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SillyUsername

1,006 karma · joined October 25, 2022

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SillyUsername··on Why Mathematica does not simplify sinh(arccosh(x))
I've only an A-Level in Further Maths from 1997, but understand complex numbers and have come across complex inverse trig functions before.

My takeaway for other people like me from this is "computer is correct" because the proof shows that we can't define arccosh using a single proof across the entire complex plane (specifically imaginary, including infinity).

The representation of this means we have both complex functions that are defined as having coverage of infinity, and arccosh, that a proof exists in only one direction at a time during evaluation.

This distinction is a quirk in mathematics but means that the equation won't be simplified because although it looks like it can, the underlying proof is "one sided" (-ve or +ve) which means the variables are fundamentally not the same at evaluation time unless 2 approaches to the range definition are combined.

The QED is that this distinction won't be shown in the result's representation, leading to the confusion that it should have been simplified.

SillyUsername··on GLM-5: Targeting complex systems engineering and long-horizon agentic tasks
Also, cheaper... X99 + 8x DDR4 + 2696V4 + 4x Tesla P4s running on llama.cpp. Total cost about $500 including case and a 650W PSU, excluding RAM. Running TDP about 200W non peak 550W peak (everything slammed, but I've never seen it and I've an AC monitor on the socket). GLM 4.5 Air (60GB Q3-XL) when properly tuned runs at 8.5 to 10 tokens / second, with context size of 8K. Throw in a P100 too and you'll see 11-12.5 t/s (still tuning this one). Performance doesn't drop as much for larger model sizes as the internode communication and DDR4 2400 is the limiter, not the GPUs. I've been using this with 4 channel 96GB ram, recently updated to 128GB.
SillyUsername··on EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners
Won't happen. They'll buy the next indie game studio that is successful, chew on their profits, then tank that, rinse repeat.
SillyUsername··on Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles
A lot of apologists say that "a human would have hit that".

That's kind of irrelevant, this technology is meant to be safer and held to a higher standard.

Comparing to a human is not a valid excuse...

SillyUsername··on Qwen3 30B A3B Hits 13 token/s on 4xRaspberry Pi 5
Well you're wrong on all accounts of the veiled insults.

Also, I've not stated LGBT, this has nothing to do with it, it's weird you'd even mention it.

SillyUsername··on Qwen3 30B A3B Hits 13 token/s on 4xRaspberry Pi 5
I imagine it might be limited by number of layers and you'll get diminishing returns as well at some point caused by network latency.
SillyUsername··on Qwen3 30B A3B Hits 13 token/s on 4xRaspberry Pi 5
The irony of this is that Gen-Z have been mollycoddled with praise by their parents and modern life, we give medals for participation, or runners up prizes for losing. We tell people when they've failed at something they did their best and that's what matters. We validate their upset feelings if they're insulted by free speech that goes against their beliefs.

This is exactly what is happening with sycophantic LLMs, to a greater extent, but now it's affecting other generations, not just Gen-Z.

Perhaps it's time to rollback this behaviour in the human population too, and no I'm not talking reinstating discipline and old Boomer/Gen-X practices, I'm meaning that we need to allow more failure and criticism without comfort and positive reinforcement.

SillyUsername··on Warner Bros. Discovery sues Midjourney for generating copies of its characters
Can somebody please break this down for me so I can see what benefit WB gets from this?

I can only see mostly negatives

- Winning means taking away the ability for fans to spread viral / subliminal advertising for WB via the art they create.

- Anybody who uses Midjourney commercially to create DC characters etc will be sued, BAU, this might be worth more...

- Midjourney might actually be useful for creatives at WB (mockups etc), so shutting it down not in that interest.

- Negative publicity from people who use Midjourney.

The positives

- WB gets a boatload of short term money from Midjourney if they win.

- They exercise enforcement of copyright preventing their characters becoming a public good (yeah this one's flaky, but as I said, I couldn't think of positives).

SillyUsername··on What Is the Fourier Transform?
Amazing.

Until I read this article I didn't properly understand Fourier transforms (I didn't know how image compression bitmaps were derived), now it's opened a whole new world - toying with my own compression and anything that can be continuous represented as it's constituent parts.

I can use it for colour quantisation too possibly to determine main and averaged RGB constituents with respect to hue, allowing colour reduction akin to dithering, spreading the error over the wave instead and removing the less frequent elements.

It may not work but it'll be fun trying and learning!

SillyUsername··on Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep
I miss the days of Sun Solaris' CDE desktop.

Afterstep looks too much like Stardock's Window Blinds from around 2000 (see the weird glass effect, font etc), but Etolie seems to nail the aesthetic for me.

I hope this comes back, I'd love to use it on an old netbook I have for accessing my servers remotely.

SillyUsername··on WinBoat: Run Windows apps on Linux with seamless integration
It's running RDP to a Winboat docker image hosting the app and rendering the container on the desktop. This includes audio forwarding.
SillyUsername··on Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war
Amazon also didn't read the room when it fired most of its Alexa staff just as GenAI was taking off.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/17/amazon-cuts-several-hundred-...

Of course not being able to monetise Alexa has always been a problem, but these and the article's issues are all to do with poor planning and top tier business direction.

SillyUsername··on F-Droid site certificate expired
Respectfully, you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
SillyUsername··on F-Droid site certificate expired
[flagged]
SillyUsername··on The fight against labeling long-term streaming rentals as "purchases" you "buy"
Oh this I can get behind, it's my pet hate, especially when the rental is taken away.

Some slogans used to say "to buy and keep".

- Why would you buy it and not keep it? The word "Keep" is clearly used to manipulate you into thinking it's the same as owning.

- Keeping something you buy (not rent) implies ownership as long as you want, not what they want, so this goes against its definition too.

SillyUsername··on Some thoughts on LLMs and software development
This is a misconception, we absolutely do know how LLMs work, that's how we can write them and publish research papers.

The idea we don't is tabloid journalism, it's simply because the output is (usually) randomised - taken to mean, by those who lack the technical chops, that programmers "don't know how it works" because the output is indeterministic.

This is not withstanding we absolutely can repeat the output by using not randomisation (temperature 0).

SillyUsername··on Dev Reveals Secrets Behind New "3D" Platformer for the ZX Spectrum
I wonder if they can get the multicolour mode working with this to, the 8x4 (Vs 8x8) attribute colour switch thingie.
SillyUsername··on Porn censorship is going to destroy the internet
I think that might have been an own goal on that link. The comment on the article sums it up nicely. Also can you trust the data source - a government body that wants to enact more control?

If there's independent studies great, especially world wide (the US can be a bit insular), but as someone in the UK I dont see anything but disdain for ID checking age-gating.

Even other political parties are saying they'll roll it back if they get in power, which if they're betting the farm on that policy, must have considerable public influence.

SillyUsername··on Porn censorship is going to destroy the internet
Sure it's problem but one that doesn't need a state nanny.

Kids could always get jazz mags from friends, find VHS tapes, be told stories, see topless women etc.

The difference here is that it's easier, but that's partly caused by indifference and technical illiteracy.

If it was a serious enough problem to warrant government intervention the larger public would be championing this cause.

They aren't.

That's not even withstanding that soft porn is often just people showing their bodies, which should never be a problem.

SillyUsername··on Who does your assistant serve?
No but therapists like AI are not your friends.

They're there for the money as nobody else would listen to this kind of thing day in day out for free.

Your money stops - poof your therapist vanishes, not even a personal follow up call asking if you're ok, and I know this to be true from secondhand experience.

You can't heap your problems on friends either or one day you'll find they'll give up speaking to you.

So what options do you have left? A person who takes money from you to listen to you, friends you may lose, or you speak with an AI, but at least you know the AI doesn't feel for you by design.

SillyUsername··on MCP overlooks hard-won lessons from distributed systems
How is this browser specific or mentioned to be browser? The technologies can be purely "enterprise integration" of backend services. When was swagger (openapi) for example forbidden to be used for RPC? E.g. an endpoint that doesn't just support a crud op but take an event with an operation to execute?
SillyUsername··on ChatGPT Agent – EU Launch
If this got some traction there would be a lot more use cases: https://community.openai.com/t/feature-ifttt-connector-in-ag...
SillyUsername··on MCP overlooks hard-won lessons from distributed systems
MCP is flawed but it learnt one thing correctly from years of RPC - complexity is the biggest time sink and holds back adoption in deference to simpler competing standards (cf XML vs JSON)

- SOAP - interop needs support of DOC or RPC based between systems, or a combination, XML and schemas are also horribly verbose.

- CORBA - libraries and framework were complex, modern languages at the time avoided them in deference to simpler standards (e.g. Java's Jini)

- GPRC - designed for speed, not readability, requires mappings.

It's telling that these days REST and JSON (via req/resp, webhooks, or even streaming) are the modern backbone of RPC. The above standards either are shoved aside or for GPRC only used where extreme throughput is needed.

Since REST and JSON are the plat du jour, MCP probably aligns with that design paradigm rather than the dated legacy protocols.

SillyUsername··on The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers
Actually I just posted about this. I've experienced it first hand.
SillyUsername··on The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers
I worked for a big games company. We shut down game servers, we got death threats. Horses for courses.
SillyUsername··on ChatGPT Agent – EU Launch
If you want agent to be genuinely useful please support this feature request to have a connector for IFTTT: https://community.openai.com/t/feature-ifttt-connector-in-ag...
SillyUsername··on The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers
No this isn't always the case.

Perhaps if somebody were to shut down your favourite online shooter without warning you'd be upset, angry and passionate about it.

Some people like myself fall into this same category, we know its a token generator under the hood, but the duality is it's also entertainment in the shape of something that acts like a close friend.

We can see the distinction, evidently some people don't.

This is no different to other hobbies some people may find odd or geeky - hobby horsing, ham radio, cosplay etc etc.

SillyUsername··on I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me
Anthropic throw this guy a consultancy on demand job, or at least a bit of money. He's made your business rich!
SillyUsername··on Ollama's new app
GPUStack doesn't seem to have the problem of lowest common denominator but supports many architectures.

https://github.com/gpustack/gpustack

SillyUsername··on Scientists may have found a way to eliminate chromosome linked to Down syndrome
Counterpoint. My youngest son has DS. He's an absolute nightmare sometimes.

Whereas some children might get into a mood and be ok after an hour, he does not unless his environment is changed.

He will literally scream or moan non stop for 6-8 hours (yes you read that right, and it's no exaggeration). He would do this when in environments he doesn't recognise, so imagine an airplane, imagine a restaurant, imagine a trip out...

We can't do those things anymore because of the actual judgement we get from other people (oh and I could write a post on this alone).

Then, when we return him to the car to drive home, his behaviour instantly turns to a smile and blowing raspberries.

We also can't get respite, our parents are too old, friends don't feel right babysitting, council services won't yet see him as old enough or have no availability, so it leaves us hiring privately, which is expensive, difficult and low availability.

Of course this takes its toll on our mental health, his sibling and us.

So on one hand I'm pleased it can soon be stopped for others, but on the other it makes up my son's behaviour, who I absolutely love regardless of the impact he has on us without realising, because there are times when you will see the stereotypical love and happiness when it is unexpected.

But I would not say I have greater happiness.

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