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boccaff

63 karma · joined January 11, 2022

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boccaff··on A beginning for mathematics
I don´t think so. For programming agents can run code, check compiler output, etc. For mathematics, it is almost the same once you factor in the usage of lean.

For the reality, you can´t close the loop that fast, or with that precision. You will have to slow down by several orders of magnitude.

boccaff··on Substack writers, you need a website
I don't know, but I imagine "unsubscribe" type of features.
boccaff··on We have proof automation now
Don't we still need to verify that what the LLM proved is actually the stated system?If agents cutting corners (like deleting tests) is a concern, how can we be sure that the verification corresponds to the software and that every _load bearing_ assumption is true? I don't think that simply trusting the Lean core is enough.
boccaff··on Financing the AI boom: from cash flows to debt [pdf]
The value of AI and related companies on retirement funds
boccaff··on Pluto.jl 1.0 release – reactive notebook for Julia
It is interesting that they are paying attention to that, as the section on interactivity [1] brings "how to disable a cell" that would prevent its reactivity and anything that depends upon. With some careful placement, you can disable the automatic calculations. Another thing would be tuning the parameter for confirming before a long runtime. Set it to 50 ms, and only run "almost instant things".

[1]https://discourse.julialang.org/t/pluto-1-0-release/137296#p...

boccaff··on New arXiv policy: 1-year ban for hallucinated references
There is a lot of "throw it against the wall, and if it sticks, write it up" empirical work against benchmarks. It leads to post-hoc rationalization of the work and browser plugins using LLMs to find references for work that is already written. It is a bureaucratic view about "you need a citation for this", where people misunderstand the citation as a checkbox, instead of "you need to substantiate this claim, as I, the reviewer, do not accept this as a fact".
boccaff··on Earthquake scientists reveal how overplowing weakens soil at experimental farm
The estimated area of no-till in Brazil is between 33 to 50 million hectares. It won't be hard for you to find videos of no-till corn being planted following soybean. There is also grass cover that is planted after the main crop season, that is later grazed. This cover stays till the next year and the new crop is planted without tilling. You may need to use "plantio direto" "milho safrinha" and "braquiária de cobertura" plus some translation.
boccaff··on Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world
llama models pushed the envelope for a while, and having them "open-weight" allowed a lot of tinkering. I would say that most of fine tuned evolved from work on top of llama models.
boccaff··on Decision trees – the unreasonable power of nested decision rules
tree algorithms on sklearn use parallel arrays to represent the tree structure.
boccaff··on Decision trees – the unreasonable power of nested decision rules
short answer: No.

longer answer: Random forests use the average of multiple trees that are trained in a way to reduce the correlation between trees (bagging with modified trees). Boosting trains sequentially, with each classifier working on the resulting residuals so far.

I am assuming that you meant boosted decision trees, sometimes gradient boosted decisions trees, as usually one have boosted decision trees. I think xgboost added boosted RF, and you can boost any supervised model, but it is not usual.

boccaff··on Study identifies weaknesses in how AI systems are evaluated
Do you have any pointer to search for that?
boccaff··on Advent of Code 2025: Number of puzzles reduce from 25 to 12 for the first time
You can see aggregated results on `stats` [1] for every year. In general, half the people drop in the first 3-4 days. For last year, by day 12 there is less than 1/5 of day 01. While the stats do count people that completed later, the shape appears to track well with what I saw during the events since 2021.

[1] https://adventofcode.com/2024/stats

boccaff··on Advent of Code 2025: Number of puzzles reduce from 25 to 12 for the first time
I am not aware of Eric saying something about that alternative, but this comment on reddit[1] makes a lot of sense to me:

> Given that part 2 is often a very simple modification of part 1, this could lead to many of the days being total letdowns. I can enjoy a simple puzzle, but I'd be a bit disappointed if one day is a single line change to the previous day.

I'd also add that not having to be worried everyday about something makes a lot of sense. He can have fewer days "on call" in December with.

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/1ocwh04/chang...

boccaff··on Why friction is necessary for growth
You could think about how most people can get away without doing anything physical to survive, so we must artificially exercise to be healthy. The question then is if this analogy hold for mental capacities, and I think it does.
boccaff··on The role of Amazon fires in the record atmospheric CO₂ growth in 2024
hard, and expensive, but doable as long as carbon credits are a thing: https://re.green/en/?force_locale=1

there are a few others in Brazil, like Biomas and Mombak

boccaff··on Ask HN: What trick of the trade took you too long to learn?
>2. be very careful when using rm command (use alias rm='rm -i' )

and treat mv/cp/rsync like rm

boccaff··on Why Datadog bought Eppo for $220M, and what it means for experimentation
Announcement from Eppo[1]

[1] https://www.geteppo.com/blog/eppo-is-now-part-of-datadog

boccaff··on Spectral Imaging Made Easy: A Powerful Python Library
There is a multitude of applications leveraging parts of the spectra different than the visible. I come from an agricultural background, and you can see examples from improving classification of land use, detection and classification of diseases, nutritional status assessment, indirect measurements of properties of plants and soil... it is endless, and every time any part of the tool stack gets cheaper, you have more and more potential applications. This comment [1] have a nice description for the library.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42507805

boccaff··on OCaml Syntax Sucks (2016)
If anything, OCaml's error messages are something that sucks, especially for newcomers. The `Error: Syntax Error` message that points to an empty last line in the file leaves you doing the parser work, in a language that you don't understand.
boccaff··on What Excessive Screen Time Does to the Adult Brain
I'd guess that you can equate "screen time" to "smartphone use" in most of the population but here. Similar to what people are using the screen for.

To include so many variations of screen would complicate a lot the study, and without a prior about why it should matter, you are probably safer starting with something more homogeneous.

boccaff··on React for R
When I've dealt with R in production, cursed meant: - Difficult to keep package versioning, even with "renv". - If an analyst decide to use a single function from the "tidyverse", you have a tons of dependencies. - Large docker images (1G+) due to packages like "devtools" and very large dependency tree for the "productivity packages" (see above). - Hard to communicate with the process. With luck, you can set it up and work with 'r-script' [1]. Without luck, stdout from process or simple files for io.

In the end, to have a nice webapp, we ended up rewriting the R code into typescript. Julia don´t solve this also, as you have a hard time to set it up to communicate with other things. It seems that we can´t avoid the "2 or 3 languages" problem if you don´t use python.

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/r-script

boccaff··on D&D is Anti-Medieval
This impression looks more like the main events of the movie.

You have the several turns on the Battle of Osgiliath, and Boromir alluding to Gondor paying the cost for holding the frotiers with Mordor.

boccaff··on D&D is Anti-Medieval
Disclaimer: My view is based on D&D 3Ed.

I think that the the game culture have changed into something where the DM (dungeon master) is just a enforcer of rules/npc builder. Most of the arguments in the text should be discretionary to the DM. If a DM chooses to enforce a "medieval" setting, the campaign will be medieval. "Knights mentioned", "any time select a land", well, I guess the DM can mention knights and not treat land as something that can be bought as long as you have money. It was very different playing a campaign in Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance or Greyhawk, or having a custom world built by a DM.

boccaff··on Rust Dylib Rabbit Holes
Which can be incremented to `cargo watch -x check -x test -x "run --release" --clear` on a side terminal.
boccaff··on The unreasonable effectiveness of i3, or: ten years of a boring desktop env
If you have 2 windows side by side, nothing. If you have 4 windows and want 3 columns and the left column with two windows on top of each other, there is a lot. Usually it is something like [docs | nvim | (terminal | top or something running)] for me.

And then, if you have more windows, and want to move them between workspaces, move windows within the workspace, send them to background, and don´t want to use the mouse, it will show more value.

boccaff··on GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
except when you have a different locale and language, and half your office suite have the original shortcuts, and the other half is translated like:

ctrl + a (abrir, open in Portuguese) instead of select all, that is moved to ctrl + t (tudo, all in Portuguese), and many others.

So, universally for English/US I guess.

boccaff··on Valencia's irrigation system is now a model for sustainable farming
TL;DR, simpler mechanics for the irrigation system.

The circular pattern comes from the area irrigated by the simplest configuration of a center-pivot [0], which is a fixed point in the center to access water. "Non-circular" area require linear/lateral movement "center-pivots" that require a way more complex control system, or some kind of booster to cover the "corners of a square".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_pivot_irrigation