thevillagechief (u/thevillagechief)

thevillagechief commented on VHS-C: When a lazy idea stumbles towards perfection [video] youtube.com/watch?v=HFYWH... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

bsimpson · 4 days ago

YT recently recommended his explanation of how pre-computer pinball machines worked to me - a series of 3, hour-long videos. Gave me something to look forward to on my commute. I shared it with everyone I know, and now I'm sharing it with you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-1JoJQaEg

Fascinating (and insanely impressive) to see how a bunch of switches and stepper motors implement complex logic.

thevillagechief · 4 days ago

I find myself randomly recommending his videos to friends in the middle of conversations. Content like this is why I love YouTube.

thevillagechief commented on Google scores six-year Meta cloud deal worth over $10B cnbc.com/2025/08/21/googl... · Posted by u/herpderperator

calmbonsai · 4 days ago

Google needs deal this due to flights away from its cloud.

It can't compete with Azure for simple/coarse-grained services and AWS for complex/fine-grained services.

Atm, Google cloud is only good for cheap high-ram one-run-centric compute (AWS is cheaper for generic compute and reserved compute), simple container execution (Cloud Run), and ~100 TB bulk storage.

thevillagechief · 4 days ago

Your phrasing seems off. Why does Meta care what Google needs? It would seem that it's exactly backwards. Meta needs this because training resources are scarce. And Google is in the enviable position of having TPUs.

thevillagechief commented on Fairness is what the powerful 'can get away with' study shows phys.org/news/2025-07-fai... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

thevillagechief · 11 days ago

So this is just Thrasymachus - "Justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger"?

thevillagechief commented on OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution openindiana.org/... · Posted by u/doener

shrubble · 13 days ago

I’m of the opinion that the acquisition of Sun by Oracle was the worst possible outcome; it guaranteed that Solaris would decline.

thevillagechief · 13 days ago

Still mad at IBM for screwing the pooch on that one. They basically handed the company to Oracle.

thevillagechief commented on Monte Carlo Crash Course: Quasi-Monte Carlo thenumb.at/QMC/... · Posted by u/zote

hnhg · 19 days ago

This feels like a crash course for people already very familiar with it all. For everyone else, Steve Brunton's courses cover a lot of the foundational stuff here on probability and stats and might be a lot more accessible: https://www.youtube.com/@Eigensteve

thevillagechief · 17 days ago

Nice coincidence! I'm going through his course as a review of FFT and SVD fundamentals. He's really good.

thevillagechief commented on The Algebra Gatekeepers educationprogress.org/p/t... · Posted by u/domofutu

thevillagechief · 23 days ago

One of the most frustrating articles I've read in a while. Is everything in the US just well-off people colluding to keep everyone else down? Most countries don't have this advanced classes thing. Everyone just takes the same classes. It does not make sense to have admins and other parents with vested interests block kids from whatever classes they want to take!

thevillagechief commented on Google shifts goo.gl policy: Inactive links deactivated, active links preserved blog.google/technology/de... · Posted by u/shuuji3

borg16 · 25 days ago

i read in an earlier thread for this on HN - "this is a classic example of data driven product decision" aka we can reduce costs by $x if we just stopped goo.gl links. Instead of actually wondering how this would impact the customers.

Also helps that they are in a culture which does not mind killing services on a whim.

thevillagechief · 25 days ago

One of the complaints about Google is that it's difficult to launch products due to bureaucracy. I'm starting to thing that's not a bad thing. If they'd done a careful analysis of the cost of jumping into this url-shortener bandwagon, we wouldn't be here. Maybe it's not a bad thing they move slower now.

thevillagechief commented on Corporation for Public Broadcasting ceasing operations cpb.org/pressroom/Corpora... · Posted by u/coloneltcb

nemomarx · 25 days ago

Large groups voting for "tear it all down, we don't trust institutions" wasn't a sign for you back in 2016? what were your priors before this year?

thevillagechief · 25 days ago

My point here is that "strong institutions" were supposed to stem this tide. Of course, I should have thought through who made up these institutions. In some ways institutions kind of held up pretty well 2016-2020. Which is why I was a little less worried. But looks like that was a dry run. The efficiency with which this is happening now is shocking. Honestly, I'm kind of impressed. If we applied this much efficiency constructively in the US, we'd probably see post-war prosperity levels. I imagine even NASA would approach the 1960s productivity.

thevillagechief commented on Corporation for Public Broadcasting ceasing operations cpb.org/pressroom/Corpora... · Posted by u/coloneltcb

thevillagechief · 25 days ago

Woah! This stuff is unwinding faster than my priors. I'm going to have to re-evaluate everything I thought true about the US. I just always assumed "strong institutions" meant something here. That it was all a house built on sand is disconcerting.

thevillagechief commented on GPT-5 is already (ostensibly) available via API old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/c... · Posted by u/consumer451

williamdclt · 25 days ago

this comment points out the same things as you. It's (not-so-obvious but pretty clearly in hindsight) sarcasm

thevillagechief · 25 days ago

I thought it was sarcasm, then got confused because people seemed to take it seriously. So I decided to try the prompt on Gemini 2.5: Pro just says it can't generate an SVG, Flash generates a petty great one. Whatever copilot is using is also good. So I just assume even the image generated is a joke? People are starting to make me doubt my abilities to identify sarcasm.

u/thevillagechief

KarmaCake day241August 25, 2023View Original