tsmarsh (u/tsmarsh) - Readit News

tsmarsh commented on Ask HN: Are you still using your Vision Pro? · Posted by u/dgellow

tsmarsh · a year ago

Yes, its very much a part of my work setup. It transformed working so that for the first time I have a good working setup everywhere.

Its also my preferred place to consume cinema. I have a short throw projector and sound system. I prefer the AVP. The image is so crisp and the 3D is so good, that its better than a decent home movie theater.

Its my preferred place to watch F1.

Environments genuinely soothe me.

Breathe works on this platform, it annoys me on the watch.

I would watch every sport and documentary in spatial if the was a thing. The tastes have me excited for the future.

tsmarsh commented on Ask HN: When LLMs make stuff up, call it 'confabulating', not 'hallucinating' · Posted by u/irdc

tsmarsh · 2 years ago

I find the easiest way of explaining LLMs to laypeople is "Bulls*t Engine". If tuned well they're going to answer like a salesperson or internet troll: if they don't know they will BS before they don't answer. Its not hallucinating, or confabulation its BS.

That's not to say they're not useful. The ability to BS is well regarded among humans as long as you, as a consumer, have a decent BS detector. And like a good BS artist, if you stay within their area of expertise they can be really useful. Its when you ask them something that they should or almost know that they start to be full of s**.

tsmarsh commented on The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook theverge.com/23770770/app... · Posted by u/samwillis

al_be_back · 2 years ago

>> This isn’t just for pros, Apple seems to claim; it’s for capital-P Pros.

paying $15K for a Mac Pro (without screen) to be tethered to a desk isn't a very creative solution in 2023, WFH / remote working requires agility. MacBook Pros are very powerful already.

Plus, consumers are going to want more Energy Efficient / Green products, and that means long-lasting too (reduce waste).

tsmarsh · 2 years ago

I really enjoy the luxury of both. I have a MacBook Air that I use when I'm traveling or sick of being at the desk, but 80% of my computing is done at my desk with my Mac Studio. git, icloud, airplay and basically all corporate work happening in office360 means that I'm not really tethered to any one machine.

Why have the desktop? Power. M1 Ultra is a beast, throwing a little more money at a device that isn't going to die because the battery expired or I crack the screen made sense to me. I'm also mostly at my desk, mostly for ergonomic reasons: I hurt _less_ if I'm in a good chair where everything is tuned to my height.

tsmarsh commented on Is tipping getting out of control? Many consumers say yes apnews.com/article/tippin... · Posted by u/subliminalpanda

ddyevf635372 · 3 years ago

There isn't any tip in New Zealand and Australia. Everybody get proper salary. The service is always exceptional. How is that possible?

tsmarsh · 3 years ago

Look at the UK. Tipping has gotten weird in the last decade but the service culture is just missing. The service industry is what you do in high school or college because it’s the first cost that the food service industry wants to optimize. Consumers don’t expect or demand good service, so we don’t get it.

tsmarsh commented on Use one big server specbranch.com/posts/one-... · Posted by u/pclmulqdq

BenoitEssiambre · 3 years ago

I'm glad this is becoming conventional wisdom. I used to argue this in these pages a few years ago and would get downvoted below the posts telling people to split everything into microservices separated by queues (although I suppose it's making me lose my competitive advantage when everyone else is building lean and mean infrastructure too).

In my mind, reasons involve keeping transactional integrity, ACID compliance, better error propagation, avoiding the hundreds of impossible to solve roadblocks of distributed systems (https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/MIT-LCS-TM-394...).

But also it is about pushing the limits of what is physically possible in computing. As Admiral Grace Hopper would point out (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eyFDBPk4Yw ) doing distance over network wires involves hard latency constraints, not to mention dealing with congestions over these wires.

Physical efficiency is about keeping data close to where it's processed. Monoliths can make much better use of L1, L2, L3, and ram caches than distributed systems for speedups often in the order of 100X to 1000X.

Sure it's easier to throw more hardware at the problem with distributed systems but the downsides are significant so be sure you really need it.

Now there is a corollary to using monoliths. Since you only have one db, that db should be treated as somewhat sacred, you want to avoid wasting resources inside it. This means being a bit more careful about how you are storing things, using the smallest data structures, normalizing when you can etc. This is not to save disk, disk is cheap. This is to make efficient use of L1,L2,L3 and ram.

I've seen boolean true or false values saved as large JSON documents. {"usersetting1": true, "usersetting2":fasle "setting1name":"name" etc.} with 10 bits of data ending up as a 1k JSON document. Avoid this! Storing documents means, the keys, the full table schema is in every row. It has its uses but if you can predefine your schema and use the smallest types needed, you are gaining much performance mostly through much higher cache efficiency!

tsmarsh · 3 years ago

'over the wire' is less obvious than it used to be.

If you're in k8s pod, those calls are really kernel calls. Sure you're serializing and process switching where you could be just making a method call, but we had to do something.

I'm seeing less 'balls of mud' with microservices. Thats not zero balls of mud. But its not a given for almost every code base I wander into.

tsmarsh commented on I built my own Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) hardware dev kit from scratch nestenius.se/2022/01/18/h... · Posted by u/regus

tsmarsh · 4 years ago

I bought Ben Eater's Motorola kit and was overwhelmed, I have a whole new respect for folks that can do this.

tsmarsh commented on Why geothermal isn't ubiquitous and how it might get that way austinvernon.eth.link/blo... · Posted by u/Osiris30

swiley · 4 years ago

The "free energe" is moving the heat from the hot rock to the atmosphere. The difference is that it's not doing that by oxidizing carbon to CO2.

tsmarsh · 4 years ago

Yes. But CO2 is a problem because it prevents the heat from the sun from escaping (and there is 1kW/m2 of that). Without excess “greenhouse” gasses excess energy is free to radiate into space.

tsmarsh commented on Hybrid supercapacitor offers NiMH energy density, charges much faster newatlas.com/energy/qut-h... · Posted by u/CarCooler

tsmarsh · 5 years ago

As a turbo for cars to enable focusing on super high wH/kg storage class batteries this is interesting.

But as power delivery for drones and rail guns these could be game changing.

tsmarsh commented on $30 DIY Kilowatt Wind Turbine (2017) opensourcelowtech.org/win... · Posted by u/simonpure

ck2 · 5 years ago

Could you make a dyson fan work backwards as a generator and avoid the blade problem?

tsmarsh · 5 years ago

Dyson fans substitute one large, slow fan, for a small fast fan and then hydraulically gear that down.

Its an interesting idea. You would definitely create an uplift if air was blown through the fan and that could drive a turbine, and that turbine would be experiencing a much higher air speed, so you might be able to avoid the mechanical gearing. You'd have less moving parts, but probably lower efficiency.

You could also combine the fans with ducting and use a single generator. Ducting also has significant losses when compared with wiring, but if the generator is your biggest expense maybe its worth it?

tsmarsh commented on Tinnitus Treatment from Neuromod lenire.com/... · Posted by u/Mopolo

quaffapint · 5 years ago

I've often wondered why sometimes it's worse than others. It's always there. I always hear the ringing, but most times I can ignore it, but there are other times it just seems so much louder.

I would like to know what all those triggers are so I can try to avoid them. Some are obvious - real loud noises, heavy exercise, etc, but others not so much.

tsmarsh · 5 years ago

For me its worse when my introversion is acting up. Its like having a song stuck in your head. It really only goes away if you engage with the rest of the world.