larrydag (u/larrydag)

larrydag commented on The Cathedral, the Megachurch, and the Bazaar opensourcesecurity.io/202... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

brid · 2 months ago

The Cathedral metaphor doesn't make any sense since the point of the Cathedral is simultaneously to revere God and to be able to take in as many "unwashed masses" as possible. Only by self-exclusion (explicit external irreverence/scandal) can you be excluded.

larrydag · 2 months ago

It works for me. Cathedral is analogous to free software being a religion. It is a theocratic worldview that has a zealous following that must apply the rituals of old. Bazaar is the marketplace. It is supposed to be a efficient market metaphor for software being transactional and not relational.

Is this a perfect metaphor? I think its a rigid way of looking at software on either side. I think it is more grey. I like the merits of both sides.

larrydag commented on Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades latimes.com/business/stor... · Posted by u/ValentineC

sethev · 3 months ago

We should never idolize a person (in my opinion). Here are some things Buffet has done that I admire (notice that phrasing):

  - He consistently communicated with shareholders of Berkshire in a straight-forward and transparent way in his letters and annual reports. If you read these documents, I believe that you will have a solid understanding of how he built Berkshire.
  - He maintained a disciplined approach to investing and managing risk over 60+ years.
  - He still lives in the same home he bought when he was 28 years old.

Our society has become moralistic. It's so much more useful to identify behaviors to learn from - either to emulate or to avoid - than to debate whether various public figures are good or bad people.

That said, it makes me a little sad that we've read the last of his annual letters.

larrydag · 2 months ago

Adding the letter archive into a LLM prompt is a good read. you can use this as a source https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html

larrydag commented on Scaffolding to Superhuman: How Curriculum Learning Solved 2048 and Tetris kywch.github.io/blog/2025... · Posted by u/a1k0n

bob1029 · 3 months ago

> To learn, agents must experience high-value states, which are hard (or impossible) for untrained agents to reach. The endgame-only envs were the final piece to crack 65k. The endgame requires tens of thousands of correct moves where a single mistake ends the game, but to practice, agents must first get there.

This seems really similar to the motivations around masked language modeling. By providing increasingly-masked targets over time, a smooth difficulty curve can be established. Randomly masking X% of the tokens/bytes is trivial to implement. MLM can take a small corpus and turn it into an astronomically large one.

larrydag · 3 months ago

perhaps I'm missing something. Why not start the learning at a later state?

larrydag commented on Amatuer codebreaker may have solved Zodiac killer identity sfchronicle.com/bayarea/a... · Posted by u/larrydag

larrydag · 3 months ago

behind paywall. Amateur sleuth from West Virginia may have decoded the Z13 cipher and solved the mystery of the Zodiac killings identity.

larrydag commented on The G in GPU is for Graphics damnit ut21.github.io/blog/trito... · Posted by u/sebg

larrydag · 5 months ago

Should change the name to Matrix Processing Units

larrydag commented on They Thought They Were Free (1955) press.uchicago.edu/Misc/C... · Posted by u/nataliste

brightball · 6 months ago

I think the sane alternative has long been modeled by the US Constitution.

The real test is how any model handles corruption and expunges it because no matter the ideology, people are in charge and people are corruptible.

The only real model that can work is one that minimizes the power of those in charge.

larrydag · 6 months ago

The US Constitutional government is meant to be slow, methodical and gridlocked. It is supposed to take enormous compromise to get any decision created into law.

larrydag commented on They Thought They Were Free (1955) press.uchicago.edu/Misc/C... · Posted by u/nataliste

big_jimmer · 6 months ago

Reading this, you can see how the political ideology of trumps supporters was so easily manipulated, and how effective the radicalisation of the right has been.

larrydag · 6 months ago

"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy" -James Madison

larrydag commented on Statistical Physics with R: Ising Model with Monte Carlo github.com/msuzen/isingLe... · Posted by u/northlondoner

Qem · 6 months ago

I wonder how close R was to also take over the scientific computing/machine learning space, instead of Python's numpy/scipy ecosystem.

larrydag · 6 months ago

Very close. In fact you could still say that it still is competing with Python for users. There is still an active community of developers.

larrydag commented on Spending too much time at airports thezvi.substack.com/p/spe... · Posted by u/nsoonhui

larrydag · 7 months ago

While the 1 hour rule is mostly true be careful with discount airlines. Frontier Airlines does do a 1 hour boarding. I've heard of cases that if you are late to boarding, even if half hour ahead of departure, they will not let you board the plane. I'm sure it depends on specific airport agents protocols. My point is I'm not sure you can always use the 1 hour buffer.