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herdcall

351 karma · joined January 17, 2011

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herdcall··on Pandoc
I actually found more control in writing complex formulas and scientific notation with MD and then using pandoc to convert than with Word directly. Also, it's almost magical how pandoc does the conversion: fast, accurate, and without fuss.
herdcall··on Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]
In what way is he awesome? His primary job was to improve Google Cloud's market share and it isn't any better as far as I can see, perhaps worse as Azure has increased the lead.
herdcall··on The Rust project has a burnout problem
Not sure if this is Rust specific though; if anything Rust is easier to review because the compiler takes care of a large class of problems like use-after-free or race conditions. You let the compiler do the "review" on your behalf on most common issues and mainly focus on logic errors, which makes life much easier IMO for the reviewer.
herdcall··on Firefox Sync actually works
You know what, you could be onto something. I'm using the Firefox Developer version (122.0b3 64 bit). In any case, how are the differences resolved? E.g., in my recent case, all the devices ended up with only a handful of passwords (17), whereas the Linux laptop had 858. When I brought that laptop online (after exporting them), it synced and also ended up with the 17. I wonder what the logic was to deduce that the 17 are the ones to keep and the 858 should be deleted (there are some common ones of course). Because after sync when I imported the 858 back, it kept them all and synced them to all other devices, so it considered them as additions that should be kept.
herdcall··on Firefox Sync actually works
Yes, it just works; but a few days back all my devices suddenly lost almost all of the passwords. Not all but most of them, couldn't make out any pattern or reason. Luckily a Linux laptop that I don't usually use had the full set and I had to export them, sync, and import them back to restore everywhere. Very scary, any ideas why this could've happened? I immediately backed up for the future, but this kind of loss should not be happening.
herdcall··on Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger
How is/was Figma so superior to XD exactly? I used to work with XD and briefly also used Figma, but never really liked it (seemed like a crude version of XD in a way), so never understood all the Figma rage. Genuine question, not challenging the view at all. The only pluses I saw for Figma over XD were that it was perhaps easier to collaborate and didn't need installation (because it is web based).
herdcall··on Intermittent fasting more effective than calorie restriction
I don't believe it's as simple as what's the net -ve because with TRE the BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) does not reduce like with calorie restricted eating, so the net -ve is higher with TRE even when the calorie intake is the same. Also, reducing the BMR has other negative effects because the body does away with key repairing processes to live with the reduced availability of energy.
herdcall··on Analyzing Data 170,000x Faster with Python
This seems like a meaningless claim because the core parts of both itertools and pandas libraries used here are written in C, unless I'm missing some context here.
herdcall··on Rattled U.S. government fears wars could spread
You can have bad foreign actors and have bad local actors, both can be true at the same time. My concern is that we (US) aren't doing enough to seek peace as the world leader with clout and acting not too different than the other jerks. Over a hundred thousand people, mostly young with full lives ahead of them, have reportedly died in the Ukraine war so far...for what? So we can stick it to Putin? Listen to Lindsey Graham who now wants to have a war with pretty much the entire world or to the Biden administration that is now seeking $100 billion, $60 billion of which is for Ukraine.
herdcall··on Rattled U.S. government fears wars could spread
The situation is made worse by warmongers from both parties in congress providing seemingly endless flow of funds, with no concern for loss of life as long as it is not American and hurts them politically.
herdcall··on Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users
Yeah, I've been using all kinds of browsers (Chrome, Brave, Edge, now Firefox) on Windows old and new (now on 11), never had any real issues. I don't even remember nudges to use Edge, to be honest, may be there was one after an OS update. Edge is actually really good now, with tight Bing chat integration, but the last dev version has been sluggish on occasion.
herdcall··on Infrequently Asked Questions in Comp.lang.c (1999)
These don't look like "stupid questions" at all, but the disdainful smart aleck responders do look stupid. What a sad, toxic group of people.
herdcall··on You probably don’t need to fine-tune an LLM
We're using LLMs (OpenAI) to generate SQL queries to search customer data, and the current approach using chat API frequently generates queries using the wrong record/column names. I'm exploring use of fine tuning to improve accuracy on a customer/customer basis to train on their set of data, isn't that a good use case?
herdcall··on Perhaps it’s time to sideline the internet when evaluating collective reality
The problem is not so much that a minority sets the agenda, but that a majority falls for it. I see outrageous flat-out lies that otherwise intelligent folks consume without questioning.
herdcall··on Green vs. brown programming languages (2021)
I think it's much simpler than all this: we prefer newer languages (or most newer anything really) because we haven't seen the warts yet or we just want change. Like they say: familiarity breeds contempt.
herdcall··on Ocean Heat Record Broken
I don't get this figure: how can the average temperature be higher than that of all the years? If this is a model prediction, it's extremely misleading. And if each gray line represents a year, we can't tell if there is a steady increase year/year, all we see are clusters for different years. Also, it seems having wide fluctuations is not uncommon: I see a +2.6 degree increase in 2015. Climate changes can be serious, but it's hard to get straight facts anymore, it seems.
herdcall··on How is ChatGPT's behavior changing over time?
My guess is that for most folks good at math => you're smart, so the most obvious way to test an LLM is to ask it a math question, which is trivial to construct. Another motivation IMO is that asking a relatively simple math question and seeing an LLM fall flat kind of makes many to feel good about themselves and gives them a chance to show it off on social media.
herdcall··on Official Chrome extension to use iCloud Keychain Passwords
I've been using this with Microsoft Edge on Windows, this is so very useful. It does have autofill on the browser, but for some reason it keeps asking for password if you want to directly open it to add a password or look up something.
herdcall··on India's Chandrayaan-3 launches to explore moons water rich South Pole
Congrats to India on the successful launch, you can't underestimate how inspiring and source of pride this would be to Indians, especially the young aspiring technologists. Having said that, the hard part is in the landing though, which happens only mid next month.
herdcall··on Threads is already giving brands more engagement than Twitter
Not as big an accomplishment as you say IMO because Threads is just an add-on to a fully functional Instagram app that has 2.3+ BILLION users, it's not an independent app by any means. So yeah, not that hard to keep it from crashing.
herdcall··on Twitter blocks links to Threads, while CEO downplays reports of traffic decline
I think the jury is out on whether it is really "ascending." Getting a few hundred million out of billions of installed users try out a new extension doesn't mean much. What would be impressive if they can sustain the engagement, and we won't that for some time.
herdcall··on Twitter blocks links to Threads, while CEO downplays reports of traffic decline
Twitter is not dying.
herdcall··on [dead]
Some people are reporting that Instagram is down. I don't use Instagram, can others confirm if this is related to the new Threads launch? A bit of a face plant though after claiming to be "sanely run."
herdcall··on Texas professor failed half of class after ChatGPT claimed it wrote their papers
It's worse: he didn't even know its name, thought it is called ChatGTP.
herdcall··on Google shared AI knowledge with the world – until ChatGPT caught up
Most believe ChatGPT didn't just catch up but overtook...a while back.
herdcall··on Google’s cloud business turns profitable for the first time on record
They got the profit after they changed the way losses are recorded though, not sure if it really shows improvement: "cloud unit had a $186 million operating loss in the fourth quarter, compared with $480 million before the change."
herdcall··on Al Jaffee, king of the Mad Magazine fold-in, has died
I used to love Mad writers, each so different and brilliant in their own way...Al Jaffee was no exception.
herdcall··on Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI
Multi language support is just one of the selling points, you didn't mention the other two: sandboxed security with explicit capabilities and high performance. E.g., I have a Web Assembly module running on the server (Fermyon) that needs explicit capabilities defined to even make a network call to a Twilio endpoint or read a local file. That means you can run a random Web Assembly module that you with confidence, just like you can typically open a random website on the browser without concern. By contast, you can't say that when running a random Java class that you don't trust.
herdcall··on Stanford’s Alpaca shows that OpenAI may have a problem
Looks like it's already offline? https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/21/stanford_ai_alpaca_ta...
herdcall··on [dead]
This article leaves out key details: it doesn't say what the distribution of the people arrested is, it only talks of how many died. What does "Assuming constant demographic profiles over the period considered, Black people are 6.4 times more likely to die..." mean? Is the assumption that the distribution of the general population is the same as those arrested? How can you assume that without actual numbers? Also, how is 6.4 times rounded to 7? Articles like this do a disservice because they're more about clickbait by inflaming the passions and dividing people than addressing what is likely a genuine problem in how black offenders are treated.
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