atondwal

thanks! we asked the model to generate some synonyms and antonyms (in this case, we have "cold" and "impassive" vs "affectionate" and "sensitive")

Then, we ask the model to behave that way (with a prompt), and store the difference in activations for each pair. Then, a PCA can be used to extract the principal component, giving use the steering vector. We do most of this using the repeng library, and the author goes into a bit more detail on how it's done on her [blog](https://vgel.me/posts/representation-engineering/#How_do_we_...?)

I'm totally going to say it your way from now on. But only for currency: "boku bucks", "watashi won", and "ore reals".

You just put together the clearest examples I've seen for illustrating this point. When it need to make it from now on, I'm linking to this comment :)

There are actually pretty decent webIDEs for all of those things (shareLaTeX's vim mode is pretty nice, too), and I did consider switching to a chromebook. I was actually about to buy one before I decided that the max 8GB of RAM was way too little for my usual browsing habits. That, and I'm dependent on some firefox addons that just don't have good chrome equivalents, so chromeOS is sort of a no-go.

Edit: apparently there's a sizable segment of the market that agrees with both of us!

> In the third quarter of 2016, Chromebooks made up 54% of computer shipments to K-12 classrooms in the United States, says IDC analyst Linn Huang. That market share figure even factors in iPads, which themselves have been successful in education.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3067267/how-chromebooks-aim-to-f...

I don't think it's about not using the GPLv3 --- a lot of software is stuck in GPLv2 because the maintainers can't get everyone who contributed (or their estate) to sign off on a license upgrade to the better but incompatible GPLv3. Even the linux kernel is stuck!

But this isn't an "escape hatch" for breaking the GPL; there's a reason the FSF made the "cure clause" explicit in the GPLv3. The explicit language should make life easier and save on court costs not only for corporate lawyers, but even more so for the excellent folks at the Free Software Conservancy, the biggest defenders against GPL violations.

I don't think the "browser-only strawman" is condescending elitists dismissing users --- I'm a self-described GNU zealot on most days the only software I use on are apps like firefox, ssh, and vim and a few other bits like gnome/xmonad, liquid haskell, latex, and rustc.

I have no clue how the "average person" uses a computer, but for me it really is all web. Hell, if I had consistent LTE on my laptop, I could very just spend the whole day in a full-screen firefox with a web-ssh connection to my work server for development.

The book's subtitle is literally "A modular, capability-based operating system"[1]

[1]: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/docs/+/master/book.md

> It might eventually lead to one culture, but then that would be because we all learned from all the options and settled on the best combination.

Isn't that the whole point of the Borg?

This course of study seems to take just as much, if not more, time than a math ugrad+master's at a typical uni. The people who could really benefit from having a path of textbooks like this fall into two categories: those who don't have access a university (due to poverty, rural location, and/or being a shift worker, for example), and high school students.

And I think the latter category is more important than people realize. When I was a high school student, I benefitted greatly from t'Hooft's theorist.html (like this, but for physics, and put together by one of the Greats of the field). It's part of what got me really interested in physics, it was a whole lot of fun, and it actually did a pretty good job of preparing me for graduate-level coursework. Eventually I left physics and math for CS (I'm in PL, so this is even less drastic of career change than one might think), but I still have warm memories of working along t'Hooft's guide and checking off topics as I finished the problems in each textbook.

Switching to the mobile version s/www/m/ also does the trick

>Once the type program's been compiled to a Haskell module, it becomes in essence a type-level library. You can include it in your regular Haskell programs and use the type class instances it exports in your own types to enforce whatever invariants you care about.

Cool! Is there an example of this? I poked around the repo and reddit/HN posts on it, but couldn't find anything...

> This may be especially useful for satellite-to-ground links in less than perfect atmospheric conditions.

Seems to me that the ionosphere would get in the way of this kind of technique. This relys on creating a plasma in air with controlled properties to function as a waveguide, so I imagine that having a high-energy space plasma in the way would make that sort of thing very difficult.

> "Interestingly" is a distinctive word, especially at sentence-initial. Both Nakamoto and Szabo use this.

> (I'd be interested to see if anyone can find Szabo starting paragraphs with "Right, ...": that's a definite tic in Nakamoto's postings.)

AFAIK these are both extremely common among [CS, Math, Physics] professors.

Mathematica is LISP, so it's really 0-based indexing, where the first element is the function you're applying. All the sugar and literals are made to hide this, but you can code like you're dealing with a real LISP.

Consider an ASCII password of unknown length.

Now you just show your mark each symbol to check if it's a part of the password, which would drastically and usefully reduce your search space (unless it a password that uses almost all ASCII characters, but those are extremely rare...).

The Oct 22 update basically says "nevermind".

Android ought to fall under Linux (Other), but he should still add it. He should also separate GNU/Linux (other) and BSD/Linux categories; see how many people are using BSD userlands like obase and magenta. So,

    GNU/Linux (other)
    BSD/Linux
    Android
    Linux (other userland)

stallman.org may not train you with all the skills you need to do investigative journalism and uncover conspiracy, but it _does_ cover the bare minimum you should do before you get started.

rms has been telling us for decades that hackers needed to get our act together politically, and it seems like this is the last "I told you so" he needs to finally get us to start looking.

I think you're missing the point here. pg's saying the scientist identity is useful here, not because of science, but because it reminds you not to take any other identities.

> Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which tells us about the gaps in theories we can't fill

That's mathematical, not physical, so that would mean that in the parent universe somehow _something else constitutes a formal language_, which requires changing what it means to be a subset, which requires changing set theory. So if GITs are invalid in the parent universe, it means, roughly either that you can compare something to itself, and find that it contains different things that itself (absurd), or that list comprehensions are logically impossible (not as obviously absurd, but still "whaaa?").

Hmm, I didn't even notice the first ad, because I subconsciously scanned over it as an ad. The second one looked liked content to me, so I saw that one, and even felt an impulse to click and see what kinda game someone built with such a campy art style

> Teachers' unions are right now fighting the introduction of actual metrics

We would unionize and be fighting metrics too, if they tried to measure how good a programmer you were with the number of goto's you use.

> there must be a ton of stuff that doesn't really do what its supposed to but people buy anyway.

This is one of the reasons I make sure I know how everything I own works. That, and the good ol' hacker ethic.

One possible reason is that indefinite inefficiency "creates jobs in the public sector"

I think you got the original causes right on, but I don't think it's taboos that keep them in place; I think it's a jobs thing (for cops and DEA agents).

His example is intentionally contrived to show a minimal example of StateT. This is who you'd really do it in Haskell:

for strings:

    main = repl ""

    repl :: String -> IO ()
    repl a = getLine >>= \c -> print (a++c) >> repl (a++c)

and it's not that much harder for Ints

    main = repl 0

    repl :: Int -> IO ()
    repl a = fmap read getLine >>= \b -> print (a+b) >> repl (a+b)

or using do notation

    repl a = do $
       b <- getLine 
       print sum
       repl sum
       where   
           sum = a + read b

which is still concise and easy to read.

Also note: Daala is [lossless](https://git.xiph.org/?p=daala.git;a=blob;f=doc/design.tex;h=...)

> It seems to me that the scientists could have simply stored the energy from the light for a period of time

Strained analogy: It's more like recording a hologram for a minute and then playing it back. It's a one-minute buffer for light, the same way we have video buffers, but for real life.

APS typically features important results with articles that are not only understandably by the quantitative laymen, but also do a good job of communicated content. (They're supposed to be the least common denominator for interdisciplinary physicists.)

Here's the article for this paper: http://physics.aps.org/articles/v6/80

Photons have zero rest mass, but light has an energy of $h\nu$, where $\nu$ is the frequency, so this gets added on to the mass of our thing.

Oversimplified explanation: Photons are massless so they can go as fast as they want without needing kinetic energy, but even massless things can store energy (think of the massless springs you studied in high school physics). Energy is the same thing as mass, but we still refer to photons as massless, in the same way that we think of an (imaginary) massless spring as such; we don't like to think of potential energy as _being the object_, just somehow _there_.

This makes more sense if you study physics, in no small part due to the fact that we make it all rigorous (though not to the satisfaction of the mathematicians, I guess...).