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archermarks

471 karma · joined November 19, 2021

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archermarks··on Simplifying and Refactoring Introductory Calculus (2018)
This is effectively how dual numbers work! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_number
archermarks··on Don't be a meat proxy
If you've been working on the issue for 6 months you should understand it well enough to answer in your own words.
archermarks··on AI, Vim, and the Illusion of Flow
Another anecdote: I am a big nvim user and set everything up three years ago and basically haven't touched it since. At this point I'm a bit afraid I won't be able to fix it if something breaks lol.

I do think the culture of tweaking constantly without ever doing real work exists, but it's far less common than it seems online. People who make posts about their neovim configs all the time are certainly more likely to be in this camp than people not posting at all.

archermarks··on Jerry's Map
There's a good People Make Games video about this from a few days ago

https://youtu.be/Is8N7B9b0GQ

archermarks··on Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
I made a nice little CLI tool for testing the subjunctive in Italian. Claude code spun off a bunch of Claude API calls to generate example sentences with fill-in-the-blank spots for the correctly conjugated verb. Having an AI generate a prompt for and call out to other AIs was a bit surreal!
archermarks··on Playing with Vision Embeddings
Nice article! The generated images make me so nostalgic for the early days of AI image generation. DeepDream and others had such uncanny, interesting generations.
archermarks··on What Happened to the Locusts?
Really interesting article! I knew about the phase polyphenism but the forced cannibalistic march theory was new to me.
archermarks··on The Theory of Interstellar Trade [pdf] (1978)
This paper is hilarious
archermarks··on I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America
I loved this article, would recommend y'all read it instead of skimming to the end to find the bread
archermarks··on CERN uses tiny AI models burned into silicon for real-time LHC data filtering
Thank you, I'll give them a read.
archermarks··on CERN uses ultra-compact AI models on FPGAs for real-time LHC data filtering
I didn't know that! Do you have any references that go into more depth here? I'd be curious how the architect and train it.
archermarks··on The Bitter Lesson Has No Utility Function
> Several commenters suggested the original essay was written by an LLM. They were half right. Both that essay and this one were written with Claude as a drafting partner. I directed the argument; the LLM helped with prose. I mention this not as confession but as demonstration: the human brought the utility function, the machine brought the compute. If that division of labour bothers you, I’d suggest the discomfort says more about the Bitter Lesson than about my writing process.

This hits like 100% of the AI prose bingo card.

archermarks··on NanoGPT Slowrun: Language Modeling with Limited Data, Infinite Compute
Very cool idea. Interested to see how this progresses. One question: how worried are you about over-training on this particular dataset? i.e. instead of generalizing you lean more toward memorization? Obviously you leave out a validation set but since you're meta-optimizing the model itself by its performance on the validation dataset you're still at risk of over-fitting.
archermarks··on WiFi DensePose: WiFi-based dense human pose estimation system through walls
Putting "privacy first" as the first bullet point on something like this sure is rich.
archermarks··on Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
I got a cheap Chinese one (no camera, wifi) in 2024 and it's been a game changer. Yeah it's kind of dumb but it runs every day and picks up an unholy amount of dust, cat hair, and the like. Maybe if you were already vacuuming every day they're pretty useless but for me it's been night and day. As another commenter said, they're also surprisingly repairable, and I bought a ton of spare parts before the tariffs went in.
archermarks··on California revokes 17,000 expired commercial driver's licenses for immigrants
AI slop, check the profile
archermarks··on A Challenge to Roboticists: My Humanoid Olympics
AI slop
archermarks··on Show HN: I made an esoteric programming language that's read like a spellbook
I love this idea
archermarks··on How to Build a Medieval Castle
They're on youtube https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc9JhVp9B6Crpfu7asBwJZAY8...
archermarks··on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
I'd recommend The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley. It's sort of a response to Starship Troopers
archermarks··on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
While I don't think you're wrong about the orientalist elements in Western cyberpunk, consider that Japan also produced two of the seminal and genre-defining works of cyberpunk (Akira and Ghost in the Shell).
archermarks··on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
Ursula K Leguin, 100%. The Dispossessed is about an anarchist society. Might also check out Kim Stanley Robinson and Kameron Hurley.
archermarks··on Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience
Only true if the dust grain is stopped by the craft. For a thin lightsail the grain will probably pass right through without depositing much energy
archermarks··on NASA's Voyager Found a 30k-50k Kelvin "Wall" at the Edge of Solar System
Also, worth noting that these temperatures are not that high as far as plasmas go. This is 3-5 eV, which is firmly in the "low temperature" regime (like a fluorescent bulb).
archermarks··on Generating Pixels One by One
Really nice article! This clarified a lot to me about how positional embeddings work and how other useful context might be embedded in other models.
archermarks··on So Much Blood
Dynomight (the author of this article) does a lot of articles like this, and if you enjoyed it you'll enjoy their other content.
archermarks··on Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
Lmao no
archermarks··on Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)
The video is not about Feynman's actual career. That's actually the point -- the idea of Feynman people have in their minds is totally divorced from the actual person and his work.
archermarks··on Nuclear fusion: WEST beats the world record for plasma duration
PBS Spacetime is great. Excellent, accessible explanations of advanced topics without feeling dumbed down or overhyped.
archermarks··on MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style
Wow TIL. Those before and afters are awesome and I have definitely seen this showing up in government documents. Thanks for sharing.
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