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conorbergin

222 karma · joined November 18, 2022

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conorbergin··on Sherline Tools Is Going Out of Business
That's a shame, I was considering getting one after seeing Chris of Clickspring recommend them. Hobby machinists are used to using machines built by defunct manufacturers, so I'm sure plenty will stay in circulation.
conorbergin··on Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
This reminds of Magnus Carlsen saying that if he were to cheat, all he would need would be a signal to spend more time on the current move.
conorbergin··on Just Bury Your Trash
I think using a cotton bag 173 times to beat plastic bags and a mug 1,000 times to beat disposable cups sounds completely reasonable.
conorbergin··on c100
Nice, I've always wanted my desktop PC to be coupled to the keyboard.
conorbergin··on Simplifying and Refactoring Introductory Calculus
This guy has an interesting publication history, programming books and what looks like evolutionary biology from a creationist perspective.
conorbergin··on Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism
A lot of this thinking still predates the Vatican 2 significantly, I think this person has made their mind up and is working backwards.
conorbergin··on Zig: Build System Reworked
I don't think performance has got much to do with tinkering. IMO the real benefit of Zig is you get the flexibility of C with the ergonomics of a modern language.

I like Python as a tool language, and I am very impressed by projects like Micropython, but you always eventually run into a wall. I.e. you are never going to write a compute shader in python, but I assume someone is going to try.

I think the programmer should meet the hardware in the middle, and Python has a few too many layers of indirection to do this well.

conorbergin··on Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism
I found your previous comment chain on the matter, in which you conflated Catholicism and Conservatism, the second of which I'm sure you have your own personal definition, as there is no Conservative church that decides on doctrine.

Catholic social teaching, which this encyclical is grounded on, has it's roots in Rerum novarum (1891) by Leo XIII (the Pope's namesake) and it dealt with the changing conditions of people due to the industrial revolution. We are potentially in the midst of another revolution (I suspect it will be less significant the the IR), so it is prudent of the church to develop a house view.

conorbergin··on Byrne's Euclid
I'm slightly baffled it existed in the first place, considering they also used the small s, and it looks almost exactly like the f. To be fair, I am equally confused that so many modern typefaces don't distinguish I and l.
conorbergin··on Byrne's Euclid
While less typographically interesting, this is a much clearer treatment of Elements.
conorbergin··on The Zulip Foundation
I've only used Zulip when checking out the Lean Zulip a few years ago, and I thought it was an infinitely better interface than Discord for serious discussion, and also much easier for lurkers to find information. I wish more projects adopted it.
conorbergin··on LLMs Are Not a Higher Level of Abstraction
I don't think LLMs are that chaotic, you can replace words in an input at get a similar answer, and they are very good at dealing with typos.

They are definitely not interpretable, I was reading some stuff from mechanistic interpretability researchers saying they've given up trying to build a bottom up model of how they work.

conorbergin··on LLMs Are Not a Higher Level of Abstraction
LLMs are deterministic, the same model under the same conditions will produce the same output, unless some randomness is purposefully injected. Neural networks in general can be thought of as universal function approximators.
conorbergin··on Anthropic Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
I doubt a fork would ever happen, Blender, being computer graphics software, has a huge knowledge gap between it's developers and it's users.
conorbergin··on Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers
That "syntactic sugar" encompasses the entire value proposition of markdown, there's nothing stopping you using Typst to author blog posts or take notes, they even have HTML export.
conorbergin··on Arch Linux Now Has a Bit-for-Bit Reproducible Docker Image
Scripts are typically turing complete, config files are typically not.
conorbergin··on Arch Linux Now Has a Bit-for-Bit Reproducible Docker Image
I wonder if well designed "mutable" operating systems like Arch and Alpine that are going to beat NixOS etc. in the long run. An install script is strictly more powerful that a declarative config language, and typically less verbose.
conorbergin··on Focused microwaves allow 3D printers to fuse circuits onto almost anything
This is a much more promising technique from Applied Science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIqhpxul_og
conorbergin··on GitHub Monaspace Case Study
Not a fan of “texture healing”, a very convoluted and unsatisfying way of fixing a minor problem with monospace fonts, I’d be more interested in seeing letterforms redesigned to be more optically balanced within the grid, another commenter points out ubuntu mono does this somewhat, but I imagine you could make some fairly radical alterations to certain letters and still be legible.
conorbergin··on DARPA’s new X-76
The Osprey's accident rate is not that bad, and the US Army have ordered a new smaller tiltrotor, the v280.
conorbergin··on My “grand vision” for Rust
I don’t think PL theory driven design produces good systems languages.
conorbergin··on My “grand vision” for Rust
Thank God for Zig
conorbergin··on Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
Do you think Vulkan will become "nice" to use, could it ever be as ergonomic as Metal is supposed to be?
conorbergin··on Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
Is webgpu a good standard at this point? I am learning vulkan atm and 1.3 is significantly different to the previous APIs, and apparently webgpu is closer in behavior to 1.0. I am by no means an authority on the topic, I just see a lack of interest in targeting webgpu from people in game engines and scientific computing.
conorbergin··on Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
Having no CSD at all is unacceptable on small screens IMHO, far too much real estate is taken up by a title bar, you can be competitive with SSD by making them really thin, but then they are harder to click on and impossible with touch input. At the moment I have firefox setup with CSD and vertical tabs, only 7% of my vertical real estate is taken up by bars (inc. Gnome), which is pretty good for something that supports this many niceties.
conorbergin··on The C-Shaped Hole in Package Management
I use a lot of obscure libraries for scientific computing and engineering. If I install it from pacman or manage to get an AUR build working, my life is pretty good. If I have to use a Python library the faff becomes unbearable, make a venv, delete the venv, change python version, use conda, use uv, try and install it globally, change python path, source .venv/bin/activate. This is less true for other languages with local package management, but none of them are as frictionless as C (or Zig which I use mostly). The other issue is .venvs, node_packages and equivalents take up huge amounts of disk and make it a pain to move folders around, and no I will not be using a git repo for every throwaway test.
conorbergin··on Size of Life
>microns to inches

absolutely foul

conorbergin··on Resolution Dynamics: Deriving the Fine Structure Constant from Shannon Capacity
crank check:

  - AI "collaboration" 
  - pure maths in a cosmology paper 
  - Zenodo 
  - small number of citations from a wide range of dates 
  - cosmology
One of my favourite youtube videos is Angela Collier's one on cranks, she makes the point that a motivated independent researcher can do science if they choose less ambitious problems, but these people always choose the deepest and most fundamental problems in maths and physics.
conorbergin··on Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg
>If you called Netanyahu a monkey because of his Gaza genocide, most people who are pro-palestine will try to cancel you! Not because they think highly of him, but because it hurts the cause more than it helps.

Your reading of the current political climate is very different to mine.

conorbergin··on µcad: New open source programming language that can generate 2D sketches and 3D
Can it do fillets?
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