transformative paper describing an amazing breakthrough, but just don't explain it very well. And that's exactly what happened, IMO.

3. The way in which these architectures were discovered was largely by throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticked. There is no reflection process that ended on a prediction that such an architecture would work well, which was then empirically verified. It's empirical all the way through. This means that we don't have a full understanding of why it works so well, all explanations are post hoc rationalizations (in fact, lately there is some work implying that other architectures may work equally well if tweaked enough). It's hard to explain something that you don't even fully understand.

Everyone who is trying to explain transformers has to overcome these three disadvantages... so most explanations are confusing.

cmplxconjugate · a year ago
>This is probably an unpopular opinion.

I wouldn't say so. Historically it's quite common. Maxwell's EM papers used such convoluted notation it it quite difficult to read. It wasn't until they were reformulated in vector calculus that they became infinitely more digestible.

I think though your third point is the most important; right now people are focused on results.

cmplxconjugate commented on You don't have to type faster to type faster   blog.abreevy8.io/you-dont... · Posted by u/shesmycherrypie
cmplxconjugate · a year ago
As the saying goes: "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast".
cmplxconjugate commented on My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)   lisyarus.github.io/blog/p... · Posted by u/atan2
verisimi · 2 years ago
The cynicism doesn't seem that fair in this case.

Re HN becoming like Reddit..

Perhaps there is a generic 'cynical feeling' in the air with technology, with feelings of distrust about the intentions of governments and corporations over their use of the profound technology that is appearing, and how this is being constructed with the intention to constrain and manage the individual, rather than enabling greater freedom.

cmplxconjugate · 2 years ago
I think maybe more that the users of this website, which is designed in a way that is intensely functional compared to other similar sites, just prefer less “useless” design features.
cmplxconjugate commented on Compiling History: A brief tour of C compilers   deusinmachina.net/p/compi... · Posted by u/fagnerbrack
WalterBright · 2 years ago
`->` is completely redundant with `.`. I suspect it may be a relic from an earlier version of C that did not have a complete type system.
cmplxconjugate · 2 years ago
Personally I like the distinction between them as it gives me context for the object being a pointer, which helps with "at-a-glace" reading of clean code.
cmplxconjugate commented on En Route: A Magazine About Trains in Japan [pdf]   tokyoweekender.com/wp-con... · Posted by u/keiferski
traceroute66 · 2 years ago
> a fourth one replaced by a voucher for a 450km taxi ride

When can I move to Germany ?

In the UK if your train gets cancelled its either:

    1. "Tough shit. Suck it up buttercup"
    2. The infamous Rail Replacement Bus Service
Most of the time option two doesn't even get offered.

So yeah, you would not find me complaining if the train company offered me a taxi voucher if my train was cancelled !

cmplxconjugate · 2 years ago
In 2018 I spent ~£6300 on train tickets for personal holiday travel all over the UK. Of that, almost 50% of it was refunded due to meeting requirements for partial refunds due to delayed/cancelled services.

After that experience, I purchased a car and motorbike and I will never be convinced to give up my independence in exchange for that abysmal service. It was completely morale breaking. What's worse is I then worked in Japan during 2019 and experienced some of the best service I could possibly think would be reasonable. It's hard to defend in any form the absolute depressing state of the UK rail service.

cmplxconjugate commented on Inside the Steam Deck's APU   boilingsteam.com/an-in-de... · Posted by u/ekianjo
cassianoleal · 2 years ago
> AMD are competent, they just have sucky crash-prone GPU drivers.

I have an AMD GPU on my desktop PC and I also have a Steam Deck which uses an AMD APU. Never had a driver crash on me on either system.

cmplxconjugate · 2 years ago
I have had a RX580, RX590, 6600XT, and 7900XT using Linux with minimal issues. My partner has had a RX590, 7700XT on Windows and she's had so many issues it's infuriating.
cmplxconjugate commented on Project Oberon: Design of an operating system, a compiler, and a computer [pdf]   people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/... · Posted by u/JoachimS
zengid · 2 years ago
RIP Prof Wirth

Side note: can we get a better tag on this to show it's a PDF file? I think the source is reputable but I always freak out when a url goes to a pdf.

cmplxconjugate · 2 years ago
His plea for lean software [1] is always worth a read.

[1] https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf

u/cmplxconjugate

KarmaCake day205May 18, 2016View Original