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baxter001

434 karma · joined July 22, 2008

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baxter001··on Show HN: Fractional jobs – part-time roles for engineers
[flagged]
baxter001··on The Raft Consensus Algorithm (2015)
I recall doing a rather large technical case for using raft and a replicated log for water industry back in 2017 it must have been.

That's from knowing nothing about the shape of consensus algorithms to almost getting one adopted.

To me Raft's brilliance is how easy, clear and comprehensible they made thinking about it.

baxter001··on Pfeilstorch
> I was surprised how well the bird was getting around.

SurvivorBias.png except it's a silhouette of a goose with numerous red arrows drawn over it.

baxter001··on FFmpeg 8.0 adds Whisper support
You'd be surprised what's in there, a few forms of NNs are already supported for denoising, speech detection.

I think having this flow out to all of the deps of libav is a greater good than notions of lib purity.

baxter001··on FFmpeg 8.0 adds Whisper support
More precisely libavfilter, so it's also soon in mpv and other dependent players.

This is going to be great for real-time audio translation.

baxter001··on Nobody knows how to build with AI yet
The fact that you think it was suggested _by_ them is I think where your mental model is misleading you.

LLMs can be thought of metaphorically as a process of decompression, if you can give it a compressed form for your scenario 1 it'll go great - you're actually doing a lot of mental work to arrive at that 'compressed' request, checking technical feasibility, thinking about interactions, hinting at solutions.

If you feed it back it's own suggestion it's no so guaranteed to work.

baxter001··on A faster way to copy SQLite databases between computers
What technologies we have in 2025!
baxter001··on Scientists have 20-minute "conversation" with a humpback whale
It seems to be the "conversation" part, not necessarily "communication", one of the early stages in children's language acquisition is teaching the flow of back and forth responses and pausing for the other to speak: which seems to be what they're indicating in this article.
baxter001··on Comparing humans, GPT-4, and GPT-4V on abstraction and reasoning tasks
No, it doesn't, Turk is what we call Turkish people too.
baxter001··on 'Super melanin' heals skin injuries from sunburn, chemical burns
The "chemical burns" in the title are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_mustard burns, a blistering agent and schedule 1 substance under the chemical weapons convention.
baxter001··on DeepMind’s new AI with a memory outperforms algorithms 25 times its size
Completely not the focus of the article, and you've turned the result of an error rate of 0.8 percent for gender classification of light-skinned men and a 34.7 percent error rate for the same classifier on dark-skinned women - into some kind of google image search language game?

I can only quote Joy Buolamwini on this:

“To fail on one in three, in a commercial system, on something that’s been reduced to a binary classification task, you have to ask, would that have been permitted if those failure rates were in a different subgroup?”

baxter001··on This word does not exist
Always curious of how you walk around the latent space in these, are you just linearly interpolating between two random high dimension points?
baxter001··on UMN CS&E Statement on Linux Kernel Research
background for those unfamiliar with this: https://news.itsfoss.com/hypocrite-commits/

and Kangjie Lu's response: https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~kjlu/papers/clarifications-hc....

baxter001··on RIP Google Reader
When I'm bored and looking for distraction, I'll often get as far as reader.goog in the address bar before I remember :(
baxter001··on New quantum receiver the first to detect entire radio frequency spectrum
That opening paragraph is hellishly depressing.
baxter001··on Will India Ban Twitter?
It's an article post on the paywalled site platformer.news (Alexa Rank 57,888, most of the sites visitors coming from cnewton.org) by the San Francisco based founder and writer of platformer.news Casey Newton, the article title ends in a question mark.
baxter001··on Stop global roll out of 5G networks until safety is confirmed, urges expert
A meta-response: https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/should-we-pause-the-5g-roll-...
baxter001··on Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets
Can't let this pass without the old classic: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1

In the United States, supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. In Italy, which has more uniform vital registration, remarkable longevity is instead predicted by low per capita incomes and a short life expectancy. Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and short life expectancy relative to their national average. As such, relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status, and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.

baxter001··on Analyzing the performance of Tensorflow training on M1 Mac Mini and Nvidia V100
No, but it's pretty good at retraining the final layer of low memory networks like MobileNet - weirdly a workload that the V100 is very poorly suited for...
baxter001··on U.S. Bill H.R.69 introduced – To make daylight savings time permanent
Almost a yearly tradition: https://www.congress.gov/search?q={%22source%22:%22legislati...
baxter001··on Pfizer submits Covid vaccine to FDA for approval, to distribute in December
A retraction for being one week out with their predictions and not expecting a new vaccine to get exceptional early distribution authorization?
baxter001··on AI’s “world in chains” scenario
As it says "still an unlikely and far-future scenario" the author thinks it's prediction, simply a 'scenario' but is too myopic to see the unfeeling machine he's already inside.

Which is a shame as it may help them see that there is a way out of even the most all-encompassing scenarios of control.

baxter001··on AI’s “world in chains” scenario
I love how many of these AI horror thought experiments are so close to realizing the horrors of global capitalism but they're too close to see it.
baxter001··on Show HN: I made earrings that work like earphones
"signalling status with ear-accessories Airpods Pro are gonna do a better job these days."

Excellent point, one doesn't need an earphone that looks like traditional jewellery if the earphone is already fulfilling the purpose of traditional jewellery.

baxter001··on NestedText, a nice alternative to JSON, YAML, TOML
Interesting insights into the thought process of the author, there's very little as to positive statements of why you'd want to use this format, but they do however spend a great deal of time discussing neutral features and edge cases of currently wildly adopted alternatives.

One might call this 'argument by gotcha' interesting to imagine the kind of lifeworld that makes one think this is a worthwhile form of persuasion.

baxter001··on The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]
Is that those two french brothers who tried to publish fake physics papers?
baxter001··on Deepfake used to attack activist couple shows new disinformation frontier
That 'heatmap' looks suspiciously like the blurred brightness channel of the image.
baxter001··on Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera
Is it not clear that they're not complaining about the literal situation of credit card breach, but rather using it as analogy to being informed of a breach after the fact?
baxter001··on Evidence-based Software Engineering – book beta
This is a very heterogeneous text, pulling in the psychology of perception, economic theory, a description of how regressions work and static analysis of a whole host of programing languages along with R snippets on how to perform the analysis.

Strikes me more like a manic episode than a useful text.

baxter001··on Fed’s Balance Sheet Exceeds $7T for First Time in History
That's not a very interesting observation due to everyone being able to work that out.

The point here is the previously assumed additional round of quantitative easing now going to be so hot on the heels of the last in January the US may as well be a command economy.

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