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alephxyz

884 karma · joined December 25, 2021

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alephxyz··on 2023 Hugo Awards
Depends on the years and used to be worse imo (Harry Potter 4 and American gods both won best novel).
alephxyz··on 2023 Hugo Awards
Voting is open to all attendees of the World Scifi Convention and they usually get thousands of votes now. It's possible that you find the winners too "mainstream" but accusing them of being cliquey doesn't make sense.
alephxyz··on My Google Play Developer account has been terminated
You can find the app if you use a non-google search engine (e.g. duckduckgo), and the publisher's name matches the medium username.
alephxyz··on The Deq Tattooist: Preserving the ink of a disappearing culture
Very similar to Amazigh tattoos, who are also disappearing due to Islam. I wonder how widespread tattoos were in north African and middle eastern people in ancient history. There are paintings from 1200BC showing Lybian kings with body markings: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ancient_Libyans,_Nubian...
alephxyz··on Pixel 8 Pro
They've already been limiting some of the "AI" image editing features to newer pixels (but installing the same app package on older phones works just fine).
alephxyz··on The short-lived experiment with rubber tires on railways (2013)
That's essentially a light rail system. Have a look at the Montreal REM.
alephxyz··on Why and when the Sahara Desert was green: new research
Even natural climate changes can be problematic, such as drier climates precipitating the fall of the Roman empire or the late bronze age collapse.
alephxyz··on Dire warnings about Libya dams went unheeded
Except the civil war started a month and a half before NATO intervention
alephxyz··on Saving Lives (2004)
I have a W10 install on a 7200rpm HDD and I believe it.
alephxyz··on Changing its name tanked X's downloads in App Store and Play Store
It sounds like the slogan of an AliExpress GPU brand.
alephxyz··on Qualcomm chip sales down 25 percent, plans layoffs
First line in TFA: >Smartphone sales are down across the board, and that means component vendors like Qualcomm are also feeling the heat.
alephxyz··on Espresso coffee mitigates the aggregation of Alzheimer′s associated tau protein
There have been studies showing that higher coffee consumption correlates to slower cognitive decline. This study only looks at the effects of coffee in vitro.
alephxyz··on Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node
The saying is no honor among _thieves_. Unless you mean chiefs as in c-suite, in which case it's also accurate.
alephxyz··on Civic honesty around the globe (2019)
What happens if you're in a society where most people are dishonest and expect other people to also be dishonest?
alephxyz··on Thousands of species of animals probably have consciousness
Probably more than two hundred years ago if you consider where the word "animal" comes from
alephxyz··on Reddit mods have concerns against users voting them out
Editorialized title
alephxyz··on Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout
Non-voting and dual class shares let you control a company with fewer than 50% ownership (e.g. Zuckerberg and facebook)
alephxyz··on Google HR hounds threaten 'next steps' for slackers not coming in 3 days a week
> We've _heard_ from Googlers that those who spend at least three days a week in the office _feel_ more connected to other Googlers, and that this effect is magnified when teammates work from the same location,"

As an employee or an investor I would not want any of my CXOs to make major decisions based on hearsay and feelings, but it's guess it's different for WFH.

alephxyz··on A software update on smartphones may be the cause of hundreds dropped 911 calls
I became aware of that feature when one of my Pixel's power button got stuck and the phone kept trying to dial 911 while beeping loudly.
alephxyz··on Wildfire Smoke in Northeastern US Visible on GOES East Images
Cold front pushed the smoke southwest over lake Ontario yesterday and towards NYC/NJ today. Also it's been raining in eastern Canada today.
alephxyz··on Automatic emergency braking should become mandatory, feds say
But odds of rollover and braking distance are proportional to your absolute speed. So is crash severity when you're impacting a tree, animal or pedestrian.
alephxyz··on Tree of Thoughts
Yep, I fell for it this week. Spent an hour fixing typos and minor bugs in their code before taking a step back and realising most of it was flawed.

What I believe they're doing is feeding papers to a LLM as soon as they come out in order to get a repo they can advertise. Once someone releases a working implementation they just copy it over.

I was able to generate almost identical code to what they released by giving chatgpt pseudocode copied verbatim from the original paper.

alephxyz··on Introducing the Sophia optimizer, a faster alternative to AdamW
Ignore that link. Their implementation doesn't even run and seems to be almosy entirely chatgpt-generated.
alephxyz··on Introducing the Sophia optimizer, a faster alternative to AdamW
Unofficial implementation: https://github.com/kyegomez/Sophia

Looking forward to trying it out this week

alephxyz··on Paris’s Centre Pompidou to Close for Five Years Starting in 2025
It doesn't. "Digital" is considered an anglicism when used in that sense. "Numérique" or "virtuel" is what's typically used instead.
alephxyz··on Social network ad targeting can “listen into” conversations using “live photos”
Ultrasonic beacon tracking + being able to tell if someone is indoors, in a vehicle, at a concert, sporting event, watching something on tv, etc
alephxyz··on Google Pixel Fold
They haven't even figured out how to make power buttons that don't get jammed.
alephxyz··on Dutch town installs bat-friendly red LED street lights (2018)
Red light doesn't overlap as much with the sensitivity of the rod cells in our eyes which are responsible for night vision (see https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1416_Color_Sensiti...)
alephxyz··on LORA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models
I wouldn't recommend PEFT unless you're only working with models pulled from the huggingface hub.
alephxyz··on New Alzheimer’s drug slows cognitive decline by 35%, trial results show
Do these two new drugs (lecanemab and donanemab) work the same way aducanemab does? Does that mean that the aducanemab results weren't a fluke and that the amyloid plaque hypothesis may in fact be true?
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