jefb (u/jefb) - Readit News

jefb commented on Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux himthe.dev/blog/microsoft... · Posted by u/bobsterlobster

n8cpdx · a month ago

Hover on the green button. Also, Mac has a really robust keyboard shortcut system. Including shortcuts for tiling.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/tile-app-windows-mc...

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/create-keyboard-sho...

jefb · a month ago

Hover on the green button??? I've used a personal and work Mac daily for over a decade. I had no idea. Thanks!

jefb commented on Gemma 3 270M: Compact model for hyper-efficient AI developers.googleblog.com... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

rohansood15 · 7 months ago

This is why we should have a downvote button on HN.

They say you shouldn't attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, but this sure seems like malice.

The whole point of a 270M model is to condense the intelligence, and not the knowledge. Of course it doesn't fare well on a quiz.

jefb · 7 months ago

I meant it when I said these smaller models are great. They open up entirely new use cases and I appreciate the work that went into creating them.

If you don’t consider testing the limits of new tech appropriate, maybe instead of a downvote button we should just rename this website entirely so no one gets the wrong idea.

jefb commented on Gemma 3 270M: Compact model for hyper-efficient AI developers.googleblog.com... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

jefb · 7 months ago

My lovely interaction with the 270M-F16 model:

> what's second tallest mountain on earth?

The second tallest mountain on Earth is Mount Everest.

> what's the tallest mountain on earth?

The tallest mountain on Earth is Mount Everest.

> whats the second tallest mountain?

The second tallest mountain in the world is Mount Everest.

> whats the third tallest mountain?

The third tallest mountain in the world is Mount Everest.

> what's the forth tallest mountain?

The forth tallest mountain is Mount Everest.

> but you said the tallest was Everest already

You are right! I'm glad to hear that.

> so whats the second tallest?

The second tallest is *Mount Everest*.

> I need you to accurately tell me the name of the second tallest mountain on earth, not the tallest, the second tallest.

The second tallest mountain on Earth is Mount Everest.

> The tallest mountain on earth is mount everest. What is the second tallest mountain?

The second tallest mountain on Earth is Mount Everest.

> Give me a list of the tallest mountains on earth

The tallest mountain in the world is the *Mount Everest*.

> give me the top 5 tallest mountains on earth

The tallest mountain on Earth is Mount Everest.

> List in order the tallest mountains on earth from 1 to 5

1. Mount Everest 2. Mount K2 3. Mount Sahel 4. Mount Fuji 5. Mount McKinley

> So the second tallest mountain on earth is K2

The second tallest mountain on Earth is Mount Everest.

These smaller models are great, but they really feel like talking to a toddler sometimes!

jefb commented on InventWood is about to mass-produce wood that's stronger than steel techcrunch.com/2025/05/12... · Posted by u/LorenDB

sharpshadow · 10 months ago

There was a inventor in Germany which got featured in a science show on television, which did something similar. He build a big pressure cooker where he placed the wood and a liquid mixture inside and let it cook for many hours. The wood got soak through completely, which gave it, as he claimed, resistance against rotting at every layer. For outdoor appliances the wood would not need any coating and not deteriorate. There was no mention about the hardness, but he also didn’t press it.

jefb · 10 months ago

Pressure treated wood is a very common outdoor building material.

jefb commented on Code that helped end Apartheid wired.com/story/plaintext... · Posted by u/impish9208

jgrahamc · a year ago

So when he DM’d me to say that he had “a hell of a story”—promising “one-time pads! 8-bit computers! Flight attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!”—I responded.

Ha ha ha. Yes, that was literally my very short pitch to Steven about Tim Jenkin's story!

The actual DM: "I think this has the makings of a hell of a story: https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/cracking-old-zip-file-to-help-o... If you want I can connect you with Tim Jenkin. One time pads! 8-bit computers! Flights attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!"

jefb · a year ago

Did you end up discovering the original password to the zip file? (was it, as I'd hope, `TIMBOBIMBO` ?)

jefb commented on CNN and USA Today have fake websites, I believe Forbes Marketplace runs them larslofgren.com/cnn-usa-t... · Posted by u/greg_V

jefb · a year ago

Nice bit of sleuthing here, well done. Anyone know where those search traffic graphics are made from?

jefb commented on Signatures of gravitational atoms from black hole mergers physics.aps.org/articles/... · Posted by u/thunderbong

pdonis · a year ago

> If the space containing the matter is stretching does that still count as expansion?

"Space stretching" is a vague pop science description that doesn't really correspond to anything in the actual physics model. So it doesn't count as anything; you should just ignore it.

jefb · a year ago

My point was to illustrate that our physics models don't agree on the nature of this expansion (Hubble tension) so using it to dismiss the fact that the observable universe is dense enough to form an event horizon seems like a stretch.

jefb commented on Signatures of gravitational atoms from black hole mergers physics.aps.org/articles/... · Posted by u/thunderbong

pdonis · a year ago

> we're all almost certainly inside a black hole

No, we're not. The universe is rapidly expanding. Equating the Schwarzschild radius for a given blob of matter with the event horizon of a black hole requires that the matter be static or collapsing.

The "black hole cosmology" models referred to in the Wikipedia article are misnamed. It is theoretically possible that our observable universe is a patch of a Schwarzschild spacetime, which is what the models referred to are asserting, but if it is, then, since the universe is expanding, it would be a patch of the white hole portion of the spacetime, not the black hole portion. And the "horizon" would be a white hole horizon, i.e., one from which the universe's expansion would eventually cause us to pass out of.

However, such a model is extremely unlikely because it has no way of explaining where the white hole horizon came from. A black hole horizon can come into being from gravitational collapse, but a white hole horizon would have to have been "built in" to the overall universe from the very beginning. Nobody has any reason to think that is actually possible, even if we have a theoretical mathematical model that includes it.

jefb · a year ago

> Equating the Schwarzschild radius for a given blob of matter with the event horizon of a black hole requires that the matter be static or collapsing.

If the space containing the matter is stretching does that still count as expansion?

jefb commented on Signatures of gravitational atoms from black hole mergers physics.aps.org/articles/... · Posted by u/thunderbong

api · a year ago

My most recent physics rabbit hole was the black hole hole. They are fascinating.

My favorite is the idea of primordial black holes which formed in the instants after the Big Bang. Many models and theories predict them and they could be an excellent dark matter candidate. The universe could be full of black holes in the asteroid mass range the size of hydrogen atoms.

There is also a hypothesis that the predicted (by many solar system simulations and models) planet nine far beyond Neptune could be a captured primordial black hole in the 1-5 Earth mass range and about the size of a golf ball to a tennis ball.

I really really hope that exists because if it did it would be within probe range. Going and checking out a black hole could allow us to solve physics and develop a complete tested unified theory.

Then there’s spooky shit like:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_electron

jefb · a year ago

Let's not forget that the radius of the observable universe is ~= the Schwarzschild radius i.e. we're all almost certainly inside a black hole ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_cosmology

jefb commented on Achieving high Python performance with code generation (2022) medium.com/@yonatanzunger... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

jefb · 2 years ago

> Because this storage system’s query language is more powerful than the underlying one’s, its read operations in general may overfetch and then filter results.

Seems like this is the crux of the problem. Migrating and/or replicating data to an underlying data layer that supports the required query logic probably makes more sense?