grumbelbart2 (u/grumbelbart2)

grumbelbart2 commented on I've been writing ring buffers wrong all these years (2016) snellman.net/blog/archive... · Posted by u/flaghacker

Mikhail_Edoshin · 8 days ago

Technically each side needs an index plus a single bit. The bit is a counter, you increment it on every wrap. It overflows, but this is correct, we only need the last bit. Initially it is 0. By comparing the indexes and the bit you tell apart all cases and do not lose an entry.

(I think this was published in one of Llang's papers but in a rather obscure language.)

grumbelbart2 · 8 days ago

One of the comments in the article proposes that: Just wrap both counters at 2capacity (instead of capacity or UINT_MAX).

grumbelbart2 commented on Is it a bubble? oaktreecapital.com/insigh... · Posted by u/saigrandhi

PurpleRamen · 16 days ago

Yes and no. There is the infamous quote of Microsoft, about 30%(?) of their code being written by AI now. And technically, it's probably not that such a wild claim in certain areas. AI is very good at barfing up common popular patterns, and companies have a huge amount of patternized software, like UIs, tests, documentation or marketing-fluff. So it's quite easy to "outsource" such grunt-work if AI has the necessary level.

But to say that they don't write any code at all, it's really stretched. Maybe I'm not good enough at AI-assisted and vibe coding, but code-quality always seems to drop down really hard the moment one steps a bit outside the common patterns.

grumbelbart2 · 16 days ago

I found LLLMs to be very good of writing (unit) tests for my code, for example. They just don't get tired iterating over all corner cases. Those tests easily, in LoC, dwarf the actual implementation. Not sure if that would count towards the 30%, for example.

grumbelbart2 commented on AGI is not possible even in 10 years medium.com/@anwarzaid76/a... · Posted by u/MindBreaker2605

diego_moita · a month ago

I think the best take in AGI is Edsger Dijkstra's:

    “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”

I am not interested in computers that have their own intelligence but I do want computers that increase my own intelligence.

grumbelbart2 · a month ago

I've read this multiple times and disagree.

If I had an AGI that designs me a safe, small and cheap fusion reactor, of course I would be interested in that.

My intelligence is intrinsically limited by my biology. The only way to really scale it up is to wire stuff into my brain, and I'd prefer an AGI over that every day.

grumbelbart2 commented on Meta Segment Anything Model 3 ai.meta.com/sam3/... · Posted by u/lukeinator42

bahmboo · a month ago

To answer your question: no but we haven't looked because Sam is sota. Trained our own model with limited success (I'm no expert). We are pursuing a classical computer vision approach. At some level segmenting a monochrome image resembles or is actually an old fashioned flood fill - very generally. This fantastic sam model is maybe not the right fit for our application.

Edit: answered the question

grumbelbart2 · a month ago

This is a "classic" machine vision task that has traditionally been solved with non-learning algorithms. (That in part enabled the large volume, zero defect productions in electronics we have today.) There are several off-the-shelf commercial MV tools for that.

Deep Learning-based methods will absolutely have a place in this in the future, but today's machines are usually classic methods. Advantages are that the hardware is much cheaper and requires less electric and thermal management. This changes these days with cheaper NPUs, but with machine lifetimes measured in decades, it will take a while.

grumbelbart2 commented on Show HN: Browser-based interactive 3D Three-Body problem simulator trisolarchaos.com/?pr=O_8... · Posted by u/jgchaos

grumbelbart2 · a month ago

I triggered some bug by pausing the simulation, setting the mass of one of the objects to 29.1, then resuming. The lighter objects bounced into the massive objects a few times, then all three objects were suddenly ejected with a very high velocity.

grumbelbart2 commented on FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs thenewstack.io/ffmpeg-to-... · Posted by u/CrankyBear

mmooss · 2 months ago

Why would they invest resources - scarce, expensive time of attorneys - in researching and solving this problem? The attorneys' job is to help the company profit, to maximize ROI for legal work. Where is the ROI here? And remember, just positive ROI is unacceptable; they want maximum ROI per hour worked. When the CEO asks them how this project maximized ROI, what do they say?

I believe in FOSS and can make an argument that lots of people on HN will accept, but many outside this context will not understand it or care.

grumbelbart2 · 2 months ago

If you fixed something in an open source library you use, and you don't push that upstream, you are bound to re-apply that patch with every library update you do. And today's compliance rules require you to essentially keep all libraries up to date all the time, or your CVE scanners will light up. So fixing this upstream in the original project has a measurable impact on your "time spent on compliance and updates KPI".

grumbelbart2 commented on Backpropagation is a leaky abstraction (2016) karpathy.medium.com/yes-y... · Posted by u/swatson741

nirinor · 2 months ago

So, are computing gradients details of backpropagation that it is failing to abstract over, or are gradients the goal that backpropagation achieves? It isn't both, its just the latter.

This is like complaining about long division not behaving nicely when dividing by 0. The algorithm isn't the problem, and blaming the wrong part does not help understanding.

It distracts from what is actually helping which is using different functions with nicer behaving gradients, e.g., the Huber loss instead of quadratic.

grumbelbart2 · 2 months ago

> It distracts from what is actually helping which is using different functions with nicer behaving gradients, e.g., the Huber loss instead of quadratic.

Fully agree. It's not the "fault" of Backprop. It does what you tell it to do, find the direction in which your loss is reduced the most. If the first layers get no signal because the gradient vanishes, then the reason is your network layout: Very small modifications in the initial layers would lead to very large modifications in the final layers (essentially an unstable computation), so gradient descend simply cannot move that fast.

Instead, it's a vital signal for debugging your network. Inspecting things like gradient magnitudes per layer shows you might have vanishing or exploding gradients. And that has lead to great inventions how to deal with that, such as residual networks and a whole class of normalization methods (such as batch normalization).

grumbelbart2 commented on WorldGrow: Generating Infinite 3D World github.com/world-grow/Wor... · Posted by u/cdani

gcr · 2 months ago

This could be a great way to make backrooms horror environments!

I've dreamed of a NeRF-powered backrooms walking simulator for quite a while now. This approach is "worse" because the mesh seems explicit rather than just the world becoming what you look at, but that's arguably better for real-world use cases of course.

grumbelbart2 · 2 months ago

> backrooms horror environments

True, it sounds (and looks) a lot like https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3008

grumbelbart2 commented on Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption in US-East-1 Region aws.amazon.com/message/10... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

ramraj07 · 2 months ago

As I was reading through that list, I kept feeling, "why do I feel this is not universally true?"

Then I realized: the internet; the power-grid (at least in most developed countries); there are things that don't actually fail catastrophically, even though they are extremely complex, and not always built by efficient organizations. Whats the retort to this argument?

grumbelbart2 · 2 months ago

Also, aviation is great example of how we can manage failures in complex systems and how we can track and fix more and rarer failures over time.

grumbelbart2 commented on Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage news.alaskaair.com/on-the... · Posted by u/fujigawa

tschwimmer · 2 months ago

Tell me about it. Swiss air refuses to pay out 1800€ in EC261 compensation…

grumbelbart2 · 2 months ago

They almost always try that. Save yourself the hassle, use one of the online services who will get that money for you.