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grumbelbart

104 karma · joined February 25, 2017

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grumbelbart··on UTF-8000: Unlimited UTF-8
The point is probably to encode the emoji (image) in the codepoint itself.
grumbelbart··on The Einstein-Szilard Refrigerator (2020)
Get one with an inverter compressor, they are very quiet. They have a compressor that can be run at varying power levels, so instead of having one that goes of noisy at 100%, then sits off for a while, you have one that runs for example at 10% most of the time.
grumbelbart··on Claude Fable 5
It's bad. I believe them not to use it for training, but t means relevant data can and will be exfiltrated by US agencies or through court orders (see NY Times vs. OpenAI, where only traffic without any rentention was safe).
grumbelbart··on Claude for Small Business
Of course, should it be as cost efficient as claimed and if you don't use it but everybody else does, you might be pushed out of the market.
grumbelbart··on Eka’s robotic claw feels like we're approaching a ChatGPT moment
Agreed. The solution will likely be some vision foundation model that directly sends controls to the robot ("move here, grab, move there"), trained by Amazon with RL to integrate collision avoidance, object detection, grasping point detection, grasp verification etc.
grumbelbart··on Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
> But electricity is under half (30%?40%?) and the rest of that energy isn't fossil-free.

The trick of course is that if you electrify heating and transportation they'll need much less energy. Your average car with an ICE has an efficiency of 20-40%, electric cars have 60-80%. Heating your house with gas has an efficiency of around 100%, heat pumps have 300%-500%.

grumbelbart··on Great at gaming? US air traffic control wants you to apply
> If you were to design an entire ATC system from scratch (pilot interfaces, sensors everywhere in the airport and planes etc) it can be automated.

Even then you'll probably run into the long-tail distribution issues, similar to self-driving cars. 99.9% of all situations are pretty standard, but once in a while something so abstruse happens that it's not pre-programmed and requires some creativity to solve.

> What you can probably do is create software which observes traffic and simulates it into the future and notifies the human ATCs about risks.

Fully agree. Some of the recent close calls really were "obvious" much earlier, meaning they were not caused by late course changes.

grumbelbart··on Embarrassingly simple self-distillation improves code generation
Is this some kind of calibration then? I'd expect that the probabilities automatically adjust during training, such that in "lock" mode, for example, syntax-breaking tokens have a very low probability and would not be picked even wich higher temperature.
grumbelbart··on German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad
I'm reasonably sure Russia would take you.
grumbelbart··on Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit
Would using an actors face and voice as training data be fair use?

What it the model then creates a virtual actor that is very close to the real actor?

grumbelbart··on App that shows real-time lightning on Earth is showing bombings in Middle East
The data behind the app is pretty solid, but lightningmaps.org has a much better visualization (based on the same data).
grumbelbart··on So you want to build a tunnel
I use them as cheap-man's VPN. A ssh server on a public IP but a non-obvious port brings you into the network, and port forwarding allows you to connect to relevant endpoints in your remote network via localhost:12345.
grumbelbart··on Improving 15 LLMs at Coding in One Afternoon. Only the Harness Changed
> My Weird Hill is that we should be building things with GPT-4.

Absolutely. I always advocate that our developers have to test on older / slower machines. That gives them direct (painful) feedback when things run slow. Optimizing whatever you build for an older "something" (LLM model, hardware) will make it excel on more modern somethings.

grumbelbart··on The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory
Putting sulfur into the right layers of the atmosphere seems to be the currently best viable options. It's not overly expensive, either. It acts fast and is reversible.

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

grumbelbart··on The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory
The low prices of solar and batteries are a glimmer of hope. For many regions it's now the cheapest source of electricity.
grumbelbart··on Mathematicians disagree on the essential structure of the complex numbers (2024)
They would never be the same. It's just that everything still works the same if you switch out every i with -i (and thus every -i with i).
grumbelbart··on Mathematicians disagree on the essential structure of the complex numbers (2024)
> Is this the shadow of something natural that we just couldn't see, or just a convenience?

They originally arose as tool, but complex numbers are fundamental to quantum physics. The wave function is complex, the Schrödinger equation does not make sense without them. They are the best description of reality we have.

grumbelbart··on In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels
The thing is that your home's heatpump has an efficiency of 300%-500%. So even if your power plant and power delivery only has say 50% gas-to-electricity-at-home, you are still looking at 150%-250% gas-to-heat-your-house efficiency.
grumbelbart··on In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels
Exactly. It is in general (much) more efficient to burn natural gas in a power plant and use the electricity for heatpumps compared to simply burning gas at home for heating.
grumbelbart··on There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout
Would that help against a man in the middle that blocks the H3 traffic to snoop the URL when the client falls back to H2?
grumbelbart··on Five Years of Tinygrad
> The "Elon process" relies specifically to the goal of getting rid of all dependencies. Musk has spoken extensively about building things from the ground up and not relying on other vendors (in this example complex software dependencies). He says he wouldn't be able to build SpaceX competitively if he had just bought rockets or components.

That I cannot believe. He might have shifted the make-or-buy decisions, but both Tesla and SpaceX do a lot of outsourcing.

grumbelbart··on Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert
Stupid question, but is 404 the real designator of that city, or a pun towards the HTTP error code?

Edit: And what a great read, thank you!

grumbelbart··on Memory Safety
Can you say what hardware could do better? I.e. which kind of primitives do you miss, or would make it easier to develop safer software?
grumbelbart··on NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cut
Lightning detection. You have a couple of ground stations with known positions that wait for certain electromagnetic puses, and which record the timestamps of such pulses. With enough stations you can triangulate the location of the source of each pulse. Also a great way to detect nuclear detonations.

There is a german club that builds and distrubutes such stations (using GPS for location and timing), with a quite impressive global coverage by now:

https://www.blitzortung.org

grumbelbart··on Backing up Spotify
Someone compiled a list of blocked domains (by probing different DNS servers):

https://cuiiliste.de/

This is also how, for example, RT is blocked in Germany.

grumbelbart··on Writing a good Claude.md
Here: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-pract...

claude.md seems to be important enough to be their very first point in that document.

grumbelbart··on Always be ready to leave (even if you never do)
> In many European countries this can even reduce the usually robust protections you have as an employee.

Huh, where?

grumbelbart··on Largest Mass Resignation in US History as 100k Federal Workers Quit
> the federal workforce excluding the postal service (which has actually shrunk, as a semi-private employer) has grown by about 1% per year since 2000

That's less than it seems though, given that the US population has grown with over 0.7% per year for most of those years.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...

grumbelbart··on New records on Wendelstein 7-X
Mandatory: We should build it in space and beam the electricity back to earth using electromagnetic waves. We could collect those using solar cells. And then get rid of the plant and use the sun instead.
grumbelbart··on My first verified imperative program
Long-term this would be done using LLMs. It would also solve LLMs' code quality issues - they could simply proof that the code works right.
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