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fantod

217 karma · joined September 29, 2020

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fantod··on Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom
It's not just the papers. It's also the students and their students, many of whom ended up working in the top labs today.
fantod··on US freezes visas for 75 nations
Oh, well that's reassuring
fantod··on I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA
Isn't 1-2 year wait time standard for spousal immigration?
fantod··on Leaving Intel
I'm surprised someone with his reputation would need to do this.
fantod··on Rosetta 2 creator leaves Apple to work on Lean full-time
I don't know what his reasons are but it makes sense to me. Yes, there are incredible results coming out of the AI world but the methods aren't necessarily that interesting (i.e. intellectually stimulating) and it can be frustrating working in a field with this much noise.
fantod··on My second year without a job
This is... incredible if true. How can this be? I looked up the old walk-in I used to go to (haven't needed it in a while) and it still shows up on maps but the most recent reviews says they "don't do walk-ins anymore". In which case I don't really understand what they do. Genuinely curious about the situation if anyone cares to chime in.
fantod··on My second year without a job
Do you really need a family doctor? I've never had one. Whenever I've had a non-emergency issue (in BC), I've just gone to a walk-in clinic where they've either helped me on the spot or referred me to a specialist. I can definitely see why having a family doctor might be a more pleasant overall experience, but as far as I understand in Canada it's practically a pipe dream.
fantod··on Vimium – The Hacker's Browser
This is supported by vimium with `gi`
fantod··on The only acceptable rating to leave an Uber driver is 5 stars
Agreed. Or have a function to report unacceptable behavior, but besides that no feedback is needed. I pretend this is the case. Never leave ratings anymore.
fantod··on Tracking the Fake GitHub Star Black Market
> ChatGPT is creating a huge market for creating fake companies to match the fake information it's generating.

Does ChatGPT consistently generate the same fake data though?

fantod··on Signal app's president-“layoffs in tech are to keep salaries in check”
Why has competition fallen? Is it simply due to an increase in supply?
fantod··on How did Roomba-recorded photos end up on Facebook?
Re-quoting the GP's quote,

> They were given to “paid collectors and employees” who signed written agreements acknowledging that they were sending data streams, including video, back to the company for training purposes.

So it hardly seems likely that they would not be aware of this.

fantod··on Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
My approach was to port everything to a different language I was learning.
fantod··on Some WFH employees now live in another country
Not to mention visa and health insurance issues.
fantod··on John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips
He does discuss VSCode towards the end of that clip.
fantod··on Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time
Good for St. Louis, bad for NYC.
fantod··on Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out
> if everyone forgot all they knew about math today we would be easily able to get back to where we are in a just by reading

If your definition of "easily" is the amount of work required to become a mathematician, then sure.

fantod··on Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles
You don't really need to know calculus (derivatives and such) but it's true that big O notation requires some sort of "asymptotic thinking" which is probably only explicitly taught in a calculus course.
fantod··on Python 3 Types in the Wild
I agree and I think a good thing about the type hints is they help uncover these kinds of code smells. But there are definitely cases where it's definitely not worth the effort to fight mypy.

One example is that variable re-assignment can cause type errors in mypy but re-assigning a variable to a value of a different type is an extremely common and reasonable thing to do in Python. Another situation where strict typing can be borderline hopeless is when parsing e.g. very dynamic content like json. Sure you could encode every possible situation using types but this would basically defeat the purpose of using Python for such a task.

fantod··on Python 3 Types in the Wild
Exactly. When I initially started using typed Python, I would write code as though I were using a statically-typed language. In order to appease mypy, I found myself increasingly needing to either rewrite my code in awkward ways or add explicit ignore comments.

What happened is I started losing out on the advantages that Python provides as a dynamically-typed language without truly gaining those of statically-typed ones. Then I realized, type hints are just that: hints. They're a form of documentation. In some cases, they're very helpful, but in other cases, it doesn't really make sense to use them. I don't need to appease mypy. The type hints are their for the benefit of myself and other developers.

fantod··on The new silent majority: People who don't tweet
Personally, I always read it as "advice" rather than as an insult. Unfortunately, can't seem to find much context for that quote so it's hard to determine what was intended.
fantod··on The new silent majority: People who don't tweet
You can get the best of both worlds. Stop worrying too much about what you think and say, like you mentioned; and also stop engaging on Twitter.
fantod··on How I think when I think about programming
I think it was a joke about the author's writing style.
fantod··on Examples of common false beliefs in mathematics
You can think of each vector space as being embedded in the direct sum of the two.
fantod··on Pydantic
I think SQLModel actually exists precisely so that you don't have to do that. According to [1]:

> That class Hero is a SQLModel model... But at the same time, it is a SQLAlchemy model... And at the same time, it is also a Pydantic model

[1] https://sqlmodel.tiangolo.com/#sqlalchemy-and-pydantic

fantod··on 5% of 666 Python repos had comma typo bugs (inc V8, TensorFlow and PyTorch)
Not to mention the implicit string concatenation that you get instead.
fantod··on Why are German numbers backwards?
Yup, a friend of mine learning French a few years ago asked me how I, as a native French speaker, deal with this problem. I didn't understand what he was talking about because I had never in my life even noticed it. Learned how to count before I learned how to multiply, after all.
fantod··on PyTorch: Where we are headed and why it looks a lot like Julia (but not exactly)
Also no (official) REPL.
fantod··on When did computer science theory get so hard?
If you're referring to the underlying rigorous analysis / set theory / foundations of math, it's arguably still easier to understand now that those things have been developed. Before these theories existed, your only way of truly "understanding" calculus to a similar level of detail would have been to actually develop the foundations of math, which would be impossibly hard for most people.
fantod··on Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Mind on Fire
> My understanding is the Tractatus was meant to "end philosophy" by implying that most of philosophy arises from the confusion between these grammatical artifacts and reality.

Apologies in advance as I haven't read any Wittgenstein myself, but am I wrong in thinking this is what the Philosophical Investigations was about (as opposed to the Tractatus)?

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