Udo

A few simple rules worked for me:

  - start with zero skills

  - add a skill if you encounter behavior that you want to ward against or if 
    you want to associate a meaningful phrase with a certain method of doing things 

  - NEVER copy a skill from someone, do not clone skills repos, do not let LLMs
    write their own skills

  - occasionally revise or delete a skill, less is more

This looks very promising. It would be cool if support for Bonsai-style models would land in mainline MLX soon, looking forward to trying it out.

It seems PrismML has implemented a better version of an idea I had a while back: what if we had a 1-bit model where the scale of the weight is determined by its position. The model would have to be trained from the ground up for this though, which is why I never tried it. The interleaved scale factor approach of Bonsai is a much more flexible approach at almost the same cost.

I know this is an outsider position, but I always felt that the AoC leaderboard was a mistake. Very few people had the time, the commitment, and the capability of making it on there in a meaningful fashion, and it put an emphasis on something that didn't match the vibe of the event at all. If speedrunning the problem solving was the point, then why package every episode into an enjoyable little story?

This also ties into the comments that AoC has become moot or was "ruined by LLMs". If you enjoy solving the problems, nothing should have changed for you. What's the difference if a given problem was already solved by an LLM, or a group of IQ 200 superhumans from MIT for that matter?

As time marches on, there will eventually be absolutely nothing left where an unaugmented human outperforms a machine. That doesn't mean you have to stop enjoying things. In a few years at most, all programming will be purely recreational.

Exactly. And as implied by the term techno-feudalism, the owners are okay with a greatly reduced economy, and in some cases a severe reduction in quality of life overall, as long as they end up ruling over what's left.

I think what GP meant was voting on policies directly instead of voting in delegates that promise to implement policies.

I had to try this gem, it's my new benchmark! o4-mini-high also fails spectacularly, even after repeated feedback. However, 4.5 (the impractibly large demo model) gets it right:

It’s a nonsense twist on the classic lateral thinking puzzle:

The original puzzle goes: “A father and son are in a car accident. The father dies, and the son is rushed to the ER. The surgeon says, ‘I can’t operate on him—he’s my son.’” The intended answer to that puzzle challenges the listener to recognize the surgeon is the child’s mother, confronting implicit gender biases.

Your version humorously mangles it by swapping roles (“son and his man”) and objectifying the victims as cars, creating a logical absurdity. The sentence “I can’t operate on this car, he’s my surgeon!” doesn’t parse logically, indicating it’s a playful distortion rather than a coherent scenario

Yes, skip would be good, but I'd also advocate an option like "I reject the premise of the question".

In legal contexts yes-or-no answers can work because the case can in theory be boiled down to guilty or not. If there is any flaw with the case, the answer should be not guilty.

But let's take the "do I have a moral duty to..." questions used as examples here for contrast. I'd argue you never had a moral duty to attend your sibling's wedding to begin with. But because the question was asked with a weird modifier like "even if it's their 3rd wedding", any answer you give will be inadequate and will just serve to reinforce the flawed premise. Skipping is not enough in my opinion, because even if communicated to the question asker, it doesn't make it clear whether there as an issue on the answerer's side ("I don't know" / "don't feel qualified") or with the question itself.

What you're describing sounds like the curvature or topology of space would be non-flat. AFAIK this hasn't been completely ruled out, but so far every piece of evidence suggests the universe is flat over vast distances.

Intuitively I'd say if there was curvature or topological irregularities at the furthest distances we can observe, there wouldn't be a consistent redshift observed on far objects because some of them would be coming towards us instead of pulling away.

> I hope it's not a disservice to you to suggest this is standpoint where essentially 'we' know all about the universe and everything in it

Like I said I have no business talking about philosophy or spiritualism. However, since you asked: that's not at all what I meant. In fact, it's the opposite way around. I'm of the opinion just because we don't know something, this shouldn't give people a license to invent things from whole cloth and assert them as facts (which is exactly what Penrose does).

We're still waiting on proof of anything supernatural, and explaining things with materialism has served us super well. It's not unreasonable to assume it's going to continue to be a good tool for understanding the world.

I believe Penrose's core argument fits the description of a rhetorical device called argument from incredulity. He is incredulous how "consciousness" could ever arise from mere molecules interacting with each other. To me, everything he built up on top of this is tantamount to intellectual dishonesty, but I acknowledge that this is born out of a certain bias on my end.

Or even simpler: if cells are just machines, then there is no reason why a computer couldn't perform the same operations. I'm not a philosopher, but I believe this comes down to materialism vs a belief in the supernatural.

Having read about Penrose's positions before, this is indeed what is he proposing in a roundabout way: that there is an origin to "consciousness" that is for all intents and purposes metaphysical. In the past he pushed the belief that micro-tubules in the brain (which are a structural component of cells) act like antennas that receive cosmic consciousness from the surrounding field.

In my opinion this is also Penrose's greatest sin: using his status as a scientist to promote spiritual opinions that are indistinguishable from quantum woo disguised as scientific fact.

You're right, maybe I read the post a bit too charitably.

> You're happy to not use it. I'm happy whether you use it or not.

I think you misunderstood the OP. The criticism was about the landing page, not the project.

And fwiw, it's not unwarranted. Putting the words "terminal emulator" somewhere on the page would make less people bounce off. You may be fine with them bouncing off, but still, I think it was meant as constructive criticism.

> You may check out Rumble.com as a video player alternative.

Although I'm not familiar with the Rumble player, I assume your advice implies that they'd have to host their videos on Rumble as well. The main issue described in the article is about controlling what gets published on their site and what the user experience is going to be. Hosting their videos on a competitor's service is not the answer to that, as it would simply make them dependent yet on another company.

Media outlets that are large enough to need that kind of control but not large enough to host their own data are in a tough spot there.

SEEKING WORK | Germany, remote or in-house (willing to travel)

I'm an older generalist programmer. I prefer to work on your custom codebases and I enjoy optimization work.

Server-side web programming with PHP, Node JS, C++; Games programming: Pixi.js, Three.js, HTML/Canvas, Godot, custom code/engines using OpenGL or Vulcan; General programming: Python, C, C++, JavaScript, Pascal, Go, Lua, Swift

Platforms: Linux, MacOS, Proxmox, Arduino/Microcontrollers/SoCs

I like working on:

  - proofs of concept and MVPs
  - getting projects ready for demo day
  - turning MVPs into fully fleshed-out products
  - code reviews
  - hot spot optimization and scalability
  - developing/maintaining in-house tooling
  - project rescues in the face of looming deadlines

Contact: udo@openfu.com

SEEKING WORK | Germany, remote or in-house (willing to travel)

I'm an older generalist programmer. I prefer to work on your custom codebases and I enjoy optimization work.

Backend: server-side web programming with PHP, Node JS, C++

Games: Pixi.js, Three.js, HTML/Canvas, Godot, custom code/engines using OpenGL or Vulcan

General programming: Python, C, C++, JavaScript, Pascal, Go, Lua, Swift

Platforms: MacOS, Proxmox, Arduino/Microcontrollers/SoCs

I like working on:

  - proofs of concept and MVPs
  - getting projects ready for demo day
  - turning MVPs into fully fleshed-out products
  - code reviews
  - hot spot optimization and scalability
  - developing/maintaining in-house tooling
  - project rescues in the face of looming deadlines

Contact: udo@openfu.com

My guess would be that it was flagged because the subject invites unproductive controversy and low quality discussion.

SEEKING WORK | Germany, remote or in-house (willing to travel)

I'm an older generalist programmer. I prefer to work on your custom codebases and I enjoy optimization work.

Backend: server-side web programming with PHP, Node JS, C++

Games: Pixi.js, Three.js, HTML/Canvas, Godot, custom code/engines using OpenGL or Vulcan

General programming: Python, C, C++, JavaScript, Pascal, Go, Lua, Swift

Platforms: MacOS, Proxmox, Arduino/Microcontrollers/SoCs

I like working on:

  - proofs of concept and MVPs
  - getting projects ready for demo day
  - turning MVPs into fully fleshed-out products
  - code reviews
  - hot spot optimization and scalability
  - developing/maintaining in-house tooling
  - project rescues in the face of looming deadlines

Contact: udo@openfu.com

They're not even related. Sanitizing input is at best a formatting/style issue. Escaping output is a security issue.

SEEKING WORK | Germany, remote or in-house (willing to travel)

I'm an old generalist programmer. I prefer to work on your custom codebases and I enjoy optimization work.

Backend: server-side web programming with PHP, Node, C++

Games: Pixi.js, Three.js, HTML/Canvas, Godot, custom code/engines using OpenGL or Vulcan

General programming: Python, C++, JavaScript, Pascal, Go, Lua, Swift

Platforms: MacOS, Proxmox, Arduino/Microcontrollers/SoCs

I like working on:

  - proofs of concept and MVPs
  - getting projects ready for demo day
  - turning MVPs into fully fleshed-out products
  - code reviews
  - hot spot optimization and scalability
  - developing/maintaining in-house tooling
  - project rescues in the face of looming deadlines

Contact: udo@openfu.com

Even when I click on the correct link I get forwarded to the German page anyway. Granted, I'm in Germany, but I absolutely hate this behavior.

113585 - probably the very last time I can feel good about this number!

I can't remember the last time I even thought about ICQ, much less had a client installed. But damn, end of an era

> salting a star with an impossible chemical composition might also be a way for a technological species to create a monument, correct?

It's an impossible composition from a nuclear physics point of view, since the star shouldn't be producing these atoms, and they can't be part of the initial makeup of the star since they're unstable elements and would long be gone by now. The most likely explanation is still that something randomly collided with the star.

If it's a monument, then it certainly is the right one to send a (very vague) message far into the future, "we were here".

> This seems like it would involve moving less mass around than a Dyson Sphere/Swarm

It's a bit weird to compare two endeavors we haven't even tried yet, but making a Dyson swarm seems vastly easier than this. To pull off the salting of a star, you'd need to constantly manufacture vast amounts of exotic radioactive materials. A Dyson swarm may be massive (although there would be very light-weight ones you could build if the only function was to be a monument), but it's "just" a lot of solid bodies orbiting a star. A star salter, on the other hand, would require way more complex engineering.

It's not a completely useless idea. LLMs are pretty good at relating parallel concepts to each other. If we could annotate the whale speak with behavioral data we might catch something we'd otherwise have missed. Since whale children need to start (almost) from scratch, it sounds worthwhile to tap into that for teaching an LLM alongside a real whale infant.

Hopefully in the far future the IA will be distributed over many individual user nodes, but that doesn't seem feasible right now. What we need right now are 2-4 high powered individuals or companies building local mirrors. Hopefully the IA would cooperate in setting these up. These mirror organizations should be distributed around the globe in different jurisdictions, and they need to take the negative lessons from IA into account: for example, they should probably be structured such that the legally precarious data-serving arm is a different entity from the organization that owns the server space.

We absolutely need this kind of resilience, and we need it now. Otherwise this time will retroactively be dubbed the digital dark ages because so very little information actually survived and made it out.

Someone in this thread was estimating about USD 2M investment in hardware, then 1M facilities and a small team of people for initial setup, plus connectivity costs and maintenance - let's say 4M initially and about 1M ongoing costs yearly. A single wealthy individual could fund one of these sites. You don't even have to be "rich" to fund this, being well off would be enough.

If you fit this description and you're feeling altruistic or are looking for a lasting legacy that will benefit humanity far into the future, use a portion of your capital to make this happen.

The point about installing tools on demand is correct, however, I have trouble following the other ones. Simplifying or summarizing both the usage and the output of common tools clearly does have value, and people do that all the time to great effect. Maybe the specific choices made here are not to your liking, but attacking the concept of doing that is a weird thing to do. Also, why does it matter how a script was generated if it does the job? Especially given the fact that scripts like these often serve as a starting point for further customization, is there really a meaningful difference between asking ChatGPT and copying off some random person on the internet? You need to double-check for functionality and safety either way.

Seems to me that the most subversive thing you can do in a gold rush is to open source the shovels.

The thing I keep re-reading is

> popped the breaker for the sockets causing everything to be harshly powered off. My fileserver took it badly and one drive died.

Maybe someone with more hardware knowledge could chime in, but my default assumption would be that the hard drive died either because it couldn't take another power-off/on cycle, or because the event that caused the circuit breaker to pop was harsh enough to damage it (not sure how much the computer's power supply insulates components from things like that, but intuitively, there are much more voltage-sensitive components in PCs than hard drives). While a UPS might have been effective against a surge, it would not have saved the drive from dying by power cycling.

My hypothesis is that most equipment doesn't need to be notified when on UPS, it could in fact be harmful when it causes a power cycle that turns out to be unnecessary. An orderly shutdown doesn't matter that much unless you're dealing with an app that can become internally inconsistent, such as a database. In all other scenarios, the journaling FS takes care of data integrity.

So, especially for home use, why not just let the UPS run until it's out?

> Who's to say that other "loud" aliens haven't already expanded and begun spacefaring, but simply are not expanding out to where we are?

By definition if they're loud and we can't see them, they're not within the volume of our visible universe.

> I might be missing something here, but why would alien (or any) civilizations continually expand at a constant rate?

This assumes they keep multiplying and colonizing outward. There is no real upper limit - except, eventually, the accelerating expansion rate of the universe that keeps them from reaching further. Because the colonized volume is so large, we don't really assume these colonized volumes form a coordinated empire. It would be more like a loose tangle of city states spread across a vast landscape. They might share common heritage, technology and some amount of culture, but be otherwise independent.

I was curious about that as well. He probably doesn't tell because there would be instant arguing. To be fair though, hardware development feels like it has slowed down while the parts are becoming more expensive.

I have a thing where I wait to upgrade my workstation until performance of newer hardware has 2x'ed on most workloads. I had to wait quite long this time. My trusty 1080 Ti was not 2x'ed until fairly recently, and that came at a hefty price and much increased power draw. It feels like a lot of low hanging fruits have already been picked.

Expanding on the "breadcrumbs": pheromone trails or "trampled grass" are awesome, not only because they are a great data source for steering heuristics, but they also lead to organic-seeming navigation behavior that is pleasant to look at.