chuckledog

Reminds me a bit of the TARS robot from Interstellar. It was portrayed as a highly capable robot with limited articulation. (CASE too) https://interstellarfilm.fandom.com/wiki/Robot

Some of this is still visible: https://maps.app.goo.gl/de6StyBysTMH2Xon8?g_st=ic

Nice website with Ames Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel history: https://www.nasa.gov/nasa-ames-unitary-plan-wind-tunnel/

Anyone play the Apple II video game by Telerium? Slow, but it did evoke that sense of wonder https://youtu.be/ITxhoiXiXRY?si=n21imKGMjqyjmQld

> “As an aside, I think there may be an increased reason to use dynamic interpreted languages for the intermediate product. I think it will likely become mainstream in future LLM programming systems to make live changes to a running interpreted program based on prompts.”

Curious whether the author is envisioning changing configuration of running code on the fly (which shouldn’t require an interpreted language)? Or whether they are referring to changing behavior on the fly?

Assuming the latter, and maybe setting the LLM aspect aside: is there any standard safe programming paradigm that would enable this? I’m aware of Erlang (message passing) and actor pattern systems, but interpreted languages like Python don’t seem to be ideal for these sorts of systems. I could be totally wrong here, just trying to imagine what the author is envisioning.

What stack are you running? How do you guarantee sequential consistency of order numbers across your app server regions, cache layers and data lakehouse?

Great article, thanks for posting. Here’s a nice summary of automatic differentiation, mentioned in the article and core to how NN’s are implemented: https://medium.com/@rhome/automatic-differentiation-26d5a993...

Compelling video!

Great point. Erlang is still going strong, in fact WhatsApp is implemented in Erlang

Yes StarCon2 / Masters of Urquan also hold up really well

This. My new Samsung T7 SSD overheated and took 4T of kinda priceless family photos with it. Thank you Backblaze for storing those backups for us! I missed the return window on the SSD so now have a little fan running to keep the thing from overheating again

You have to go into your inventory to use/consume the items. It’s very nicely done.

Just another plus one for cast-iron pans and wooden spatulas. We’ve been using those for over a decade, 20 bucks each, never needs replacing, works for everything.

We switched from gas stove to induction and now they work even better since the handle doesn’t get as hot and it’s easier to control the temperature.

The whole seasoning thing is extra credit, the only failure mode I’ve seen is trying to fry an egg on a completely unseasoned pan, which just means some extra soaking and scrubbing is needed. The pan seasons itself after a few uses. Hand wash the pan instead of sticking it in the dishwasher, done.

Finally a game superior to Flappy Bird. Bravo!

According to Alan Kays 1971 description of Smalltalk:

“An object is a little computer that has its own memory, you send messages to it in order to tell it to do something. It can interact with other objects through messages in order to get that task done.”

Smalltalk concepts heavily informed the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) tenets, e.g.

1. Services are autonomous - Cohesive single responsibility.

2. Services have explicit boundaries - Loosely coupled, owns its data and business rules.

Choosing good service boundaries is really crucial for a successful, resilient, maintainable system.

There’s a nice synopsis at https://hemantkumar.net/services-microservices-bounded-conte... (2015)

“Cells” seems like the same thing but it’s IMO a nicer word for it.

GitHub, especially filtered by starred repos, is a pretty high quality dataset.

Ada Lovelace is my grandma

Interesting deck that shows moon caves are not a new concept at all. I’m surprised this hasn’t shown up in more sci-fi movies by now… slides 11 and 16 are quite compelling!

Now how do we know there isn’t anyone there already… ;)

We (the tech community) have spent 10+ years “growth hacking” entire populations, scaling up the web backends and personal devices capable of connecting that relentless growth into “users’ attention”. All that attention has to come from somewhere. There are only so many hours in a day; more virtual = less RL, human attention is a zero sum game.

Does the compiler work on a Mac M2?

Interesting idea from Oracle. See also https://github.com/oracle-samples/oracle-db-examples/tree/ma...

I stopped using Perl 15 years ago, except for this exact use case. I still type “perl -pi -e” to wrangle source code or data files, at least monthly. The regex syntax is more consistent too.

We created a cheap effective DIY positive pressure system and it’s been working well for about a year now. Intake: old Winix filter, HEPA ish, broken fan removed, nice filter changability. Fits in joist bay, faces down drawing air from a protected exterior part of the house. $50/yr … connected with a steel hvac boot to… Duct Fan: AC Infinity 6” leave it on 1/10 … connected with 10’ of 4” duct to another hvac boot which blows air into a floor register in the bedroom.

We have 3 of these, always on, ready for the next round of purple air

Edit: house is in mild climate California

From a senior software engineer who has been using them productively for many months.

(10000 years later) The age of the bot is over. The time of the elves has come.

IF all this were to come to pass as described, on that ten year timeline, I wonder what would be the fate of programming languages? New dominant coding languages come along roughly every five years. Would generative AI stick with one language? Would it learn to prefer new languages over time? Would it write new languages? If not, who would?

It is not imaging your face like a normal camera would. It is using an infrared camera to pick out the location of two dots (the relative position and distance of the two dots in the camera”s field of view). That information stream could be compressed to a few bytes per second without losing tracking fidelity. That does not seem very invasive. Even if a high resolution pixel stream were to be sent from the camera to an untrustworthy, persistence layer, it would be infrared, which doesn’t seem very privacy-invasive.

Canonical paper on SQL query optimization. By Patricia Selinger. The dynamic programming algorithm for determining join order proposed in this paper still forms the basis for most of the query optimizers used in modern relational systems.

Seems like bulk loading might be a good use case here.

No, we live in a mild climate so the cost of ERV outweighs the benefit for us. I researched it, but balked at the high price of the unit, and the idea of adding lots of ducting in the attic.

Instead went with separate AC Infinity (grow-room) fans each pulling air through a filter. Works ok. Still iterating tbh.

This all predates the war. Another factor for us was wildfire smoke