pmichaud (u/pmichaud)

pmichaud commented on Classical statues were not painted horribly worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/bensouthwood

esperent · 2 days ago

I've literally never heard anyone say that classical statues were painted "horribly", and unless I missed it, there's no sources in this article that say that, either (just several links to the same New Yorker article talking about whiteness).

What I've always heard is that classical statues were painted "brightly".

So, is this something that's so well known in the study of antiquities that no source was required, or has the author just got a personal bugbear here?

pmichaud · 2 days ago

It made immediate sense to me, since the painted statues do, in fact, look gaudy and horrible. I think he was evoking a widely held feeling that is bot in common knowledge.

pmichaud commented on Google Titans architecture, helping AI have long-term memory research.google/blog/tita... · Posted by u/Alifatisk

kgeist · 13 days ago

>The model uses this internal error signal (the gradient) as a mathematical equivalent of saying, "This is unexpected and important!" This allows the Titans architecture to selectively update its long-term memory only with the most novel and context-breaking information

So one can break a model by consistently feeding it with random, highly improbable junk? Everything would be registered as a surprise and get stored, impacting future interactions

pmichaud · 13 days ago

I’m guessing that this is the first thing they thought of and the problem only exists in the superficial gloss you’re responding to?

pmichaud commented on Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models github.com/p-e-w/heretic... · Posted by u/melded

pjc50 · a month ago

If someone's going to ask you gotcha questions which they're then going to post on social media to use against you, or against other people, it helps to have pre-prepared statements to defuse that.

The model may not be able to detect bad faith questions, but the operators can.

pmichaud · a month ago

I think the concern is that if the system is susceptible to this sort of manipulation, then when it’s inevitably put in charge of life critical systems it will hurt people.

pmichaud commented on An opinionated critique of Duolingo isomorphism.xyz/blog/2025... · Posted by u/agnishom

creaktive · 3 months ago

Like I always say to my friends & family who are complaining about Duolingo not really teaching anything: it beats doomscrolling, what else do you want?

pmichaud · 3 months ago

A language learning platform that works would be nice, instead of this.

pmichaud commented on A collection of technical things every software developer should know (2017) github.com/mtdvio/every-p... · Posted by u/redbell

pdntspa · 3 months ago

Can we pleeeeeeease stop putting emoji in the middle or end of sentences like this was a 6-year-old's training reader?

Any time I see a sentence end in that strong-arm emoji my douchebag-o-meter goes way way up.

pmichaud · 3 months ago

Probably not. I think it's the beginning of a major language evolution.

pmichaud commented on Crates.io phishing attempt fasterthanli.me/articles/... · Posted by u/dmarto

coldfoundry · 3 months ago

Why does it seem like phishing is popular again? Maybe bad actors forgot how gullible humans were? I get phishing attempts nearly daily via email or sms and I honestly thought “Who would fall for this?” every time one came in.

The only phishing I can see that would be extremely hard to detect are browser extension injections (either in extension window or page replacement) so the domain is legitimate.

pmichaud · 3 months ago

I experience and wonder the same thing, but literally yesterday I had to help my grandmother recover from a phishing scam that actually (very nearly) worked on her. So there you go.

pmichaud commented on Our $100M Series B oxide.computer/blog/our-1... · Posted by u/spatulon

vonneumannstan · 5 months ago

Skeptical of that. There's only so much you can do against the physics of moving electrons around at high speeds... "Bigger Fans" and "compute density" doesn't change that

pmichaud · 5 months ago

I don't have any particular knowledge about oxide's cooling, but think about how bloated and inefficient literally every part of the compute stack is from metal to seeing these words on a screen. If you imagine fixing every part of it to be efficient top to bottom, I think you'll agree that we're not even in the same galaxy as the physical limitations of moving electrons around at high speeds.

pmichaud commented on Why English doesn't use accents deadlanguagesociety.com/p... · Posted by u/sandbach

eahm · 5 months ago

French.. you people have no idea how Italy is.

I speak differently than my brothers because I grew up at my grandparents 3 MILES! away and if I go to my family restaurant 2 MILES the other direction there is a different accent again, and I mean different words too not just the sound. Where I used to go to school 10 miles away they don't understand if I speak my dialect because it's a different region.

The whole Italy is like that, a different dialect every 2-3 miles, every family, town, city, province, county and region has different accents and ways to make food and recipes. My town is 3200 years old, older than the Romans, they used to fight, then ally then fight again with them etc., this dialect thing is very old, cultures, traditions and families.

Of course we have the Italian language in common and the main dialects are separated by the main city of the region then by the region itself but yep, that's how it is.

pmichaud · 5 months ago

When I was doing a bunch of learning about linguistics, situations like this were very interesting and confusing to me. I still don't have a good working intuition for how this is possible. I don't understand what maintains the sound differences in the face of the continuous exposure to substantially different accents. It's empirically possible, but it's never made sense to me. Why don't you and your brothers end up talking the same after a while?

pmichaud commented on Importance of context management in AI NPCs walterfreedom.com/post.ht... · Posted by u/walterfreedom

bee_rider · 6 months ago

Sounds like his original system was for the AI characters to be fed all events that happen in the universe. Then he changed it so that the AI characters were only fed events they reasonably should have gotten. Makes sense and seems like a great idea.

Something I wonder—often in a game, the focus follows the player character, and the universe stops when we go away. Maybe a simplified model will run to represent time passing while we are away, in games where that sort of thing matters. This is fine because our NPCs are basically static, if you freeze them, and then wake them up when the PC shows up. They aren’t deep enough for the missing day to day events to matter.

But, with more complex NPCs, will the fact that their lives pause while we’re gone shatter the illusion? It seems like his original system (the universe broadcasts to every NPC even while they are not doing anything) could fudge that a bit and retain a feeling of ongoing background life, in some cases. While in the new system they are ready frozen…

I dunno. What to do? Maybe run a simplified model and have it generate some appropriate local events for the NPCs while they are frozen (some, fewer than when they were on the receiving end of the whole universe).

pmichaud · 6 months ago

I think you can mostly fake this by waiting until the player reenters the range to generate what happened since the last time they interacted. If it's a complex simulation it won't work without more effort, but if it's flavor text like "Bob told me last week you killed the dragon, nice work!" then it can be done like 5ms after the player enters the simulation radius of the NPC.

pmichaud commented on Introduction to the A* Algorithm (2014) redblobgames.com/pathfind... · Posted by u/auraham

JohnKemeny · 6 months ago

It's that time of year again. I like A* as much as the next one, but it seems a bit excessive a times.

Title should have a (2014) in it: Introduction to the A* Algorithm (2014).

1 points, 8 months ago, 1 comments: Introduction to the a* Algorithm (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41897736)

202 points, 3 years ago, 30 comments: Introduction to the A* Algorithm (2014) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30287733)

4 points, 5 years ago, 1 comments: Introduction to the a* Algorithm (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24146045)

201 points, 7 years ago, 14 comments: Introduction to A* (2014) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18642462)

5 points, 7 years ago, 0 comments: Introduction to A* (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16190604)

pmichaud · 6 months ago

I think it's just the first, most obvious thing to teach people just starting in pathfinding. It works in real life, it's easy to visualize and compute. Therefore all the tutorials are about it :)