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dachworker

331 karma · joined September 15, 2023

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dachworker··on Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
I have recently installed Fedora Sway Spin and it's so nice. I did change the configs since I have been using i3/sway for a long time. But otherwise, the default setup is just very sensible.

I guess, the only thing it's missing is an AI agent component, but for now I don't know how to integrate one and trust it that it won't leak my personal data, so I prefer not to mess with that stuff.

dachworker··on Roboharm: Do frontier robot policies refuse unsafe instructions?
IMHO robots should either be quarantined or they should have physical safety like for example with table saws where if it detects flesh it just halts. There's absolutely no way I would trust a robot based on a .md. That's lunacy.
dachworker··on Fable 5 – Median thinking declined in August
Makes sense, no? Test time compute is something you can vary, so it makes sense that you start covertly reducing it once the model has already made it's splash.
dachworker··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
[flagged]
dachworker··on Australia 'on the same page' as Canada as it seeks deeper EU alliance
Japan and Taiwan are culturally very foreign unlike Australia and Canada. If we add them we might as well add the whole globe.
dachworker··on Nerd culture is murdering intellectuals
I always thought I was a nerd, but I was never into super heroes or fantasy books/movies and I was never into playing Pokemon or Magic the Gathering. Star Wars didn't appeal to me and neither did Lord Of The Rings nor Narnia nor Harry Potter. I wasn't even that big into video games, although I did spend quite a lot of time playing some of the big titles (Vice City for example) but I spent way more time flying in MS Flight Simulator and FlightGear.

When I was little I was fascinated by big engines and in general driven by the curiosity of wanting to know how everything worked. I would disassemble every piece of electronics in the household. I was into model airplanes and gliders. I was obsessed with building electric motors. I was also really big into steam machines. Everything steam was just cool. Then computers took over my life. Today I find myself nerding out about wood working and back garden agriculture when I'm not doing AI stuff.

I still believe I qualify as a nerd.

dachworker··on Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%
This is actually at the core of our (EU) problem. Instead of thinking, "here is this new technology, how can we build new markets/products out of it", our industry leaders always think, "here is this new technology, how can we apply it to our existing industries".

You can see it a lot in AI, right now. AI4industry is not where the gains are right now. We should be competing on training foundational models. Once the foundational models from US/China are strong enough, they will do AI4industry and we wouldn't have any edge on them anyway because their tech is more vertically integrated and they have better insight in how AI works under the hood.

dachworker··on German battery maker Varta files insolvency applications
At the time it was a perfectly rational decision that followed the liberal foreign policy dogma of the time, which advocated that we tie up unstable countries with economic trade, so they become less incentivized to create havoc. Let's please not rewrite history.
dachworker··on Understanding the AI Economy
That last graph is surely AI generated.
dachworker··on Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample
The abstraction is by necessity. Our puny brains have only a very small working memory. The only way we can reason about many problems is by creating multiple levels of hierarchy. That is actually the essence of what mathematics is.
dachworker··on New US homeownership measure puts people first
It's an economic metric, not a political statement.
dachworker··on Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise
I find all this gender wars crap competely untrue in real life. I wouldn't be surprised if it was all due to sampling errors.
dachworker··on Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise
My parents bought their house cash. No they were not high earners and not even median income earners. Yes the house is now worth close to a million dollars.
dachworker··on Alternative(s) to run CUDA on non-Nvidia hardware
Why should I not just port my kernel to Triton? What's the appeal of Scale?
dachworker··on EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0
Here's a thought: maybe liberal democracy was never very free.
dachworker··on The US Government Is Now a Shareholder in 26 Companies
Corporate taxes don't work and taxing the rich is super hard. Could this be a way for the state to suplement tax revenue?
dachworker··on EU could announce social media ban for kids in September
For the kids, sure. Incidentally, if you post anything political you must now do it with the knowledge that your identity is tied to your comment or opinion.
dachworker··on Meta building cloud business to sell excess AI capacity
I'm excited for the opportunities that an abundance of compute brings, even in the absense of AI applications. Big compute is the right direction, if we can afford it. There are always things to simulate or discover or automate in some way shape or form.
dachworker··on South Korea – A cautionary tale for the rest of humanity
My grandparents were all born in Europe between the two world wars. Actually, despite humble origins they all had a fairly prosperous life. Even though I have much more education than they did, I don't think I can ever achieve the same level of prosperity as they had.

Like, I certainly cannot afford a family of 12 children. Nor can I afford to buy the amount of land that they acquired, and certainly not by working the same kind of jobs they did.

dachworker··on South Korea – A cautionary tale for the rest of humanity
Maybe I'm weird, but does anyone else have worries about what future their prospective children would inherit? In particular things that worry me: 1. the growing geopolitcal turmoil which is likely to eventually descend into a great war of sorts, the footage coming out of Ukraine is horrifying, 2. climate change isn't going to be dealt with and again, lots of violence will ensure because of that, almost certainly, 3. not sure what to think about AGI, but I'm not entirely dismissive and at best it seems like a dual use technology, 4. a GATTACA-type future where the super rich figure out a way to birth super humans with perfect genetics and top 0.001% IQs. All of those make the future look so unappealing.
dachworker··on Helion: A high-level DSL for performant and portable ML kernels
I'm super excited to give this one a spin. It seems like a neat idea, Triton, but simpler and with automatic autotuning. My head is spinning with options right now. I love how everyone was hyping up CUDA this and CUDA that a couple of years ago, and now CUDA is all but irrelevant. There's now so many different and opinionated takes on how you should write high performant accelerator cluster code. I love it.

It's also kinda of ironic that right now in 2025, we have all this diversity in tooling, but at the same time, the ML architecture space has collapsed entirely and everyone is just using transformers.

dachworker··on Michael Burry bets against Nvidia and Palantir [video]
The bubble will burst when all this agentic AI slop fails to deliver. Might take a while yet, because generative models are very good at aping competence and it's therefore easy to produce compelling demos.
dachworker··on Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
I love how they always style themselves experts on economics, as if there is one global economic policy that benefits everyone, equally. How cute.
dachworker··on Tesla's ‘Robotaxis' Keep Crashing—Even With Human ‘Safety Monitors' Onboard
Fair point, but here's my counter: consumers won't analyze the data but insurance companies will.
dachworker··on Tesla's ‘Robotaxis' Keep Crashing—Even With Human ‘Safety Monitors' Onboard
It's the British English equivalent.
dachworker··on Tesla's ‘Robotaxis' Keep Crashing—Even With Human ‘Safety Monitors' Onboard
Isn't the lesson from the success of TSLA, that you don't compete on price? That's what made Tesla the first successful EV. Because unlike the rest, they didn't try to compete on price and offer a mass market consumer vehicle. Instead they started with a roadster and then a luxury saloon both targeting the upper end of the market. I don't see the point of a budget taxi car. After all even the human driven counterparts tend to be higher end luxury saloons or SUVs.
dachworker··on Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater
You constructed a narrative and overlaid it over the facts.

The facts are that for many decades past, it was possible for hopeful economic immigrants to abuse asylum laws, or the back then less protected border, to gain entry to the US. Neither red nor blue administrations handled this properly and lots of people benefited from the status quo, and your focus on, "the left" is quite conspicuous, because one does not tend to think of farm owners, meat processing plants and construction contracting businesses as "the left".

And rightfully past administrations should shoulder the blame for not dealing with immigration in a lawful manner back then. If there was a need for immigrant labor they should have handed temporary VISAs or whatever, instead of ignoring illegal immigration.

dachworker··on [dead]
If you think of hiring as trying to get the best deal: best candidate for the most discounted price, what you want to do is find the proverbial gem in the rough. But AI does precisely the opposite of that. It will recommend exactly the same profile that appeals to everyone else. The gems will remain undiscovered and you will all be competing for the few individuals that according to their profile, are the safest bet.
dachworker··on The contrarian physics podcast subculture
He did a lecture. Not sure if you can still find it on Youtube, because IIRC, he published a paper and then redacted it. From what I can tell it was bits of old fashioned differential geometry and a whole lot of hand waving.
dachworker··on The contrarian physics podcast subculture
ML Research is ripe for such a subculture to emerge, because there are truly so many research directions that are nothing more than a tower of cards ready to be exposed. You need an element of truth to capture your audience. Once you have an audience and you already deconstructed the tower of cards, you start looking for more content. And then you end up like Sabine.
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