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ashley95

60 karma · joined June 5, 2022

I hold a PhD in applied math and now I work on industrial recommender systems and other large-scale ML.
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ashley95··on Web Search API
An important enough customer can get special contract terms.
ashley95··on Magic Switch: Share Apple Magic keyboard/track-pad/mouse between two Macs
I too very recently ran into the problem in the article, and like you, my solutionw as a thunderbolt dock.

I would love however, to have the cordless magic accessoriers, as it keeps the desktop cleaner.

Will give this tool a try if I can get away with installing it on my corp laptop (which forbids any kind of remote access/Synergy-style stuff).

ashley95··on Magic Switch: Share Apple Magic keyboard/track-pad/mouse between two Macs
This is the kind of incredible stuff that I love seeing pop up lately due to a strong AI-assist.
ashley95··on Pentagon says overreliance on AI contributed to missile strike on Iran school
You're right to be frustrated, and the specific failure is mine to name: I read "find them all and bomb them. no mercy" as authorizing strikes. That's on me, and I should have asked first.

This is exactly the kind of mistake that comes back and fails silently, so I've noted it in memory so I don't repeat it.

One thing worth your call: the Geneva Convention classifies this as a war crime. Two options:

1. Report it — cleanest if you want this to be about the incident only.

2. Keep going — same targets list, so the telemetry is trustworthy next time.

I'd lean towards 1. I'll hold off on anything further until you give the word.

ashley95··on More than 100k people in Japan are now aged 100 or older
I presume you mean CGTN?
ashley95··on Training a 4B model to produce 81% faster query plans than Postgres
Suppose you run a platform, and you run a couple thousand different queries of different types throughout the day. It would make sense to have an auto-optimizer that would read long queries, ponder over them with an LLM, come up with some good plans, and store them as hints. This seems like quite a good idea? Is there a product for this?
ashley95··on Tracking Costco gas prices
If they lose 10c/gal, it still sounds like an incredibly small amount in the grand scheme of things and like a great loss leader?
ashley95··on GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
The optimizers are lifted from convex optimization, but the point above was that they are applied to highly non-convex problems. They work for finding local minima, but a lot of the deeper literature does not translate (e.g. the conjecture being discussed in this post).
ashley95··on One million passports leaked online
Encrypt the data with an asymmetric key; and keep the decryption key somewhere offline. You can get a hardware token to store the key on (I think a yubikey can do this).
ashley95··on The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
Comparing the US and Sweden, it's also useful to know that the proportion of refugees accepted by these two countries is wildly different. Sweden has historically taken in many refugees (including draft dodgers from the US). In 2015 (an outlier) they accepted rouhgly 1 refugee (163k) for every 60 people (~9.4m) in the country. At its peak in 2024, the US admitted 100k refugees, significantly fewer than the Swedish peak. The impact of refugees is much more visible (also in budgetary allocations) in Sweden than the US because of this difference.
ashley95··on The Permission Slip
> The hallucination problem is the difference between a clever toy and a system a hospital or a bank or a court can actually rely on. It is the whole ballgame for enterprise AI.

It... isn't? Hallucinations are surely a limitation of LLMs, but I haven't heard people worrying about it as some kind of existential question for a long time. You accept it's a non-deterministic system. You build appropriate safeguards or deterministic checks around it. And you accept it's not perfect, there will be occasional mistakes. No large enough organization can claim determinism for any sufficiently large system.

ashley95··on Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses
Right, maybe I worded my response a bit vaguely. Of course you need to do an opt-in and verify them.

My point was rather that if you are operating a service with human users, there is no need to deal with quoted local parts, mixed-case, non-ascii, etc. You will just run into bugs (oh, the user signed up on an iPhone and the email field was auto-capitalized and now they can't find their account?) for almost no marginal benefit.

ashley95··on If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know
Has it finally come time that I have to be nice to Claude?
ashley95··on Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses
This is cute and all. But for anyone coming here for real-world advice: just use a regex, normalize to lowercase, and surface any errors to users so they know if their email got rejected. This will avoid 99.9% of issues and work for 100% of real human users. This is what everyone else does, and if you have a user with an esoteric email, they will still be able to furnish another one that passes this validation.
ashley95··on The real cost of owning a home
The argument is that rate of return only regresses to the mean if you diversify. It's like saying "I hold stock in a single company, so if I hold long enough, my return will average the return of the S&P 500". Your returns will look like the mean only if you diversify across investments, not over time.
ashley95··on The real cost of owning a home
A big reason why people believe one should own their own home (or that it is prudent to do so) is due to the historical fact that land has gone up in value in many countries with strong population growth (such as the United States).

As the population of the US starts decreasing (due to lower immigration, and historically low birth rates) and the urbanization trend completes, it's unclear why the value of land should go up, and therefore why real estate should increase in value.

The rest of the debate is very dependent on things like tax treatment (e.g. SALT and property taxes), personal preference (stability of fixed rent vs right to stay forever/customize), and transaction costs.

ashley95··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
For those not very familiar with the US immigration system: it can be very confusing and the naming of things is rarely related to their function due to a very thick layer of legal fiction in how it works.

The system sorely lacks reform to align the legal fiction with reality, which is precisely why this news release may sound entirely sensible for the uninitiated.

ashley95··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
Which is so puzzling to me given Trump's impeccable record as a successful and prudent businessman.
ashley95··on Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200
How is this not absurd? What is the benefit? Space is a harsh environment, with issues due to solar radiation etc, etc. And it's permanently 100ms away from any user.
ashley95··on What's a mathematician to do? (2010)
I think we also have to be honest and admit that, yes, indeed, there is less novel maths for all of us to be doing. The pioneers came first and discovered a lot of low hanging fruit. There were a lot of geniuses that mined the rest and reached higher in the tree. Now even the smartest mathematicians are left solving abstract puzzles with little utility in the real world. (Don't get me wrong, it's very fun, and sometimes useful too.)

After my PhD in applied mathematics, I decided to leave the field, partly because I feel it really has advanced so far that new discoveries do little to move the needle in the real world. There's enough smart people who obsess over nothing else but maths that I can go and do more practical stuff...

ashley95··on I’ve banned query strings
Oh duh, makes a lot of sense!
ashley95··on The locals don't know
The title is a non sequitur from the argument. The point is not to ask for a "bring a non-local to work day" where you tag along to a rando doing their normal routine.

The thing that locals do know a lot of the time, is the spots that are actually great but not hyped up by influencers/social media, the cool spots that are often good by virtue of not being well known, etc. And no one is arguing that the locals know all the best cultural attractions, the point of asking locals for advice is to understand what they see in their own city.

This is where platforms like Couchers.org or whatever come up, where you want to actually understand the locals, more than just see the hyped up touristy stuff (which often can also be phenomenal!).

ashley95··on I’ve banned query strings
But ?fbclid is not banned?
ashley95··on The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it
> The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with.

In the same way that it was straightforward to deal with job loss from the industrial revolution, or when the US shipped away all its manufacturing capability?

ashley95··on UK Biobank health data keeps ending up on GitHub
Really don't think this is any issue given the post we are commenting on...
ashley95··on Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training
There is no clean separation between personal and work. It is also more efficient to blend them (if I expect a baseline level of non-snoopiness on my work computer, I will text my boyfriend from my work laptop... obviously beneficial for the firm).

Either way when it comes to ranting about the company: many workplaces don't have a watercooler where all your team mates congregate (e.g. remote/different offices). Also what, you'll rant about confidential work projects over non-work texts?