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ahepp

1,594 karma · joined December 10, 2020

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ahepp··on I don't want to read what you didn't write
What do you think about the prompt “The first 6 digits of pi are 3.1415”?
ahepp··on German Rheinmetall open-sources its Battlesuite connected weapon system protcol
actual or perceived realtime / determinism requirements
ahepp··on German Rheinmetall open-sources its Battlesuite connected weapon system protcol
TCP/IP refers to the whole protocol stack, including UDP. That is a bit counterintuitive, but well established: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite
ahepp··on JetKVM Mini
> I don't see a reason to trust it any less than closed-hardware, closed-source solutions. I would trust a fully-open-source PIKVM more, however.

Isn't jetKVM software open source? I thought it had a public buildroot fork? Been a while since I checked, maybe something has changed.

ahepp··on Starlink Signal Leakage Threatens Radio Astronomy's Most Critical Frequencies
> The accidental static bleeding from onboard hardware, coupling through satellite structures and radiating across frequencies nobody authorized.

> The numbers tell the story bluntly:

I wouldn't waste too much compute trying to parse it, lots of LLM tells in the article. Pangram puts it at 100% AI.

ahepp··on Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI
Doesn't the premise that there's something inferior about these AI solutions, imply that there is something superior about human intelligence and that there will continue to be some kind of useful work for humans to do?
ahepp··on The revolt of the reader
Not the main point at all, but what was it? Pattern matching rule nestled deep in /lib/systemd/network? Some kind of mysterious netplan / NetworkManager compat layer?
ahepp··on Speculative Decoding in vLLM on AMD GPUs
You need the next token to begin the next decode. So if you can get what might be the next token in half the time, you can kick off the next decode before the true decode for this token has finished.

If the draft was wrong you can kill the speculative decode, and you haven’t lost anything except for idle time

It’s true we can’t show the user the token until we have the true decode finished, but we can launch more work internally before we’re certain

ahepp··on The revolt of the reader
I was so optimistic about using LLMs for "write once, read many" English language documents, but the more I've used the tools, the more pessimistic I get.

More and more, I try to ask it for low prose responses because its writing just seems like such a low signal to noise ratio

I'm curious about why LLM writing fails. Particularly whether LLM writing is fundamentally flawed, or if it's just distinctive and since it often reflects low effort, that distinctive voice is associated with low quality.

I find its reliance on extremely consistent rhetorical patterns concerning. The fact that it always finds a way to talk about how "It's not the X, it's the Y Z" no matter what topic you feed it, makes me concerned that the tail is wagging the dog

ahepp··on The revolt of the reader
>I wondered if you have tried running all of your own writings through it to verify that it thinks you are human. I was struck by Freddie deBoer's recent piece where he did this

Maybe I'm taking the "all" too literally here, but I read the article, and I'm not seeing anywhere the author ran a substantial portion of his corpus through Pangram to determine the false positive rate. That would be really interesting to see.

He does

* give an example of a piece of his writing that was, when ran in segments, flagged as generated (which he disputes)

* multiply the size of his corpus by pangram's published false positive rate and estimate that a few of his pieces would be flagged

* get the pangram model to label a piece "100% AI" when it only has 3 generated sentences

* demonstrate the ability to intentionally trigger a false positive

ahepp··on The revolt of the reader
What kind of prompting are you using to get those results? Anything I have claude or codex write carries a ton of distinctive characteristics. Obsession with "bit-for-bit identical", "it's not the X it's the Y Z" and so on.

It's driving me nuts, I constantly have to prompt it to "explain in plain, simple English"

ahepp··on The revolt of the reader
A bigger question I'm interested in is why do LLMs speak like that in the first place? Is that really what you get if you took the average of the English language? It would be difficult for me to believe that.

Is there something about tuning for desirable qualities that forces LLMs to have this voice?

ahepp··on The revolt of the reader
I wonder if this is due to experience with reading technical documentation?

I think the second requires deeper concentration, but is still quite readable compared to the kind of low-content engagement / SEO stuff one read on the internet even before LLMs

ahepp··on The Raspberry Pi Interactive Timeline · 2006–2026
The zero 2 (W) seems pretty great if you just want a cheap linux device.
ahepp··on Creating backup storage sucks
I get that a lot of immutable backup solutions are code, but they don’t have to be. You can do stuff like block writes in firmware or even blow fuses on the TX traces.
ahepp··on Changes to Sourcehut's terms of service regarding LLMs
>mailing list discussion (https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CDKSTMKM0ZD9N....)

That is certainly one way to decide what to do with the data your customers paid you to store...

ahepp··on OpenRouter is joining Stripe
Will that necessarily be true in the future? Would we not expect that openrouter will develop the ability to negotiate special pricing?
ahepp··on AirLLM 70B inference with single 4GB GPU
My understanding of it is also pretty surface level, but I was not under the impression that it develops "expertise" in a particular subject matter, at least not in a way that's easy to harness. From what I've read, it develops expertise at the token level.

Because the natural continuation of this is to say like, "Ok I want to load the bird detection expert and the navigation expert but leave the medieval European history expert behind", and my understanding is that this is not really how it works. At least at the moment.

ahepp··on AirLLM 70B inference with single 4GB GPU
> You can think of it like sharing.

was this meant to read "sharding"?

ahepp··on Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub
I understand that GitHub kinda ate the world on this, but using a branch PR as the basic unit of change seems like an arbitrary choice to me.

Torvalds invented Git for work on the Linux kernel, and the basic unit of change there is commits over email. It's not uncommon for them to take some commits but reject others.

Which isn't meant to say "pull requests are obviously wrong and commits over email are obviously correct", but rather to point out that the idea of a take-it-or-leave-it branch isn't some kind of natural unit of contribution

https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1402.2/00508.html

https://lkml.indiana.edu/2011.2/05416.html

https://lkml.iu.edu/2409.0/00960.html

https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2510.3/01369.html

ahepp··on Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub
I wonder if they could have added the ability to take only certain commits from a PR though?

It kinda seems like they're duplicating the "unit of change" arbitrarily, rather than just fixing the way a PR works.

I think the reason I find that a bit icky is it seems like it's diverging GitHub from the underlying git tool, which I trust a lot more.

ahepp··on Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub
I don't have experience with the stacked PR workflow and often find myself asking the same questions you are.

As far as I can tell, the biggest benefit of stacked PRs over just making a coherent series of commits, is that it might make it easier to start work on your second PR before you merge the first one?

With human-in-the-loop coding, that sounds like it could lead to a lot of wasted work if the first PR gets substantial feedback. But with agentic coding, I can imagine how it might be desirable to keep the agent chugging while the first PR is under review.

Interested in learning more about it and generally agree that AI is stressing the current review paradigms a lot of us are accustomed to.

ahepp··on The coolest use for the Vision Pro
Yeah my phone was doing that for a while. I just took it as a sign that maybe I should spend less time on Reddit. After a while it stopped gating me. Not sure if that was a measured decision on their end, or just that the experiment ended.
ahepp··on How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
I got a gen10 plus microserver and liked it so much that I got a second one.

Throw FreeBSD on it and add a couple lines to /etc/exports and rc.conf and it's a NAS right out of the box

ahepp··on How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
I'd probably just buy a cheap prebuilt PC with a big case, or surplus enterprise tower. You can get cheap LSI PCI cards and do miniSAS to SATA if needed.

The biggest concern I'd have with USB is power delivery to the hard drives, but I haven't even done the napkin math so maybe it's fine. The SSDs seem like they might be a waste of money. USB hard drives have a poor reputation, but I don't have a ton of experience to say how much of that is deserved. On a practical level, I'd also be concerned about knocking the cable out.

ahepp··on CarPlay Is Additive
I'm guessing you mean fuel injector? The pump that pushes or pulls fuel up from your tank is not very sophisticated, afaik.

Fuel injector timing and quantity, along with ignition timing, is generally computer controlled, certainly on any modern vehicle.

ahepp··on I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
I would love to hear more about this
ahepp··on Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation
> rarely we get things wrong (e.g. classical physics)

Curious, do you think quantum physics is the end of the line? I wouldn't claim to have a good understanding of anything beyond classical physics, but I've just assumed it's turtles all the way down and at some point we'll find serious issues with the quantum model

ahepp··on Epoll vs. io_uring in Linux
I would be interested to see benchmarks for that patch
ahepp··on 10Gb/s Ethernet: switching to a Broadcom SFP+ module
I wasn't aware there was a substantial latency difference between fiber and copper. Some googling suggests copper might be .4-.8c and fiber might be a more reliable .6c? But even if there was a huge difference in speed of light through the medium, inside a home aren't the distances so short that it wouldn't matter?
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