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coke12

237 karma · joined September 3, 2013

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coke12··on OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining
Obviously so. Raytheon is a private company that has its own equities to consider: including things like public image, legal liability, etc. The idea that the USG says jump and Raytheon says how high is absurd. They make choices and even advise the USG at times.
coke12··on Does creatine make you smarter?
The Epsom salt meme predates your “Web 3.0” thesis by many decades. I have no idea if it’s true but it’s not indicative of any new trend.
coke12··on Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
Comparing SpaceX to an aircraft leasing company seems more foolish to me than a 94x multiple.

I understand the gist here, but come on. This is a generational company. It’s the only relevant space launch business, and has its tentacles deep in AI infrastructure as well. Maybe the AI bet is foolish — I don’t know — you should short it!

coke12··on GameStop Preparing Offer for eBay
They have deep synergies in the collectibles market. There's a Venn diagram with eBay on one side and Gamestop on the other, and cultural characters like Logan Paul with his $16m Pokemon card right in the intersection.

This is a big market getting bigger. Americans have more spending money than ever before, especially at the top end, and the collectibles market is expected to grow as much as 7% y/y for a long time. That's like $50b of new spend every year. Massive opportunity.

I think this is smart. Gamestop is a vibes company, everyone knows it, and this is an opportunity to acquire a real business with strong tailwinds. Everyone knows eBay has been poorly run for 20 years. Even in 2010/2011 when I worked there it was running on empty so to speak. Some opportunity to take control of that narrative and grow the business in demographics with deep pockets would be huge.

coke12··on A Periodic Map of Cheese
What about human cheese?
coke12··on Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email
He was well known in the first Trump admin.
coke12··on Goodbye to Sora
No, reading verbatim from a technical paper is way too dense. You need a lot of filler words to slow it down and repetition to make it stick when read aloud.
coke12··on Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
Every group want to label some outgroup as naively benefiting from AI. For programmers, apparently it's the pointy haired bosses. For normies, it's the programmers.

Be careful of this kind of thinking, it's very satisfying but doesn't help you understand the world.

coke12··on U.S. had almost no job growth in 2025
Anecdotally I have bought 2 switches over its lifetime and never saw any of this ever. Just clicked “buy” on Amazon.
coke12··on What Is Ruliology?
I don’t know, I’ve been involved in computer science for several decades now and cellular automata hasn’t really lost its charm. Seems like a cool thing to dedicate your life to!
coke12··on CSS now has an if() conditional function
Many sites do something like that in practice. The problem is the extra 500ms of parse+eval time for your JS bundle influences user behavior a lot on the margin, so it’s better to not force the user to wait.
coke12··on Samsung Family Hub for 2025 Update Elevates the Smart Home Ecosystem
Ultimately the choice of platform is about trust rather than capability. Apple has been a much better citizen historically than any of the smart TV companies.
coke12··on Accelerated Game of Life with CUDA / Triton
The description/assessment of tasks is all plausible, but agreed, some of the execution can be surprisingly boneheaded :)

Case in point, I am building a cellular automata-based physics system, and there is seemingly nothing I can do to affirm that row 0 is "down" and row 255 is "up". The system just cannot grok it on a consistent basis. It has the ability to take screenshots, write unit tests, etc, it's just blind to the kind of intuitive logic we get with our human world model. So the code frequently regresses and gravity starts going in the wrong direction.

coke12··on Accelerated Game of Life with CUDA / Triton
Coincidentally I am also writing a cellular automata simulation. I've blindly given your article to my software architect subagent, who has identified several architectural improvements that it can make and has converted these into tasks to farm out to other subagents. Thanks!

Just a glimpse from building software in 2025.

coke12··on AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions
Consider that a subset of us programmer types pride themselves on never moving their hands off the keyboard. They are already "wired in" so to speak.
coke12··on Robin Lakoff has died
What a fascinating semantic mistake. Is it possible being long-divorced is more similar to being siblings than we realize?
coke12··on I've seen 12 people hospitalized after losing touch with reality because of AI
Other words they like are "reflection", "expansion", "compression". These are fundamental, abstract, semi-monadic terms that allow the user to bootstrap an abstract theory. A little bit of "insight" (aka linguistic rearranging) and I've got a theory out of nothing. How does it work? Well, reflection and recursion of course. None becomes one becomes many. Can't you see the structure?

It feels a lot like logical razzle dazzle to me. I bet if I'm on the right neurochemicals it feels amazing.

coke12··on GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation
This is arguably why it makes more sense to bring GH under the umbrella. Azure integrations need to happen yesterday. The future is full-stack batteries-included low-codeish platforms that are easy to launch with and then boom you're one click from the Azure product suite. Tighter integration is the only way to do this because of the inherent distribution advantages.
coke12··on GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation
Github should have the product sophistication/complexity of Atlassian with the distribution advantage of Microsoft. Anything less is an execution failure IMO.

Not even mentioning AI, which is a huge opportunity also.

coke12··on A Spiral Structure in the Inner Oort Cloud
Our own solar system has what appear to be spiral arms. Very cool finding.
coke12··on Claude 4
How could you possibly know what an LLM would do in that situation? The whole point is they exhibit occasionally-surprising emergent behaviors so that's why people are testing them like this in the first place.
coke12··on Weierstrass's Monster
Are there any hierarchies in mathematics that aren't like this? It seems like most hierarchies are constructed such that going up one "level" expands your scope so much that the previous rung looks like a drop of water in the ocean.

Examples include, for example: the Chomsky hierarchy of languages, where most context-free languages are not regular; Turing computability/solvability; and so on.

coke12··on 6th-generation Waymo Driver
It's the exact same benefit as having your own car. It's a common reason people have to avoid shared transit.
coke12··on The Lindy Effect
Sayings about how old things are surprisingly effective:

"Don't knock it till you try it" "Chesterton's fence" "Reinventing the wheel"

Any others?

coke12··on Internals of async / await in JavaScript
That's a toy example! In reality in a complex app you'd usually be aborting far from where the fetch is created, and you'd have large promise chains where the semantics of cancellation are non-obvious and even unintuitive.
coke12··on Internals of async / await in JavaScript
There are a lot of issues with the ergonomics of AbortController. It's very low level.
coke12··on Internals of async / await in JavaScript
I've had this same cancellation conversation many times with JS programmers. I think it's fair to say there's a need for standardization. Evidence for this need is network request management is really poor in pretty much all JS apps.
coke12··on Bret Victor update
I think he does? Has he indicated he doesn't have enough funding?
coke12··on Eating microwave popcorn increases the level of PFAS in body (2022)
You can do this with brown paper lunch bags. Put some popcorn in a bag, fold the top so that it doesn't open when it expands, and hit the popcorn button.
coke12··on This is valid Python syntax
It's possible they are trying to avoid making people think of memory swapping which is existing jargon and usually means something more complex.
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