phao (u/phao) - Readit News

phao commented on We are sorry to inform you that you are in a cult labskausleben.bearblog.de... · Posted by u/memorable

maxbond · 3 years ago

I was waiting for the part that would make it clear what was being satirized, and it never came? I feel like I'm missing context?

phao · 3 years ago

Maybe this is one of those things like cold reading.

IMO, the text may be seen as a piece of advertising for a fictional "de-programming" (like they call it) treatment from a cult. However, it's written for an abstract general kind of cult, described only in terms of what is common about several cults. It's not specific about anything. Just like well done cold reading: it's right, but unspecific.

I believe the idea is that you identify some of the things you're doing in your life as a cult (guided by the general features given in the text) and pay more attention to them. The text, however, is vague enough to classify a lot of things as cults, even though you/I/we may believe these aren't.

phao commented on What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less nautil.us/why-your-brain-... · Posted by u/dnetesn

menotyou · 3 years ago

I am an aphant, I can not imagine anything.

While I can appreciate to have a good income and always had good paying jobs, I was never really interested in making a career and becoming filthy rich. Possibly because I can not imagine myself in this situation.

On the other hand I was always better then others on making long term strategic plans.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

phao · 3 years ago

I've just spent the last 30min-1h looking this up. I think I might have a form of this... Mostly, I can't really picture stuff. I thought that was just everyone.

Gotta find out more about this!

phao commented on Seven sins of numerical linear algebra nhigham.com/2022/10/11/se... · Posted by u/jeffreyrogers

bob1029 · 3 years ago

Per the first sin, is there any alternative for computing the view matrix from a camera matrix in 3d graphics? This is a case where inversion "feels" appropriate to me.

phao · 3 years ago

He is mostly talking about computational linear algebra problems of a large scale type due to large matrices: the "computational intensity" comes from having really large matrices (kxk for k = 100's, 1 000's, 10 000's, 100 000's, 1 000 000's, ...).

In computer graphics, the situation is often different. Usually, you have small matrices (kxk for k=2,3,4); a huge number of vectors; and you want to apply your matrix to all of those vectors. Very often, these matrices have very well known forms and also known well behaved inverses. There isn't really a significant computational cost in computing the inverse (you'll very often write down its formula by hand), and conditioning is usually not an issue (consider a rotation matrix for example or undoing translations with homogeneous coordinates).

phao commented on Seven sins of numerical linear algebra nhigham.com/2022/10/11/se... · Posted by u/jeffreyrogers

melony · 3 years ago

Why is Newton’s Method not used more often in ML? I know Newton’s method requires the 2nd derivative while Gradient Descent family of algorithms only requires the first, but shouldn’t Newton’s Method be just as straightforward when using autodifferentiation since the process is just a computational graph graph transform using a lookup table?

phao · 3 years ago

With Newton's method, you'll be solving Hx=g (H = hessian of f, g = gradient of f) at each iteration. For large number of variables N, building H is of order N^2 and solving Hx = g is of order N^3 with an usual solver. N^2 and N^3 are really large for an already large N. I believe the reason is as simple as that. It isn't that it is tedious and difficult to write down the formulas or the code to compute H. It's just too costly, computationally speaking. There is also an increased memory cost (possibly having to store H).

When people do have ways to go around this problem, they do use Newton's method for large scale problems.

phao commented on Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust github.com/helix-editor/h... · Posted by u/behnamoh

phao · 3 years ago

By the way... which font is being used in the readme screenshot?

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/blob/master/screenshot...

phao commented on Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust github.com/helix-editor/h... · Posted by u/behnamoh

psuresh · 3 years ago

Does this 'written in Rust, written in Zig, written in Go' make any difference in the user experience? See this often nowadays.

phao · 3 years ago

Directly, I believe this has more to do with people interested in the language seeing it being used in actual projects.

Indirectly (a lot indirectly), sure. Maybe the software should perform better or maybe have fewer bugs because programming language X or Y is understood to help with those things. Maybe it showcases a more flexible architectural design, which leads to more potential features in future versions, etc.

phao commented on Google is shutting down Stadia theverge.com/2022/9/29/23... · Posted by u/vyrotek

futureshock · 3 years ago

Very sincerely, you must read just about zero tech news. Google has been infamous for this ever since they shut down Google Reader in 2013. For about the past 10 years they are a company adrift that can no longer launch new products without getting absolutely ridiculed. Everyday consumers have lost their faith in the company because they are so used to getting jerked around anything G. People I know wont touch a G chat app because they know it wont last 6 months.

phao · 3 years ago

> Very sincerely, you must read just about zero tech news.

Not 0, but really not much, that is true.

I remember the shutdown of google reader. I tried it once, but let go of it before it was shut down.

But I really didn't know google had this kind of reputation.

phao commented on Google is shutting down Stadia theverge.com/2022/9/29/23... · Posted by u/vyrotek

jedberg · 3 years ago

Google's reputation for not supporting things long term is finally starting to affect them in noticeable ways.

Developers didn't onboard because they were afraid it would get shut down. It got shut down because no one onboarded.

phao · 3 years ago

Super sincere question.

> Google's reputation for not supporting things long term

I didn't know Google had such a reputation. I mostly use drive and gmail, so it was fine to me.

Does google really have such a reputation? Any place I can read more on this?