sdenton4 (u/sdenton4)

sdenton4 commented on Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me boston.conman.org/2025/08... · Posted by u/classichasclass

gabeio · 13 hours ago

> It's also a page that's never visited by humans.

Never is a strong word. I have definitely visited robots.txt of various websites for a variety of random reasons.

  - remembering the format
  - seeing what they might have tried to "hide"
  - using it like a site's directory
  - testing if the website is working if their main dashboard/index is offline

sdenton4 · 13 hours ago

Are you sure you are human?

sdenton4 commented on Starship's Tenth Flight Test spacex.com/launches/stars... · Posted by u/d_silin

jiggawatts · a day ago

Sure, but it was burning congressional pork as fuel and cost only the occasional human sacrifice.

sdenton4 · a day ago

The only reason starship hasn't involved human sacrifice thus far is that they haven't put humans in it. It remains to be seen whether the engineers will manage to make something usable from musk's 'Cybertruck - space edition' fever dream.

sdenton4 commented on Rolling the dice with CSS random() webkit.org/blog/17285/rol... · Posted by u/zdw

akdev1l · 2 days ago

To generate random number in a specific range you need to do something I always forget and need to google.

    Math.floor(Math.random() * (max - min + 1)) + min;

(Google AI summary says this is the thing)

The CSS function would be random(min, max)

Also the CSS function seems to take a number of steps, it is not immediately obvious to me how to do that with Math.random()

sdenton4 · 2 days ago

Why not add a Math.randint?

I imagine there's some deep ideological war over whether to add more programming functionality to css...

sdenton4 commented on AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem vincirufus.com/posts/agi-... · Posted by u/vincirufus

andy99 · 2 days ago

If you believe the bitter lesson, all the handwavy "engineering" is better done with more data. Someone likely would have written the same thing as this 8 years ago about what it would take to get current LLM performance.

So I don't buy the engineering angle, I also don't think LLMs will scale up to AGI as imagined by Asimov or any of the usual sci-fi tropes. There is something more fundamental missing, as in missing science, not missing engineering.

sdenton4 · 2 days ago

Too bad about all those chumps designing better, faster architectures and kernels to make models run faster...

sdenton4 commented on In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses technologyreview.com/2025... · Posted by u/jeffbee

kleton · 5 days ago

The Meta FTW data centers use evaporative chillers, but they re-condense the water so that it's a closed loop.

sdenton4 · 4 days ago

Yeah, the funny thing about the water claims is that there's a pretty simple technological fix: closed loop exists, and seems to be simply the better choice going forward as new DCs are built (excepting of course things like musk's 'rolling coal' bullshit).

sdenton4 commented on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard' theregister.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/JustExAWS

threecheese · 4 days ago

Ones that can remediate it though. If I am capable of safely refactoring 1,000 copies of a method, in a codebase that humans don’t look at, did it really matter if the workload functions as designed?

sdenton4 · 4 days ago

Jeebus, 'safely' is carrying a hell of a lot of water there...

sdenton4 commented on How to Think About GPUs jax-ml.github.io/scaling-... · Posted by u/alphabetting

dotancohen · 6 days ago

I've been hearing that for over a decade. I can't even name off hand any CUDA competitors, none of them are likely to gain enough traction to upset CUDA in the coming decade.

sdenton4 · 6 days ago

...Well, the article compares GPUs to tpus, made by a competitor you probably know the name of...

sdenton4 commented on Tversky Neural Networks gonzoml.substack.com/p/tv... · Posted by u/che_shr_cat

abeppu · 9 days ago

I think the case for interpretability could have been made better, but in Figure 3 I think if you look at the middle "prototype" rows from the traditional vs Tversky layers, and scroll so you can't see the rows above, I think you could pick out mostly which Tversky prototype corresponds to each digit, but not which traditional/linear prototype corresponds to each digit.

So I do think that's more interpretable in two ways:

1. You can look at specific representations in the model and "see" what they "mean"

2. This means you can give a high-level interpretation to a particular inference run: "X_i is a 7 because it's like this prototype that looks like a 7, and it has some features that only turn up in 7s"

I do think complex models doing complex tasks will sometimes have extremely complex "explanations" which may not really communicate anything to a human, and so do not function as an explanation.

sdenton4 · 9 days ago

It's wishful thinking.

Neutral networks need to be over parameterized to find good solutions, meaning there is a surface of solutions. The optimization procedure tries to walk towards that surface as quickly as possible, and tend to find a low-energy point on the surface of solutions. In particular, a low energy solution isn't sparse, and therefore isn't interpretable.

sdenton4 commented on Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale derwiki.medium.com/do-thi... · Posted by u/derwiki

nickserv · 9 days ago

I feel like the main takeaway here is that if you want your personal project to last, you should run it on your own server.

sdenton4 · 9 days ago

It'll last until you lose interest or die. Shrug emoji.

sdenton4 commented on Bullfrog in the Dungeon filfre.net/2025/08/bullfr... · Posted by u/doppp

enraged_camel · 10 days ago

I have very fond memories of Dungeon Keeper. The devious traps, the torture chambers where you could convert your goodly hero prisoners, the way you could backslap your imps into working a bit faster, the way you could take possession of any minion to turn the game into an FPS... all of these, plus many more, were just genius-level design elements that made the game what it is.

The 90s were a special time when it came to video games. I'm a bit saddened that we are unlikely to repeat that era. There are some great games today too, but none of them capture that same zeitgeist.

sdenton4 · 10 days ago

My game of the year had been UFO 50, which simultaneously distills 80s console and early-aughts Flash game jam ethos. Incredibly inventive takes on a very wide range of game genres; an absolute masterpiece of game design.