vcdimension (u/vcdimension)

vcdimension commented on The working-class hero of Bletchley Park you didn't see in the movies theguardian.com/world/202... · Posted by u/hansmayer

vcdimension · 2 months ago

Exactly, in your words: "being built by a lot of people", i.e. not just Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. If Bill Gates & Steve Jobs didn't exist those employees would be working for different computer companies such as IBM, Olivetti, Apricot, Xerox (who invented the point & click windows system) or one of many others, and we would have similar products under different names.

The geopolitical achievement of winning the war (and the consequences of that) was the whole purpose of building the machine, so it doesn't make sense to dismiss it as you did.

vcdimension · 2 months ago

Furthermore, there is no evidence that anyone else had the idea of using thermionic valves to greatly increase the speed of the code breaking computer, so if Tommy Flowers didn't exist it probably wouldn't have been discovered until much later (i.e. too late to help the war effort). Of course CEO's such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have made important individual contributions to society, but they were not as pivotal as that of Tommy Flowers, and furthermore they have been rewarded in money (many would say too much), whereas Tommy Flowers has received very little reward or recognition for his achievement.

vcdimension commented on The working-class hero of Bletchley Park you didn't see in the movies theguardian.com/world/202... · Posted by u/hansmayer

charcircuit · 2 months ago

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs made a lot of money due to owning the company. Being able to own something being built by a lot of people is how its possible.

>If Tommy Flowers didn't exist we might have lost the war.

I don't think achievements in computing should be based off geopolitical achievements. Hypothetically he could not exist and the war is lost, but there would be someone else who would iterate upon computers.

vcdimension · 2 months ago

Exactly, in your words: "being built by a lot of people", i.e. not just Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. If Bill Gates & Steve Jobs didn't exist those employees would be working for different computer companies such as IBM, Olivetti, Apricot, Xerox (who invented the point & click windows system) or one of many others, and we would have similar products under different names.

The geopolitical achievement of winning the war (and the consequences of that) was the whole purpose of building the machine, so it doesn't make sense to dismiss it as you did.

vcdimension commented on The working-class hero of Bletchley Park you didn't see in the movies theguardian.com/world/202... · Posted by u/hansmayer

charcircuit · 2 months ago

>He should be up there with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and all the rest of them, one of the great figures of the history of computing. He should have made as much money as they did

I disagree. The amount of value companies like Microsoft and Apple have given the world is many many orders of magnitude than what this guy did. It's hard to have 1 person compete against the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people. Just being early to field of computing shouldn't automatically make someone a "great."

vcdimension · 2 months ago

The value that companies such as Microsoft & Apple provide is supplied by all their thousands of employees, not just their CEO's. So its not a fair comparison to compare the output of Microsoft & Apple with the output of a single person (Tommy Flowers). Furthermore there are plenty of alternatives to Microsoft & Apple: if Bill Gates & Steve Jobs didn't exist we'd be probably be running Unix, Linux or one of the many other operating systems that lost out to Windows & MacOS for market share. If Tommy Flowers didn't exist we might have lost the war.

vcdimension commented on Writing simple tab-completions for Bash and Zsh mill-build.org/blog/14-ba... · Posted by u/lihaoyi

vcdimension · 4 months ago

Here's another tutorial for creating zsh completers using the built-in functions: https://github.com/vapniks/zsh-completions/blob/master/zsh-c...

vcdimension commented on Writing simple tab-completions for Bash and Zsh mill-build.org/blog/14-ba... · Posted by u/lihaoyi

oezi · 4 months ago

Isn't there a standard flag which programs can implement to avoid writing this bash script?

Ideally this could all be part of a library such as argparse for typical cases, right?

vcdimension · 4 months ago

In zsh you can use the _gnu_generic function for simple completion of commands with a --help flag. Just put a line like this somewhere in your startup file: compdef _gnu_generic <CMD>

vcdimension commented on Shell-secrets – GPG-encrypted environment variables github.com/waj/shell-secr... · Posted by u/mgarciaisaia

vcdimension · 8 months ago

I've forked the repo and created a zsh version: https://github.com/vapniks/shell-secrets

vcdimension commented on An Introduction to Stochastic Calculus (2022) bjlkeng.io/posts/an-intro... · Posted by u/ibobev

fancyfredbot · 8 months ago

Apparently this is the key to unlocking vast riches through a career as a derivatives quant. I'm told it's a requirement even though you don't really use it on the job. A bit like how you need to rebalance a binary tree to be a web developer.

Anyway now it's the key to unlocking vast riches through a career as an AI researcher too, seems like a good skill to have.

vcdimension · 8 months ago

Yes, you need a good tutor to help you navigate through such a complex topic.

vcdimension commented on Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different arxiv.org/abs/2503.02113... · Posted by u/wuubuu

rottc0dd · 9 months ago

If anyone wants to delve into machine learning, one of the superb resources I have found is, Stanfords "Probability for computer scientists"(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MuDZIAzBMY&list=PLoROMvodv4...).

It delves into theoretical underpinnings of probability theory and ML, IMO better than any other course I have seen. (Yeah, Andrew Ng is legendary, but his course demands some mathematical familarity with linear algebra topics)

And of course, for deep learning, 3b1b is great for getting some visual introduction (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk&list=PLZHQObOWTQ...).

vcdimension · 9 months ago

and if anyone is interested in delving more deeply into the statistical concepts & results referenced in the paper of this post (e.g. VC-dimension, PAC-learning, etc), I can recommend this book: https://amzn.eu/d/7Zwe6jw

vcdimension commented on CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins nytimes.com/2025/01/25/us... · Posted by u/doctaj

defrost · a year ago

> I don't have time to watch the 3hr debate

It was 18 hours.

Three blocks of six hours.

Plus preparation time by both parties and the multiple judges who were chosen to have the kind of expertise to weigh up arguments.

Both parties were invested in making a case, and each put up $100,000 in escrow to add weight to the debate.

The case that you put forward lost.

It was debated by the person that put it forward.

He lost.

vcdimension · a year ago

I had a look at Eric Stansifer's write-up of his decision, but I didn't read all of it (83 pages!). He does seem to have a good understanding of Bayesian decision making and hypothesis testing.

What confuses me however, is his dismissal of two pieces of evidence in table 2 which he says should be ignored "following the presumption that HSM is the first SSE", and yet earlier, in footnote 24, he states "We are very specifically NOT conditioning on that place being HSM" (talking about the first SSE location). Can anyone enlighten me about this seeming contradiction?

Another point: while both judges are qualified scientists, their expertise is in microbiology/virology not epidemiology, but it is the epidemiological aspect of the situation that is the most contentious part of the analysis, and AFAIK the part that swung the decision in favour of zoonotic origins for both judges. Without prior assumptions they both agree that the DNA evidence favours the lab leak theory.

vcdimension commented on CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins nytimes.com/2025/01/25/us... · Posted by u/doctaj

defrost · a year ago

Which means what?

"Rootclaim" then bet $100,000 on being able to back that claim in a independant structured 18 hour long debate of their own devising .. and lost the $100,000.

The Rootclaim assessment was worthless.

See: https://protagonist-science.medium.com/lableak-truther-loses...

Or watch the entire 18 hour debate in which that claim was shredded.

Given your user profile about: it's easy to see why you might give weight to Saar Wilf's Rootclaim project .. championing this particular result while ignoring its full history seems professionally questionable.

vcdimension · a year ago

Which means this; it gives further weight to the lab leak theory, and shows the reasoning behind it.

I don't have time to watch the 3hr debate or read all of that article (which makes some misrepresentative statements, and like your response, is rather venomous in tone), but here is the response from rootclaim about the debate outcome: https://blog.rootclaim.com/covid-origins-debate-response-to-...

I also know from experience that scientists, and people in general, are often not well trained in the kind of probabilistic reasoning that is required for combining and weighing up multiple sources of evidence.