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earleybirdon Design for 3D-Printing

"You still can't print a high-tolerance metal part at scale and cost-effectively..."

Dan Gelbart has a response (with caveats)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLgPW2672s4

earleybirdon Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans

From the early 1800's, created by a single person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

earleybirdon Val Kilmer has passed away

It seems my hypocrisy knows no bounds

He had any number of great lines but this one I really enjoyed.

earleybirdon Fixing left and mutual recursions in grammars

Yes, you are correct. Nondeterministic grammars are not linear but quadratic. In the case of your palindrome example (thanks btw, added to my grimoire of grammars) I believe the quadratic is: (3n^2 + 6n)/4 (I wish HN did MathJax)

I need to do a bit more digging in to the distinction between ambiguous and nondeterministic.

When implementing parsers I enjoy the directness afforded by an Earley parser. No rejigging the grammar to suit LL, LR etc. No gotcha's with PEGs choice operator, etc.

Most grammars I end up using for practical applications are linear - so far, quadratic has been a spectre from afar. :-)

earleybirdon Fixing left and mutual recursions in grammars

Use an Earley parser. A properly implemented Earley parser will do unambiguous grammars with left/right/mutual recursion in linear time. The worst case ambiguous I've worked with is UBDA (Earley, 1970). UBDA produces the equivalent of all the permutations of a binary tree - which is Catalan(n). If you generate all the combinations as you parse it won't complete before the heat death of the universe for fairly short strings.

earleybirdon OpenAI O3-Mini

More than once I've found myself going down this 'little maze of twisty passages, all alike'. At some point I stop, collect up the chain of prompts in the conversation, and curate them into a net new prompt that should be a bit better. Usually I make better progress - at least for a while.

earleybirdon Mistral Small 3

Interesting - _q4 on a pair of 12Gb 3060s it runs at 20 tok/sec. _q8 (25Gb) on same is about 4 tok/sec.

earleybirdon Building a T1D smartwatch for my son from scratch

It's great to see awesome work like this making a difference.

Scott Hanselman has blogged[0] and spoken at some length on tech and living with T1D going back to 2002.

[0] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/category/diabetes

earleybirdon My PhD advisor rewrote himself in bash (2010)

If I were to describe the function f(x) = 0 - x, it would be "F is monotonically decreasing". It seems both words are needed.

earleybirdon Arctic uses a fan to cool another fan

Inches of water is sometimes seen for retail vacuums in shop & household use. I have no idea where it came from - perhaps marketing where it gives a buyer an easy to visualize physical model for comparative purposes.

earleybirdon The Sperry Rand Corporation

I worked for the minicomputer division(may be using the wrong term - it was a long time ago) from 80-83 as an pre & post sales support - likely equivalent to the "SA" on the mainframe side. Within a week of starting they sent me off to Irvine CA for a two week course on the OS internals. Somewhere I believe I have a book that is a printout of OS source. (all V77 assembler).

I have some great memories - first time seeing whales just off Newport Beach stands out.

earleybirdon What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

I'm currently contemplating upgrading my 2013 Leaf battery to a 62Kwh (and much longer range). It's a substantial cost but that would extend the cars life another 15 years. (un)Fortunately I've taken decent care of the original 24Kwh which is at 80.6 SoH after 11 years. Its use case is daily commuter under 45 miles - that's over 11k miles/year (or 18k km/year). At 2% loss on the SoH, that's another 5 years before it hit's 70% and has a noticeable drop in range.

earleybirdon Niantic announces “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

When ever it's free, it's all about the data.

I recall having a conversation circa 2004/5 with a colleague that Google was an AI company, not a search company.

earleybirdon Installed an open source garage door opener, and I'm loving it

Not gp but when we built our house we put magnetic switches in the jamb that close when it senses the metal bolt.

earleybirdon Trump wins presidency for second time

Claude for president 2028 :-)

earleybirdon Reasonable Person Principle

So, tit-for-tat?

earleybirdon Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

I'm inclined to believe that of the animals that exhibit varying degrees of self awareness, they have mental structures isomorphic to a recursive grammar. As such, perhaps using a recursive grammar is not distinctly a human trait.

earleybirdon Rosie pattern language: modern text pattern matching to replace regex

Rosie appears to be an acknowledgment that we shouldn't try to use a regular language when the problem requires a context free language.

earleybirdon Trachtenberg System of Mental Calculation

Now there's a coincidence - just watched Gifted https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4481414/ last night, quite enjoyed it. This system is featured. Also of note, Terence Tao is credited as "technical advisor: mathematics"

earleybirdon Coffee Stats – Maximize Caffeine Intake and Get to Bed at Night

How many hours/days/weeks should you be caffeine free for the baseline BP?

earleybirdon My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures

Only when checking for finger prints :-)

earleybirdon Charging lithium-ion batteries at high currents first increases lifespan by 50%

There are two lifespans. The shelf life and the number of charge cycles (less of a span perhaps) where you charge to 100% and discharge to near 0. If you keep your charge/discharge to 80/20 then your battery life is limited primarily by the shelf life. eg. keep your Nissan Leaf in the 20-80% state of charge range and it will probably last 20 years, DC fast charge it every time to 100% you'll probably only get 2000 cycles (5-7 years) out of it.

earleybirdon Serving AI from the Basement – 192GB of VRAM Setup

In my jurisdiction I can certainly do the work but am under the same requirements to pull a permit and pass a provincial inspection. It very quickly becomes the most effective to have an electrician involved, maybe not for all the work but some of it. They're more that willing to review the work you do and talk about it. Think of it as pair coding - great opportunity to learn and they'll tell you when you've done a good job. (at least the ones I've found)

earleybirdon OpenAI and Anthropic agree to send models to US Government for safety evaluation

I have the utmost respect for the standards and engineering work done by NIST. I'm left with such cognitive dissonance seeing their name juxtaposed with "AI safety". That said, if anyone can come up with a decent definition, I have faith that NIST would be the ones though I'm not holding my breath.

earleybirdon The Cheapest NAS

IBM deathstar[0] drives in a collection of RS6000's is still too fresh in my memory :-)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar

earleybirdon Show HN: Crawl a modern website to a zip, serve the website from the zip

Understood that this is early times, are you considering a licence to release it under?

earleybirdon Improvements to data analysis in ChatGPT

A moat is good or bad depending on which side of the moat you are on.

earleybirdon Branded types for TypeScript

NASA might have some thoughts on mixing inch and meter types :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter

earleybirdon Show HN: I built a free in-browser Llama 3 chatbot powered by WebGPU

Likewise (same error) with Chrome on Windows.

Currently running Ollama / Open WebUI and finding lama3:8B quite useful for writing snippets of powershell, javascript, golang etc.