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dewarrn1

385 karma · joined March 19, 2011

I'm a cognitive neuroscientist with a PhD in psychology.

david-e-warren.me

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/dewarren; my proof: https://keybase.io/dewarren/sigs/GlgzYFgXKgB60f8D9R19UZsu_JQQwZCOQyW9aQyAv7g ]

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dewarrn1··on Tell HN: Bob Cringely has died
It would be quite an encore if he pulled this off one last time.
dewarrn1··on Tell HN: Bob Cringely has died
A sad irony in the title of one of his last blog posts, "Not dead yet! What Bob Cringely has been up to…". https://www.cringely.com/2020/01/23/not-dead-yet-what-bob-cr...
dewarrn1··on I don't want the details
"The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me."
dewarrn1··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
This is a stunning attempt to rewrite history.

> It was Levandowski who...had persuaded Google’s leadership to spend millions of dollars inventing self-driving cars.

> Some of the biggest fights involved risks that Levandowski was taking in self-driving experiments. ... “If it is your job to advance technology, safety cannot be your No. 1 concern,” Levandowski told me. “If it is, you’ll never do anything. It’s always safer to leave the car in the driveway. You’ll never learn from a real mistake.” [0]

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal...

dewarrn1··on Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast
In light of recent news, it is hard not to think about the 4.5-day hack on Hugging Face's systems happening ~10 times faster and be slightly concerned.
dewarrn1··on I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated
It's not quite the same, but your prose clock solution reminded me of this: https://www.authorandco.com/products/author-clock.
dewarrn1··on If AI writes your code, why use Python?
If AI writes your code, why fuss about the language it writes in?
dewarrn1··on Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7
I'm hopeful that new efficiencies in training (Deepseek et al.), the impressive performance of smaller models enhanced through distillation, and a glut of past-their-prime-but-functioning GPUs all converge make good-enough open/libre models cheap, ubiquitous, and less resource-intensive to train and run.
dewarrn1··on Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
The premise for this research question is related in part to work from Dr. Eleanor Maguire (who I just learned died last year at only 55) and her team on hippocampal anatomy and careers involving spatial navigation, including taxi drivers. A connection that may be of interest to HN readers: Demis Hassabis was one of Maguire's doctoral students, although he does not appear to have worked on the project most relevant to this study.
dewarrn1··on Why I love FreeBSD
Hail u/cperciva.
dewarrn1··on Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)
If you're not interested in the new sets, the core product is readily available. Moreover, enjoy the fact that you can get that bucket of bricks for cheap partly because the expensive shiny high-margin SKUs provide a subsidy.
dewarrn1··on MacBook Neo
$499 through Apple Edu: https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/buy-mac/macbook-neo.
dewarrn1··on I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk
The real question: did he have Claude write this for him?
dewarrn1··on NASA announces overhaul of Artemis program amid safety concerns, delays
Had the same thought. NASA already cracked this nut with Apollo; if you’re gonna crack it again and differently, be real sure your solution is better.
dewarrn1··on Hackers (1995) Animated Experience
Tangential, but Darknet Diaries has been running a "hacker history" series to kick off 2026, starting with this one: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/168/. The "Hackers" movie gets a few call-outs.
dewarrn1··on Flux 2 Klein pure C inference
Ah, the other AI: Actual Italian. (w/apologies to Davie504)
dewarrn1··on Google is dead. Where do we go now?
Presumably with apologies to Steinbeck: “Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.”
dewarrn1··on Pop_OS 24.04 LTS with COSMIC desktop environment
Not your question, but 4xxx-series work seamlessly.
dewarrn1··on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1
This is a fun example, but now you've got me wondering: has anyone checked on folks who might have been in an Amazon Go store during the outage?
dewarrn1··on Qwen-Image: Crafting with native text rendering
Slightly hyperbolic, gpt-image-1 is better on at least a couple of the text metrics.
dewarrn1··on Claude Code is a slot machine
Claude Code is^W^W^WEvery LLM is a slot machine.
dewarrn1··on How to Firefox
Yes, it's the Firefox version of Python's GIL.
dewarrn1··on Preliminary report into Air India crash released
A “dead airspace”, perhaps?
dewarrn1··on Zuckerberg's Grand Vision: Most of Your Friends Will Be AI
It's not my area of expertise, but I have seen other estimates that American adults, especially men, are likely to have and report numbers of friends such that the median is in the single digits.
dewarrn1··on A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse
So, in reference to the "reasoning" models that the article references, is it possible that the increased error rate of those models vs. non-reasoning models is simply a function of the reasoning process introducing more tokens into context, and that because each such token may itself introduce wrong information, the risk of error is compounded? Or rather, generating more tokens with a fixed error rate must, on average, necessarily produce more errors?
dewarrn1··on 108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring
It sounds like a compelling film. Seeing now that it's produced by Penn & Teller's team, it makes me wonder about this fits into their "juggler vs. magician" dichotomy. The implication of that duo producing the film suggests that they might believe that Vermeer's reputation as an extraordinarily skilled artist ("juggler") might in fact be the result of Vermeer's use of a sophisticated apparatus that tricked patrons and viewers into thinking that he had extraordinary abilities, thus making Vermeer a master faker ("magician"). Or maybe they simply wanted to spur debate.
dewarrn1··on 108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring
It's an appealing hypothesis, but there's some compelling evidence to the contrary [0]. I'm not an expert, but this could potentially fall under the heading of pop history or pseudohistory.

[0] https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4707

dewarrn1··on Packing Input Frame Context in Next-Frame Prediction Models for Video Generation
LTX-Video isn't quite the same quality as Wan, but the new distilled 0.9.6 version is pretty good and screamingly fast.

https://github.com/Lightricks/LTX-Video

dewarrn1··on Section 230 Protects Users, Not Big Tech
I'm not saying you're wrong about the EFF's support, but I'm not finding a lot of information that says you're right, either. I tend to think of the EFF as generally (not always) being on the right side of issues in their domain, but if that's not true, or if their donor list makes it seem less likely that it's true, I would be interested to know more.

For reference, I found the following descriptions of EFF's major donors, and I looked at their most recent IRS filing. Nothing jumped out at me, but maybe I don't know where to look.

https://www.eff.org/pages/thank-you-public-foundations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundation... https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donee.php?donee=Electronic+F...

dewarrn1··on Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI
A Bond villain.
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