seertaak (u/seertaak)

seertaak commented on The Tor Project is switching to Rust itsfoss.com/news/tor-rust... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

lifthrasiir · 16 days ago

> 13 years to get to v0.0.1 is a success?

Wine took a roughly same amount of time to be versioned as well, but no one calls Wine a failure.

seertaak · 15 days ago

First, wine was widely panned for years before it stopped sucking.

Second, you're simply ignoring that parent poster mentioned Ladybird, a non-rust project which is advancing much more speedily than servo. And I think they have a valid point -- and while the jury is still out, it's possible that in other rust-centric efforts which have experienced foot-dragging (eg WASI), the root cause may be rust itself.

Parent poster expressed their point somewhat sarcastically, but if I (C++/python dev, I admit!) were a betting transfem, my money would be on them being right.

That said, I think the Tor project got this decision right. This is as close to an ideal use-case for rust as you can get. Also, the project is mature, which will mitigate rewrite risk. The domain is one where rust can truly shine -- and it's a critical one to get right.

seertaak commented on The choice between Rust and C-derived languages is not only about memory safety bbuyukliev.blogspot.com/2... · Posted by u/bluetomcat

kstrauser · 16 days ago

That’s right. And forget about the existing rustc compiler implement. If you have something in Rust like

  let a: HashMap = immutable_map.iter().map(…);

then you can infer from the semantics that the ordering doesn’t matter and whether it can be parallelized. C doesn’t have the ability to express what you want to happen, just how to do it. That gives Rust far more opportunity for optimization than C possibly can have.

seertaak · 15 days ago

C != C-derived languages

In C++ this was possible already in C++03.

OTOH, it wasn't until recently that you were able to write something like `std::array<T, N>` in rust. Even now, there are restrictions on the kinds of expressions that N can be.

Just pointing out that this cuts both ways.

seertaak commented on Who Invented Backpropagation? people.idsia.ch/~juergen/... · Posted by u/nothrowaways

pncnmnp · 4 months ago

I have a question that's bothered me for quite a while now. In 2018, Michael Jordan (UC Berkeley) wrote a rather interesting essay - https://medium.com/@mijordan3/artificial-intelligence-the-re... (Artificial Intelligence — The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet)

In it, he stated the following:

> Indeed, the famous “backpropagation” algorithm that was rediscovered by David Rumelhart in the early 1980s, and which is now viewed as being at the core of the so-called “AI revolution,” first arose in the field of control theory in the 1950s and 1960s. One of its early applications was to optimize the thrusts of the Apollo spaceships as they headed towards the moon.

I was wondering whether anyone could point me to the paper or piece of work he was referring to. There are many citations in Schmidhuber’s piece, and in my previous attempts I've gotten lost in papers.

seertaak · 4 months ago

Rumelhart et al wrote "Parallel Distributed Processing"; there's a chapter where he proves that the backprop algorithm maximizes "harmony", which is simply a different formulation of error minimization.

I remember reading this book enthusiastically back in the mid 90s. I don't recall struggling with the proof, it was fairly straightforward. (I was in senior high school year at the time.)

seertaak commented on C++ Library mcyoung.xyz/2025/07/14/be... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

seertaak · 5 months ago

Excellent write-up! Many thanks for your effort.

IIUC, the iterators stuff basically makes the task of creating iterator adaptors easier. Note that boost already provides similar facilities in the STLInterfaces library:

https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/latest/doc/html/stl_interface...

Note also that Joaquín López Muñoz has created a very interesting range iterator library which is based on push semantics. These have better performance, which is is intuitively reasonable (for me at least).

https://github.com/joaquintides/transrangers

Haven't had a chance to play around with them yet, but they look pretty cool.

seertaak commented on Does RL Incentivize Reasoning in LLMs Beyond the Base Model? limit-of-rlvr.github.io/... · Posted by u/leodriesch

nialv7 · 8 months ago

> we uncover that RL-trained models excel at low k (e.g., pass@1) but are consistently outperformed by base models at high k (e.g., pass@256).

This is a weak argument. I think I get what we are trying to say, but let's take this to the extreme, say pass@10^10^100. Just like a group of monkeys could write Shakespeare if given enough time, a complete random model could probably outperform an RL-trained model at pass@10^10^100. Would we then say the random model can reason too?

Of course the correct reasoning trace will be in the base model's distribution, just like any other well-formed, coherent paragraph. Kind of makes me think, maybe sampling efficiency _is_ intelligence?

seertaak · 8 months ago

The authors of the paper address this argument in the QA section.

seertaak commented on I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs cantgetmuchhigher.com/p/i... · Posted by u/jnord

pfisherman · 8 months ago

Agreed on chord numbers and progression being the analysis that should have been done. For example, blues is mostly defined by a 1-4-5 progression and the ol 2-5-1 is pretty ubiquitous across time and genre.

Also, I think disappearance of 7th chords - major, minor, or dominant - is vastly overstated. Keep in mind that these are from guitar tabs so likely ignoring chord inversion / voicing / substitution taking placw to simplify notation. For example a B minor triad can be substituted for a Gmaj7.

Bm triad = B,D,F#

Gmaj7 = G,B,D,F#

Or if you want to be fancy a Bb/Gm can work as either Bbmaj7 or C7 depending on where you put it in a progression.

seertaak · 8 months ago

Anyway a 2-5-1 is the rotation of a diatonic substitution of a 1-4-5 (2 for 4). Only one note difference between those two chord changes.

seertaak commented on I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs cantgetmuchhigher.com/p/i... · Posted by u/jnord

huimang · 8 months ago

Using absolute chord analysis instead of relative chords (i.e. roman numeral analysis) doesn't make sense. As others have noted, the original dataset is flawed because the structure of a song is critical, you cannot omit repeating chords. Programmers/analysts should take more care to understand music theory or the underlying field at hand, before compiling datasets or doing analysis.

"Most common chord" is mildly interesting, but not really that useful. The most common key, and the most commonly used chords relative to that key (i.e. with roman numeral analysis) would be much more useful and interesting. This would help paint a clearer distinction between e.g. country and jazz, not that "jazz uses Bb major more". Also, anyone with general instrument knowledge would surmise that since Bb and Eb instruments are much more prevalent.

"If you’re sitting down to write a song, throw a 7th chord in. The ghost of a jazz great will smile on you."

7ths don't belong to jazz only, and the average songwriter isn't making data-driven decisions on how to settle on the chord structure for their song.

seertaak · 8 months ago

Agree completely. I assume OP means major or minor 7th chord - they can't possibly mean dominant 7th, because...does there even exist a single blues song which doesn't have that chord?

And let's say you take maj7 chords - "you and me song", "you are so beautiful", "sing sang sung", "1975" - just off the top of my head. Pretty much any pop song which is melancholic sounding.

For min7, choose virtually any Santana song.

Even if you said maj9 or min9 it still wouldn't be remotely true. Otoh 13th chords....I think you'd have to reach to find a non-jazz occurrence of that chord. And it happens in jazz all the time.

seertaak commented on Darwin's children drew all over the “On the Origin of Species” manuscript (2014) theappendix.net/posts/201... · Posted by u/arbesman

drysine · 8 months ago

It's not clear how old he was.

seertaak · 8 months ago

One of the drawings had the inscription 'I am a wild beast' -- that's 5-7 year old territory. Ofc it's possible that I'm missing some cultural nuance, but the picture is consistent with precocious-little-kid-with-visceral-imagination. He must have been a joy to parent!

seertaak commented on Germany creates 'super–high-tech ministry' for research, technology, aerospace science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/pmags

anigbrowl · 9 months ago

Black_13 appears to be shadowbanned so I'm reproducing their comment here:

The cynicism in these comments is telling, but misses crucial realities about Germany's capabilities and social achievements. Yes, Germany creates bureaucracies. Yes, Dorothee Bär's digital infrastructure record isn't impressive. And yes, German bureaucracy can be stifling. But this myopic focus on administrative inefficiency overlooks Germany's formidable strengths.

Germany maintains world-class engineering and manufacturing excellence through their Mittelstand network while America has hollowed out its industrial base. German research institutions like Max Planck and Fraunhofer consistently produce breakthrough innovations in renewable energy, advanced materials, and chemical engineering. Their aerospace contributions through Airbus and DLR deliver real technological advances.

More importantly, Germany excels precisely where America falters. Their dual education system creates exceptional technical competence without requiring college degrees. Germans enjoy comprehensive public transportation infrastructure, universal healthcare without administrative bloat, and urban planning that prioritizes livability over speculation.

The results speak for themselves: Germans live significantly longer (81.1 years vs America's 76.4), face virtually no gun violence (2 deaths per million annually vs America's 120), and don't suffer from the manufactured scarcity that plagues American housing, healthcare, and education markets.

Critically, Germany isn't now teetering on becoming a police state. While America expands surveillance powers, militarizes police forces, and faces growing authoritarianism, Germany's post-war constitutional framework continues to prioritize civil liberties, privacy protections, and democratic norms. Their painful historical lessons have created institutional guardrails against authoritarianism that America increasingly lacks.

Let's be honest about who's posting these dismissive takes - primarily privileged tech workers disconnected from the material realities faced by average citizens. While you mock German bureaucracy from comfortable positions, their social systems deliver concrete benefits that many Americans can only dream of.

Germany's approach allows for longer, healthier lives with dramatically less precarity than what Americans experience. Their new ministry may face bureaucratic challenges, but it builds on foundations of technical excellence and social achievement that deserve genuine consideration rather than facile mockery.

seertaak · 9 months ago

Interesting comment, but Germany's much-vaunted Mittelstand is in its initial death throes. Key industries and IP are being auctioned off to the highest bidder, not the least, for lack of heirs. It isn't universally acknowledged, but the same processes that caused the US's manufacturing decay have been occurring in Germany; at roughly the same speed, but with a 30 year lag (since Agenda 2010) viz-a-vis the US.

seertaak commented on Glamorous Toolkit gtoolkit.com//... · Posted by u/radeeyate

7thaccount · 9 months ago

I'm basically in the same boat with this and all the smalltalk systems I have tried. The environment is just so foreign. I get the gist for how programming works in pharo (have also looked at Squeak and Cuis), but Python just seems a lot more natural. It is also hard to find snippets of useful code on stack overflow for smalltalk for the things I want to do. Maybe copilot is better there. The more practical problem is I'd never be able to justify using any of this for corporate work.

seertaak · 9 months ago

I see what you're saying, but looking at the video, which shows playgrounds and notes, I'm quite excited to try this because it looks a lot like jupyterlab. Jupyterlab is familiar to any data scientist, but while it's easy to use, it's quite awkward to extend due to the latter being based on a plugin system (understandably) based on typescript.

Here it's all one system, and thinking of the image as a key-value store feels quite natural too. Finally, the UI with panes that go right also feels natural and looks quite slick. I wonder if it's easy to switch between languages? Like can the key-value store pass data to a python program, or use an Apache arrow table?