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d-us-vb commented on Ivan Sutherland Sketchpad Demo 1963 [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=6orsm... · Posted by u/fs_software
dependency_2x · 12 days ago
He brushes over the zoom out, which I think was pretty impressive for a computer of this time. There is a lot of redrawing/recalculating going on there. Would be impressive on a 80s microcomputer.
d-us-vb · 12 days ago
No, rendering to a vector display (hardware whose primitive operations are points and lines) is almost free for the kind of drawings he was rendering. Zoom is just one linear transformation on each point in the model, no different from panning the view.
d-us-vb commented on There is No Quintic Formula [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=9HIy5... · Posted by u/DamnInteresting
lugao · 17 days ago
This video is truly remarkable. I'm so grateful to artists like 2step for sharing this kind of work on YouTube. It reignites a passion for math that many of us might have forgotten, especially those of us who have been away from formal math education for a while.
d-us-vb · 17 days ago
*2swap
d-us-vb commented on Brain has five 'eras' with adult mode not starting until early 30s   theguardian.com/science/2... · Posted by u/hackernj
IAmBroom · 23 days ago
Where did you get that from? The article mentions changes at age 9, 32, 66, and 83.
d-us-vb · 23 days ago
It's just the popular wisdom these days. Companies tend to deprioritize hiring engineers in their 40s, especially if their overspecialized. At face value, Companies want high-energy 20-somethings that they can mold into their specialty. More likely, they know that 20-somethings expect a far smaller salary.
d-us-vb commented on 'Calvin and Hobbes' at 40   npr.org/2025/11/18/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/mooreds
chaostheory · a month ago
They’re not supposed to be pro-social. The characters are supposed to represent the philosophers, John Calvin (predestination) and Thomas Hobbes (man is an animal). Watterson is probably making fun of them.
d-us-vb · a month ago
Watterson explicitly stated that the names have no relation to the characters' personalities or philosophical views. As someone familiar with John Calvin's views and writings, I can say safely that Calvin is not much in any way similar in personality or spirit to anything John Calvin ever taught or expressed. At best, Watterson is projecting the typical libertine caricature of John Calvin as a cantankerous and disagreeable curmudgeon onto the character. John Calvin was in reality quite progressive for his time, and by all impressions did all that he did out of love for those around them in line with a plain reading of scripture. But to see him that way requires nuance that seems to be lost on the anti-religious.
d-us-vb commented on Llmdeathcount.com   llmdeathcount.com/... · Posted by u/brian_peiris
GaryBluto · a month ago
> probably because these takes "lack context and nuance".

How anti-intellectual of you.

d-us-vb · a month ago
Well, I'm definitely anti-pseudo-intellectual. Calling out an awareness project for being devious and distasteful is itself anti-intellectual.

The nuance here is that LLMs seem to exacerbate depression. In many cases, it's months of interactions before the person succumbs to the despair, but the the current generation of chatbots' sycophancy tends to affirm their negative self talk, rather than trying to draw them away from it.

d-us-vb commented on Llmdeathcount.com   llmdeathcount.com/... · Posted by u/brian_peiris
jstummbillig · a month ago
What a distasteful and devious project.
d-us-vb · a month ago
If a new technology is directly or indirectly involved in people's deaths, we can't just ignore the problems. Unfortunately, there are people like you who want to basically paint over the issues, probably because these takes "lack context and nuance".
d-us-vb commented on Llmdeathcount.com   llmdeathcount.com/... · Posted by u/brian_peiris
lukev · a month ago
LLMs are an interesting, useful technology.

The "chatbot" format is a cognitive hazard, and places users in a funhouse mirror maze reflecting back all sorts of mental and conceptual distortions.

d-us-vb · a month ago
If they were developed to actually tell people the truth, rather than simply be a sycophant, things might be different. But as Pilate said all those years ago "what is truth".
d-us-vb commented on Llmdeathcount.com   llmdeathcount.com/... · Posted by u/brian_peiris
fishgoesblub · a month ago
If the bullshit generator tells me that fire is actually cold and not dangerous, the fault lies entirely with me if I touch it and burn my hand.
d-us-vb · a month ago
It's harder when the the BS generator says that "it's true strength to recognize how unhappy you are. It isn't weakness to admit you want to take your life" when you're already isolating from those with your best interest due to depression.
d-us-vb commented on Parents say ChatGPT encouraged son to kill himself   edition.cnn.com/2025/11/0... · Posted by u/nh43215rgb
pbhjpbhj · a month ago
Isn't it just like diary-writing or memo-writing, as far as therapy goes, the point being to crystallise thoughts and cathartise emotions. Is it really so bad to have a textual nodding dog to bat against as part of that process? {The very real issue of the OP aside.}

Could you expand on why you feel this is the fastest way to "cook your own brain"?

d-us-vb · a month ago
The mind is much more sensitive to writing it didn’t produce itself. If it produced the writing, then it is at least somewhat aware of the emotional state of the writer and can contextualize. If it is reading it from an outside “observer” it assumes far more objectivity, especially when the motive for seeking the observer perspective was for some therapeutic reason, even if they know that at best they’ll be getting pseudo-therapy.
d-us-vb commented on Radiant Computer   radiant.computer... · Posted by u/beardicus
Aurornis · a month ago
Clean slate designs with arbitrarily radical designs are easy when you don’t have to actually build them.

There are reasons that current architecture are mostly similar to each other, having evolved over decades of learning and research.

> Perhaps model where processing and memory are one, A:very simple core per 1k of SRAM per 64k of DRAM per megabytes of flash,

To serve what goal? Such a design certainly wouldn’t be useful for general purpose computing and it wouldn’t even serve current GPU workloads well.

Any architecture that requires extreme overhauls of how software is designed and can only benefit unique workloads is destined to fail. See Itanium for a much milder example that still couldn’t work.

> machines with 2^n cores where each core has a direct data channel to every core with its n-bit core ID being one but different (plus one for all bits different).

Software isn’t the only place where big-O scaling is relevant.

Fully connected graph topologies are great on paper, but the number of connections scales quadratically. For a 64-core fully connected CPU topology you would need 2,016 separate data buses.

Those data buses take up valuable space. Worse, the majority of them are going to be idle most of the time. It’s extremely wasteful. The die area would be better used for anything else.

> A n=32 system would have four billion cores

A four billion core system would be the poster child for Amdahl’s law and a great example of how not to scale compute.

Let’s not be so critical of companies trying to make practical designs.

d-us-vb · a month ago
Perhaps not a true counterpoint, but there are systems like the GA144, an array of 144 Forth processors.

I think you're missing the point, and I don't think OP is "being critical of companies making practical designs."

Also, I think OP was imagining some kind of tree based topology, not connected graph since he said:

> ...but it would take talking through up to 15 intermediaries to communicate between any two arbitrary cores.

u/d-us-vb

KarmaCake day69April 13, 2022View Original