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WhitneyLand

6,600 karma · joined March 13, 2013

I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved, as soon as the facts are shown to be opposed to it - C. Darwin
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WhitneyLand··on Collatz's Ant
It’s a fair question. Two things:

1. It does happen. These conjectures can fall apart after seeming like a lock: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mertens_conjecture

2. Even if it is true, the process of proving can yield interesting insights.

WhitneyLand··on Can rotation solve the Hubble Puzzle?
“We show that a Gödel inspired slowly rotating dark-fluid variant of the concordance model resolves this tension…”

Gödel wait what? I thought of him as “only” the logician who killed Hiblert’s dreams and caused people to question the very foundations of mathematics.

Dude then took up physics as a hobby and trolled Einstein by discovering closed time-like curves?

WhitneyLand··on A star appears to have collapsed straight into a black hole without supernova (2017)
Like people spent years of their life scientifically studying the problem and didn’t think of this before making the claim?

It was multi-wave analysis not just visible light, IR spread can differentiate this.

It’s been missing since 2015. Probability of something being large enough to cover the star and stay on a path completely obscuring it for 10 years is shall we say, not likely.

It didn’t rage against the dying of the light, it just switched off.

WhitneyLand··on AI can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything
Seems to also especially love making up options and settings for command line tools.
WhitneyLand··on Analytic Combinatorics – A Worked Example
Not at all, the post seems solid. Just fond memories of a combinatorics class in school. I like problems that are deceptively simple. Easy to get lured in to, then satisfying as layers of complexity are peeled back.
WhitneyLand··on Analytic Combinatorics – A Worked Example
What math lets you most easily be convinced you’ve come up with the right answer when you actually haven’t?

Seems like combinatorics comes in second only to statistics.

WhitneyLand··on The Llama 4 herd
They were referring to your original claim about Pew research assessing the models as highly liberal when that’s apparently not even one of their ratings.

This is clear because they referenced your quote about it being from the beginning.

No one was arguing that you typed in a question about unions.

WhitneyLand··on Gumroad is now open source
But even knowing all of this, prescriptivism was beaten into many of us growing up, so some internal cringe is unavoidable.

For ex still cringe at people saying “anyways,” even though I know it’s a losing and pointless battle.

Not sure what the biggest driver is - being shamed while growing up, or just latent pedantry.

WhitneyLand··on Show HN: The C3 programming language (C alternative language)
Sure, but in practice I believe most developers would find it intuitive to just type . everywhere.

It feels more lightweight and consistent, and collisions aren’t super common once you adopt some conventions.

It’s a tradeoff for sure, but this preference comes from having lived in both worlds.

WhitneyLand··on Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
So did you let this go without protest? Why not escalate it if it was clearly so unreasonable?

Sounds like there was more nuance to the story.

WhitneyLand··on Aiter: AI Tensor Engine for ROCm
Performance increased 100% on an MI300X running a large LLM.

On one hand, cool. On the other hand wow have they been leaving a lot of performance on the table.

How does the performance compare to NVidia now?

WhitneyLand··on Paul A. M. Dirac, Interview by Friedrich Hund (1982) [video]
Everyone is waiting for a breakthrough to merge quantum mechanics and general relativity. What kind of intellectual bombshell will that take? What kind of mind will it take to have such an insight?

Amazing to think there was a similar vibe in the 1920’s around trying to merge quantum mechanics and special relativity. They seemed incompatible at a basic level, yet this cool guy on the autism spectrum came along and said here ya go fixed that for you.

WhitneyLand··on Scallop – A Language for Neurosymbolic Programming
The point is that while biology has been a great source of inspiration toward technical advances it’s only a guide, it can’t guarantee there isn’t a better way.
WhitneyLand··on Scallop – A Language for Neurosymbolic Programming
So if inventing the airplane how long should one stick with a flapping bird wing design?
WhitneyLand··on Did the Particle Go Through the Two Slits, or Did the Wave Function?
False in multiple ways.

QFT doesn’t discard local fields and replace them with only nonlocal graph nodes.

Maybe this is coming from some speculative quantum gravity ideas.

WhitneyLand··on Arbitrary-Scale Super-Resolution with Neural Heat Fields
Seems like a nice result but wouldn’t have hurt for them to give a few performance benchmarks. I understand that the point of the paper was a quality improvement, but it’s always nice to reference a baseline for practicality.
WhitneyLand··on Arbitrary-Scale Super-Resolution with Neural Heat Fields
Click through to the actual paper and they are in the last column labeled “GT”.
WhitneyLand··on Mayo Clinic's secret weapon against AI hallucinations: Reverse RAG in action
Does your brain really tell you it’s more likely that 90% of people in the field are ignorant, rather than old expert systems were brittle, couldn't learn from data, required extensive manual knowledge editing, and couldn't generalize?

Btw as far as throwing teraflops, the ability to scale with compute is a feature not a bug.

WhitneyLand··on Betting on the Pope was the original prediction market
Related, a great new video just dropped as an intro to prediction markets:

https://youtu.be/ngX1nIvnMOM?si=QykC_5gSObT8o8e7

WhitneyLand··on Mistral OCR
How is it out of their control to document what they mean by chunking in their parameters?
WhitneyLand··on Mistral OCR
It’s interesting that none of the existing models can decode a Scrabble board screen shot and give an accurate grid of characters.

I realize it’s not a common business case, came across it testing how well LLMs can solve simple games. On a side note, if you bypass OCR and give models a text layout of a board standard LLMs cannot solve Scrabble boards but the thinking models usually can.

WhitneyLand··on Mistral OCR
1. There’s no simple page / sandbox to upload images and try it. Fine, I’ll code it up.

2. “Explore the Mistral AI APIs” (https://docs.mistral.ai) links to all apis except OCR.

3. The docs on the api params refer to document chunking and image chunking but no details on how their chunking works?

So much unnecessary friction smh.

WhitneyLand··on The US stops sharing air quality data from embassies worldwide
So do you also disagree with the premise of the government providing to this service, or only that it’s not the stated role of embassies to do it?

In deciding it’s quite reasonable to stop, is the thinking that “mission creep” = bad, so it justifies stopping something regardless of the big picture benefits? Or do you not consider the benefits significant?

Given a business with many departments, say you notice one department has some mission creep but somehow it’s also increasing profitability for the company overall.

What do you focus on - only mentioning stopping the department mission creep, or first mentioning people should make damn sure the value is preserved as they consider any reorganization?

WhitneyLand··on Time Warp: Delayed-choice quantum erasure
Apparently the author writes picture poetry books and has no degree in physics.

I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, can anyone speak to his credibility on this topic?

WhitneyLand··on The Deep Research problem
>>The premise of this post seems to be that material errors in Deep Research results negate the value of the product

No it’s not. It’s that it’s oversold from a marketing perspective and comes with some big caveats.

But it does talk about big time savings for the right contexts.

Emphasis from the article:

“these things are useful”

WhitneyLand··on Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse
I’m not in the that industry so maybe you’re not defining “stolen” as criminal activity?

I think many people would infer it to mean there’s a victim involved, someone’s personal credit card was stolen. If that’s the case it’s especially bizarre and not a customer you’d want to convert.

WhitneyLand··on Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse
You got called out, responded, but didn’t really address the point. Looks like the original claim was overstated.
WhitneyLand··on Phind 2: AI search with visual answers and multi-step reasoning
On a positive note, this is a nice look at the future and a direction that existing experiences seem likely to evolve towards.

However I did find myself wondering how crucial really were the model changes?

Imagine trying to implement these features as a wrapper around frontier apis and no 70B bespoke model.

Starting with a user query, we could ask for relevant svg diagrams, fit instruction steps or guides into layout templates, or even filter photos as the demo shows.

How much less would this simple approach leave us with?

WhitneyLand··on Why Does Integer Addition Approximate Float Multiplication?
I wonder if there was any inspiration from Quake III.

Didn’t the inverse square root trick rely on bit-level floating point and subtraction of a bias?

WhitneyLand··on TSMC 2nm Process Disclosure – How Does It Measure Up?
No, that’s not how it works.

TSMC publishes industrial research, not pure science research like a university.

In this context the amount of detail they release is careful balance of PR benefit vs. competitive advantage vs. patent status vs. keeping their talent happy because good researches want their names in prestigious journals.

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