fzeindl

I exercise 3 times a week (running, martial arts, weight lifting). I ran marathons, I exercised 5-6 times per week for the last 5 years.

I am truly fit, but … I still don’t feel like exercising.

Most of the time it’s like brushing my teeth, it is just something I do because it is right.

A similarly scoped book series is „AI game programming wisdom“, which contains a multitude of chapters that focus on diverse, individual algorithms that can be practically used in games for a variety of usecases.

In Norway alcohol is very expensive, so many people distill at home illegally.

Every travel guide tells you to not accept home-distilled drinks, since they can be poisonous.

No.

With databases there exists a clear boundary, the query planner, which accepts well defined input: the SQL-grammar that separates data (fields, literals) from control (keywords).

There is no such boundary within an LLM.

There might even be, since LLMs seem to form adhoc-programs, but we have no way of proving or seeing it.

The principal security problem of LLMs is that there is no architectural boundary between data and control paths.

But this combination of data and control into a single, flexible data stream is also the defining strength of a LLM, so it can’t be taken away without also taking away the benefits.

I tried this with early ChatGPT. Asked it to answer telegram style with as few tokens as possible. It is also interesting to ask it for jokes in this mode.

> But a lot of UK housing relies on on-street parking, and there's flats with car parks where charging isn't currently practical.

You forget the larger problem less wealthy individuals face: They typically already own a ICE-car and can‘t afford to purchase a new car multiple times in their lives.

Since sand is a non-renewable resource that is needed for construction, there’s a lot of illegal activity going on.

In India, illegal sand mining is the country's largest organized criminal activity.

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

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

Would the single sentence „Imagine you are a regular computer player and accustomed to the usual elements of games“ count as a harness?

I disable it only for the DIR variable which I might not use.

My header on top of every script

            #!/usr/bin/env bash
            set -eEuo pipefail
            # shellcheck disable=SC2034
            DIR="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" && pwd )"
            #######################################################

Certificate/key renewal was a mess in every enterprise environment I worked in.

My suspicion is that corporations in general don‘t handle tasks well that need to follow an exact timeline and can‘t be postponed by a week or two.

> a lot of real world performance comes down to how efficiently you are calling external services (including the database)

Apart from that my experience over the last 20 years was that a lot of performance is lost because of memory allocation (in GCed languages like Java or JavaScript). Removing allocation in hot loops really goes a long way and leads to 10 or 100 fold runtime improvements.

I agree JFR is amazing.

Also that you can start it on a running JVM and it that is has minimal ~1% performance overhead.

That and also the JVM is a marvel of engineering with millions of hours that were poured in by smart people over the last 30 years.

It can be as fast a C, supports a multitude of languages, introspection, surveillance etc.

My guess is that some cell in an excel sheet says that some customers bought certain models in the past and no manager at Dell has enough weight or enough courage to question that and rule to NOT release a certain model.

I have been alone for quite some time in my life, for various reasons.

Here is my advice

1. Don’t listen to people telling you that there‘s something wrong with you if you aren’t happy alone and that you need therapy. You probably don‘t.

If you aren’t able to survive a single day on your own, then you have an issue, but in general people are social animals and need talking to and touching other people on a regular basis to regulate themselves emotionally. Some don’t, but you don‘t seem to be one of them. (In my experience people who honestly enjoy being alone for weeks at end often got used to this in their childhood, for example by being single children. If you had a noisy, lively house when growing up you will always miss that.)

2. That being said it is still nourishing and useful to follow the tips for spending time on your own (cooking for yourself, going into the cinema) now and then. But don‘t expect it to magically fix your yearning for social connections.

3. Doing sports and going to the gym often is great advice, because sports generally gives you a more positive mood and a better outlook and it quiets down negative thoughts. But also keep in mind here that it will not replace social interactions and touch.

4. So the question remains where you get your social interaction from, and I suggest that you replace the single person you had with a lot of tiny social interactions.

None of those is going to fix your solitude on it’s own, but the mixture will enrich your life. If you do all of those things once per week, your mood will improve:

- Online dating and chatting with friends (but don’t expect anything to come out of it)

- Dancing classes (this is especially great because you get the physical touch component)

- Regular coffee/dinner dates (1-2 per week) with a friend, coworker or relative.

- Going for a walk and talking to a random stranger

- Singing in a choir or similar hobbies

- Going to pubquizzes or free to join community walks

- Commuting to the office instead of doing home office.

5. I won‘t argue against your psychiatrist, but I find that medication is only useful in a minority of cases. Both anti depressants and anti anxiety meds can actually reduce your motivation to go out, by mellowing you into a not-great-not-terrible dreamy state.

6. Don‘t start rummaging and contemplating your thoughts when you are lonely. Being lonely makes you weird: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/07/lonely-people-see-th...

I once digged into this database out of curiosity and found incredibly detailed research on many edge cases. Like time zones in Germany being temporarily aligned to Moscow during soviet occupancy after World War Two.

One particular commenter stood out to me, so I looked him up because I was interested which kind of people spend so much time correcting timezone information.

Turns out he was an astrologer and wanted his astrology-program to work perfectly correct.

I find it funny that we have to thank astrology for the correct calculations in our banking software :).

> Almost no one is shopping multiple supermarkets, buying cheaper alternatives, buying in-season veggies and fruit when it’s cheap, waiting for sales to stock up, buying in bulk and freezing, using coupons, meal planning based on the latest supermarket Sunday circular, etc. only a tiny minority of people have been doing so.

I don‘t know where this observation comes from, but here in Austria a majority of people in lower income sectors than IT do all of this?

This is the real URL https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000310374/suchtexperte-...

For some reason HN changes the URL in the submission.

In the book „the design of everyday things“ it is mentioned that „natural mappings“ exist. Moving the knob of a vertical slider to the upper end universally means „brighter“ or „louder“, not „less bright“ or „more silent“.

There are people who can actually separate their self-esteem from the winning of arguments ;).

But thanks.

Interesting experiment, this disproves my point, thank you.

While technically possible, it is a very unusual situation that the car is already parked at the car wash, while the owner is somewhere else.

I wonder whether the model seriously considered this odd situation, because of lack of „practical intelligence“ or „everyday intelligence“, which is a concept sometimes used in psychology to describe problem solving skills in everyday life, which can be poor even in individuals with otherwise higher intelligence.

Differently put: „You can‘t learn everything out of a book.“

I read somewhere that Google will ultimately always produce the best LLMs, since "good AI" relies on massive amounts of data and Google owns the most data.

Is that a based assumption?

The 555 is a versatile little thing. I used it at university for a simple circuit which allowed an arduino to cut it’s own power for 5 minutes and then boot again.

They probably won‘t. I recently watched a talk (in german) with Julia Friedrichs, who wrote a book about millionaires and billionaires and did many interviews with them:

https://www.youtube.com/live/4HpJKPywXqY?si=bb-p558jl_otP25I

In her research she found that many of the ultra-rich people actually have deep/patriotic/nostalgic ties to their home/community and want to invest there. They often use certain tax-evasion measures because everybody else does and she argued that those few ultra-rich people who really just care about minimizing their taxes have already moved everything abroad.

> I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department.

Yes, yes, "agile" everything...

I remember clicking on a perfectly honest button in Azure Dev Ops (Production) and it told me that the button is completed but the actual functionality will be probably delivered in Sprint XY.

That is incidentally one of the many papercuts that are widely accepted in Windows, but never were a problem on a mac.

Don’t try to interact with a windows desktop while it is still booting up. Better to wait for everything to settle down, otherwise apps will constantly snatch away focus and your typing will go into random applications.

LLMs sometimes remind me of american car salesmen. Was the hopeful "anything is possible" mentality of the american dream accidentally baked into the larger models?