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cranx

106 karma · joined November 6, 2021

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cranx··on Gambling with our lives: AI researcher quits Anthropic with warning about safety
Bc “the ai so dangerous and powerful he had to quit for moral reasons” sends a signal to investors about capabilities. And it could totally be legit. It’s hard to say. I feel like once a researcher is truly ringing the alarm bells no one will look bc it’s been done so many times already. It’s unfortunate imho
cranx··on Gambling with our lives: AI researcher quits Anthropic with warning about safety
At this point I feel like the boy who cried wolf is an ai researcher. Yes super intelligence could be dangerous. However, is the story a PR stunt or real? Well…
cranx··on The time the x86 emulator team found code so bad they fixed it during emulation
Loop unrolling is a basic compiler optimization and depending on the machine language and processor instruction set should be faster taking into account all the house keeping required to execute a conditional, jump, move register values etc. This article is missing the analysis of why. If someone didn’t “like” it and was offended then that seems like an equally silly reason. On the surface 256k to init less does seem silly, but what if it was faster?
cranx··on Is my blue your blue? (2024)
This is flawed. Turquoise is not blue or green. Also different displays will show different colors. And a lot of displays aren’t great at producing the hues in the green color space. Idk the test seems arbitrary, but I’m not color expert
cranx··on Warcraft III Peon Voice Notifications for Claude Code
"Job’s done!"
cranx··on Replacing Protobuf with Rust
I find the title a bit misleading. I think it should be titled It’s Faster to Copy Memory Directly than Send a Protobuf. Which then seems rather obvious that removing a serialization and deserialization step reduces runtime.
cranx··on The Swift SDK for Android
So this still uses the JNI for the ui? Unfortunate that is
cranx··on Advice for new principal tech ICs (i.e., notes to myself)
I find it strange that number 1 is not about political capital and how you it got it or maintain it.
cranx··on Space Elevator
This is cool, but the UX of the arrows should follow the scroll mode of the device. You drag down on an iPhone to scroll up. Following the arrow and dragging up causes nothing to happen
cranx··on Indefinite Backpack Travel
This is cool, but do you throw away stuff when done with it or do you keep things at another permanent location? Like the tent that isn’t brought on every trip?
cranx··on The maths you need to start understanding LLMs
But we do. A series of mathematical functions are applied to predict the next tokens. It’s not magic although it seems like it is. People are acting like it’s the dark ages and Merlin made a rabbit disappear in a hat.
cranx··on Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
I think a lot of engineers think, “I thought of a complicated set of abstract ideas that mean nothing to anyone else but will demonstrate my superior intellect” and then make that. It took a lot of self control to not curse.
cranx··on Debloat non-rooted Android devices
Why write this in rust to execute shell commands?
cranx··on My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)
Nice job, but it’s math, not some magic trick. I would like to see the animation functions graphed to describe how the numbers change relative to time.
cranx··on Bringing garbage collected programming languages efficiently to WebAssembly
I can see value in running code on multiple browsers on multiple OSes via web pages. I’d hate to npm install 2k+ JS libraries I don’t know or understand to be able to compile a simple Hello World Kotlin program that runs on a webpage. There does seem to be some notion in the industry that everything should be in a browser/JS, sigh.
cranx··on I got robbed of my first kernel contribution
I think this is a common issue that happens in software development. Some people just like to make thousands of changes that don’t impact logic, but let them own the blame for that line of code. I guess it gives some a sense of power, control, and ownership.
cranx··on Block a tweet, its author, and every single person who liked it
I think journalists would beg to differ. I believe that journalism is a good thing. Humans aren’t equipped to process all of Twitter effectively. Use Twitter for getting a signal of what’s happening or what interests you. To gain better information that’s been processed, digested, and summarized for you then I think journalism is great.
cranx··on Block a tweet, its author, and every single person who liked it
An alternative solution might be to leave Twitter. Talk to ppl irl. Read the news paper and I mean the paper (digital edition is acceptable too) not the website/app.
cranx··on Android in Docker without QEMU/emulator
This is interesting, but I don’t see this as something for use in development of Android apps. Given all Android’s quarks and fragmentation the use of real devices and Google’s emulators will provide a better surface to catch bugs during dev. What’s the primary use case for these containerized versions of Android?
cranx··on Web3 is centralized
The problem is that everyone assumes crypto is some type of panacea. People keep saying transparency and distributed as keys words to engender an idea. People are believing the idea, but I’m skeptical the idea can “walk the walk.”

Could you show my grandmother how to see the transactions on the block chain easily for any crypto?

IMHO Web3 is more of an idea people are using to profit than a real thing to create equality.

cranx··on Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution
We’d also die of mesothelioma. But hey, the co2 was captured.
cranx··on Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution
Do we need more fissile plutonium? More bomb plants sounds less desirable for the human race than transitioning to renewables.