Everyone knows Greenland is the real proponent of the Mercator projection. Using the unfair influence of their massive perceived size on the map to unfairly inflate their importance in global politics and economics. It's time to put Greenland back in its place.
Readit Newsertgbnm commented on It is time to 'Correct the Map' correctthemap.org/... · Posted by u/daverol
ertgbnm commented on Gemma 3 270M: Compact model for hyper-efficient AI developers.googleblog.com... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
He? I know some Gemmas and it's distinctly a female name; is Gemma a boy's name where you're from?
I don't really gender LLMs in my head in general. I guess Gemma is a female name. I only gendered it in the joke because I think it makes it funnier, especially since it's just "a little guy". I know they are giving gendered names to these models now but I think it's a bit weird to gender when interacting with them.
ertgbnm commented on Gemma 3 270M: Compact model for hyper-efficient AI developers.googleblog.com... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
This model is a LOT of fun. It's absolutely tiny - just a 241MB download - and screamingly fast, and hallucinates wildly about almost everything.
Here's one of dozens of results I got for "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle". For this one it decided to write a poem:
+-----------------------+
| Pelican Riding Bike |
+-----------------------+
| This is the cat! |
| He's got big wings and a happy tail. |
| He loves to ride his bike! |
+-----------------------+
| Bike lights are shining bright. |
| He's got a shiny top, too! |
| He's ready for adventure! |
+-----------------------+
I'm looking forward to seeing people fine-tune this in a way that produces useful output for selected tasks, which should absolutely be feasible.
He may generate useless tokens but boy can he generate ALOT of tokens.
ertgbnm commented on We are all mercantilists now bridgewater.com/what-trum... · Posted by u/andsoitis
The only problem I have with articles like this is that it frames what Trump is doing with an air of intention. Most readers will obviously think that becoming mercantilist is a bad idea. However, readers will also walk away with the notion that these actions have all been done with the a grand plan in mind.
The reality is much more stupid though. Recent policies have been made without any plan to begin with. There is no driving philosophy of "we must create modern mercantilism" and the resulting policies being a coherent plan to bring about that change. Instead actions are being made based on the split second decision making of a moron would lacks the most basic understanding of economics much less mercantilism.
This is a decidedly worse world than one in which the plan is simply a bad one. A bad plan would at least be coherent and something that our allies could predict and make their own plans around. Nevertheless, I think the thesis is broadly correct as being the outcome of recent actions.
As someone who spent years quadruple checking every figure in every slide for years to avoid a mistake like this, it’s very confusing to see this out of the big launch announcement of one of the most high profile startups around.
Even the small presentations we gave to execs or the board were checked for errors so many times that nothing could possibly slip through.
It's literally a billion dollar plus release. I get more scrutiny on my presentations to groups of 10 people.
ertgbnm commented on Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system newyorker.com/news/annals... · Posted by u/dmazin
Nuclear comes from the supernova that created all the heavy elements in our solar system. Fission is releasing energy trapped during that event. So from that standpoint, even Nuclear is solar in origin.
Well the sun didn't make those elements. Some other star did so they aren't solar. Also by that logic everything that is not a hydrogen atom would be "solar" so I don't think we can stretch the analogy.
ertgbnm commented on Google to back three new nuclear projects esgtoday.com/google-to-ba... · Posted by u/aburan28
Here's a better article:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/07/google_signs_another_...
> "Elementl didn't respond to questions by press time. Its public materials offer little clarity on its actual operations—aside from broad claims about providing "turn-key project development, financing and ownership solutions customized to meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit."
> "The nuclear developer, founded in 2022, presents itself as a facilitator of advanced reactor projects. But it has not built any reactors to date and describes itself as a "technology-agnostic nuclear power developer and independent power producer," signaling it does not back any specific reactor design."
> "This approach aligns with the background of Elementl's CEO and chairman, Christopher Colbert, who previously served as CFO, COO, and chief strategy officer at NuScale Power."
> "meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit."
Holy corporate jargon batman! I love seeing example of phrases like this out in the wild. Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers? IMO, it's better not to say stuff like that at all. It's basically a meaningless phrase, it adds no information to the sentence. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's generally a sign that they are doing the opposite of whatever the phrase means.
ertgbnm commented on Reasoning models don't always say what they think anthropic.com/research/re... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
I was under the impression that CoT works because spitting out more tokens = more context = more compute used to "think." Using CoT as a way for LLMs "show their working" never seemed logical, to me. It's just extra synthetic context.
But the model doesn't have an internal state, it just has the tokens, which means it must encode it's reasoning into the output tokens. So it is a reasonable take to think that CoT was them showing their work.
This is a fun clicker game whose point seems cynical and self-defeating on multiple levels.
Despite the HN comments complaining about it being overwhelming and a dark reflection of how awful and distracting the internet is, clearly enough people enjoyed it to get to the front page. The stimulation torture wasn't really torture, but another level to the game.
All the content creators whose inclusion at first seems like an indictment of the kinds of internet videos that lead to addiction or overstimulation also all get a pleasant shout-out which seems silly. Are these supposed to represent what's awful about the internet?
EDIT: To hammer the dissonance home, at the end of the game we are met with a calming ocean scene that I'm guessing the average player appreciated for about thirty seconds before clicking away.
To me, this whole exercise doesn't reflect how distorted humanity has become because of technology, but of how humans refuse to look themselves in the mirror.
We want to be the kind of people who buck the mold and escape systems of control, so that we can properly enjoy things like waves of the ocean, but at any point during this game we could just open a new tab and watch the ocean on a YouTube livestream. Instead we spend an hour clicking and advancing this manic stream of chaos.
What's more human, then: calmly watching the waves crash against the beach, or clicking buttons trying to win and discover what's at the end of a silly game?
These trends wouldn't be trends if they didn't work. The game can be awful and distracting, yet still succeed at garnering engagement. Not just in spite of the stimulation but partially due to the stimulation. It's not self defeating or hypocritical, it's a bad thing, an indictment, and also engaging all at the same time.
Does not surprise me at all - just because too much of something is bad for you does not mean that some amount of it isn’t essential for bodily function.
This is a common phenomenon for most things because the people in the lowest intake category of a thing are normally there for a very specific reason.
For example, people who don't drink any alcohol are more likely to die than people who drink a little bit. Why? Because people who don't drink at all tend to be those with liver damage or former alcoholics who have already done permanent damage.
I suspect a similar explanation here. People who avoid added sugar probably have other health complications going on that force them into the lowest intake category.