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MrUssek

208 karma · joined April 1, 2019

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MrUssek··on GPS – Bartosz Ciechanowski (2022)
I suppose Ciechanowski is the kind of blogger who causes an HN cascade with each new article.
MrUssek··on So long, and thanks for all the bytes
Some context for those that may be unaware; Chet has been a staple in the Android developer community for a very long time, having hosted a popular podcast and been a staple a conferences. His move into comedy will surprise no one, but he will be dearly missed.
MrUssek··on Ask HN: I am interested in reading about techniques HFT firms use
While they are out of date and not too technical (and arguably, quite biased), the two books that I've enjoyed the most on this topic are:

1. Dark Pools, by Scott Patterson, and 2. Flash Boys, by Michael Lewis.

MrUssek··on Inngest raises $3M seed to build the reliable workflow platform for every dev
Just to confirm my understanding; would you consider at least part of your product offering to be similar to temporal.io [1]? Your examples are reminiscent of theirs. [1] https://temporal.io/
MrUssek··on Ask HN: What RSS Reader do you use in 2022?
I use Feedly, not sure why it's not more frequently recommended.

https://feedly.com/

MrUssek··on Automatic Differentiation in 38 lines of Haskell
To be clear this is a forward mode auto diff implementation, not reverse mode, as might be inferred by the reference to the SPJ talk, correct?
MrUssek··on Ask HN: Have you experienced decline in problem-solving skills? How to improve?
This post feels identical to one that I had been considering writing for a while now.

I'm nearly 28, and the past ~4 months have felt like I have been suffering from acute brain fog. And not even regarding challenging topics; most of the decline feels concentrated in parsing relatively simple logical statements and arguments. I used to be able to do this without any difficulty, and now, suddenly, it feels like it requires conscious effort. I too feel like I used to be decent at math and computer science. It's gotten so bad that I'm wondering if this is an actual medical condition (perhaps there is lead in my water? perhaps I have long COVID?).

As far as testing intellect (2), apparently it's not so far out of the ordinary to request a clinical psychologist to administer an IQ test. Additionally it's easy to get tests from Mensa or other organizations. I've been considering doing this for a while myself, but have delayed due to anxiety over the result. IQ tests are evaluated against individuals of the same age, so it won't tell you how you compare against people of other ages (including your younger self), but you can probably compare against earlier aptitude tests you have taken to see if there is a decline. I get the whole IQ discussion gets toxic really fast, so I'll just say I'm not endorsing any of the rhetoric or ideas that co-occur when people start talking about it.

For (3) I think the research on this is rather grim. I don't have time to come up with a good survey, but I'm sure the "rationalists" among us will happily chime in. I think the consensus is that it is possible to increase abilities in a narrow domain and only for a short amount of time.

I have to admit that this has been a very hard thing to come to terms with. I've already felt my work performance suffer, and I'm not sure if there is anything I can do about it. I've been exercising regularly for years now, and recently got my sleep habits in check, but to no avail.

MrUssek··on Ask HN: I'm looking for a good book on the fundamentals of CS
Plus one for these. I found them a quicker and perhaps funner read than CLRS which was my undergrad textbook, and it covers a lot of interesting stuff. These are all a part of David Kopek's book project you can find here: https://classicproblems.com/
MrUssek··on GNU Binutlis 2.37 has been released
Typo: Binutlis => Binutils
MrUssek··on Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars
There should be an option for StyleGAN (i.e https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/)
MrUssek··on Will Hurd Joins OpenAI’s Board of Directors
Ok, I know it's crazy, but I like to indulge myself sometimes:

Does this have something to do with Will Hurd's past in the CIA? Feels like an interesting choice to have on the board of the premiere AI research lab.

MrUssek··on DALL-E Paper and Code
So, uhh, where's the paper? The link in the readme isn't active.
MrUssek··on Former Israeli space security chief says aliens exist, humanity not ready
Assuming this is a hoax, it has to be one of the best timed hoaxes in history to be honest.
MrUssek··on Why ‘Civilization’ is a political masterpiece
I think that Errant Signal's video on Civilization offers a really interesting counterpoint to this view. When you think about it, despite it's cheap cosmopolitanism, it has an extremely narrow contemporary liberal view of civilization, government, technology and "progress". I think it's worth looking into.

https://youtu.be/xBlEscMLjy0

MrUssek··on Introduction to Simple Workflow Service (SWF)
This reminds me of a POC I did to serialize Kotlin continuation state in order to achieve something similar with Kotlin coroutines. The main issue with that approach is that the continuation context can end up closing over a huge variety of types (since it has to serialize the entire asynchronous stack). There was some discussion in this issue (https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.coroutines/issues/76) about annotating suspend functions so that their continuation only closes over objects compatible with Kotlin serialization. This approach removes the requirement for all non-determinism in the code to go through some kind of framework, which seems like a plus.

I think in the future what will happen is someone will build a language with CSP style concurrency that deals with the "update-in-flight" and "persistence" problems. Essentially extending the notion of a programming language runtime from "once, here, on this computer, right now", to something much broader.

MrUssek··on GShard: Scaling giant models with conditional computation and automatic sharding
There's an extremely large number of parameters per "neuron". The 600B parameters will take up more than 1TB of space in memory, far too much for the 2080 TI or even main memory for most systems.