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modulus1

120 karma · joined September 21, 2013

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modulus1··on Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes
I agree w/ this perspective. An agent with a harness that can run programs can solve a lot more than one without the harness. The AI system includes the harness, and it's not clear to me that AGI requires more than LLMs + code generation & execution are capable of.
modulus1··on C++ to Rust Phrasebook
And they even made the C++ version more verbose than it should have been. Most people would write:

class Person { int age = 0; };

I wish rust would make default struct field values this easy to write.

modulus1··on The DOJ still wants Google to sell off Chrome
MS and Apple have the same thing, they're just less successful. Just a browser and an OS was previously seen as antitrust (and it looks like MS is being anti-competitive in this space still). Just a browser and a search engine can allow anti-competitive behavior. Or just a search engine and an ads platform...

The problem is the anti-competitive behavior. Businesses are generally rational actors, so clearly our system isn't working. It's unclear what the boundaries are until years in court, and even then it only applies to a single company.

modulus1··on The DOJ still wants Google to sell off Chrome
A company owning a web browser isn't the problem. A company owning a web browser, OS and search engine shouldn't be a problem either. I don't know why the remedy can't actually address the problem, and the DOJ can't move more quickly to address antitrust across the industry. This feels like randomly cutting a baby in half, while the rest of the thieves, even those in the same family, are not deterred.
modulus1··on Show HN: ZSV (Zip Separated Values) columnar data format
Can't store tabs or newlines, odd choice.
modulus1··on Rep and Ren: A new approach to CLI find, replace, and renaming
If you could pipe the ripgrep output into an editor, make changes, and have them applied, that would be great. Once you get all the text you want to change in one buffer, it should be easy to make repetitive changes quickly in your editor of choice.
modulus1··on Chrome client “variations” can be used to identify you (2020)
The author talks as if this isn't documented... https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.htm...

> Additionally, a subset of low entropy variations are included in network requests sent to Google. The combined state of these variations is non-identifying, since it is based on a 13-bit low entropy value (see above).

modulus1··on Are top websites using WebGL for fingerprinting?
Author doesn't actually know what this information is being used for. Sure there can be a discussion about whether this information should be recorded at all (say, to determine if your site doesn't work on certain hardware), but claiming it _is_ fingerprinting is baseless.
modulus1··on Super Smash Bros. Melee: An “Untouchable” Agent
Thanks, the video link in the pdf doesn't work, but the one here does: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B9SX5ANPyMzTNWgtMzdq...
modulus1··on How the GDPR Will Disrupt Google and Facebook
Does it say they can't nag users relentlessly until they click 'accept'?
modulus1··on Atom 1.6 Released with Pending Pane Items, Async Git and Top and Bottom Bar API
Lack of MRU tab switching and preview tabs are two reasons I haven't switched from sublime. Glad they are listening to requests.
modulus1··on C++ 11 Auto: How to use and avoid abuse
> [](a,b){ ... }

Is valid if a and b are types.

modulus1··on Will Bond (Package Control) Joins Sublime HQ
> It probably also helps that extending Atom is much more approachable given that it's all Javascript...

I've heard this said before, I've had the opposite experience. ST offers a small api and it was easy for me to make something work with a single .py file. I gave up trying the same thing in Atom; the api is larger and lower-level. Admission: I don't know coffeescript.

ST of course isn't nearly as flexible, there are many things you just can't do.

modulus1··on Hillary Clinton emails declared 'top secret' by State Dept
No high ranking USG official should be using insecure communication channels, as it will inevitably lead to leaks that could damage the state (secret information).

What Clinton did was dumb, but no one should have sent her classified emails in the first place. If the people sending the 'classified' documents were doing it through the right channels, it wouldn't be getting to her email server.

modulus1··on A lightweight C++ signals and slots implementation
Maybe someone can chime in on why the standard library's std::function can't be implemented as efficiently as this library purportedly is.
modulus1··on 1% the Code (2001)
> It's strongly typed, with a bewildering variety of types to keep straight. More errors.

Odd complaint, especially to be levied against C.

modulus1··on P vs. NP: An Assumption That Runs the Internet
> I have yet to see a convincing argument that it's not

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2213858

Don Knuth: As you say, I've come to believe that P = N P, namely that there does exist an integer M and an algorithm that will solve every n-bit problem belonging to the class N P in nM elementary steps. ... My main point, however, is that I don't believe that the equality P = N P will turn out to be helpful even if it is proved, because such a proof will almost surely be nonconstructive. Although I think M probably exists, I also think human beings will never know such a value. I even suspect that nobody will even know an upper bound on M. ... The moral is that people should distinguish between known (or knowable) polynomial-time algorithms and arbitrary polynomial-time algorithms. People might never be able to implement a polynomial-time-worst-case algorithm for satisfiability, even though P happens to equal N P.

modulus1··on P vs. NP: An Assumption That Runs the Internet
This article seems to assume that problems in P are computable no matter the size. If it is shown NP=P, but the best algorithm we have is O(n^100), we still don't have a computer that can actually finish the computation.
modulus1··on The Surprising Power of Neil Sloane’s Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
Too many times I've 'solved' a Project Euler problem like this: 1. Write a program to solve the problem inefficiently. 2. Look up the sequence F(1), F(2), F(3) ... at oeis.org
modulus1··on Useful Techniques in Go
This is one of the trouble spots I have with Go.

Say I have 3 members that must be set, and 5 optional members. Go's solution is to make the 3 critical members private so that someone using this struct will probably figure out they should use a construction function. And doing this means replacing all code that creates my struct with calls to a 'New' function. With all this friction, people aren't likely to do the right thing.

At least in C++ with public members I can initialize appropriately in the constructor. Of course littering my code-base with public members would be bad practice in the first place.

modulus1··on Useful Techniques in Go
'Use tagged literals for struct initializations'... I'd rather the compiler help me make sure i've updated all uses appropriately when I add a new field.
modulus1··on Why Go is doomed to succeed
Go's success has me confused. My team enjoys using Go, but to me it feels like i'm a prisoner. The designer's slavishly followed opinions are laser focused on reducing variation across go codebases. There's definitely less to learn than most languages. Unfortunately, sometimes the blessed way of doing things doesn't work well for your problem and not only are you left with a hammer to cut the wood, but making a saw is outlawed.
modulus1··on How to boost your Vim productivity
Something i've been using more lately is Ctrl-R + Register. Great for inserting text in command mode. For instance, you can do this to insert your recorded macro (if it's in register q) as a norm command: :norm Ctrl-R q
modulus1··on Neovim wants to crowdhire a full-time developer
It's 7500/month for 5 days/week.
modulus1··on Exploring an alternative to git-subtree
This is the #1 problem I have moving from SVN to Git. With SVN, everything is just in one repo. I can atomically commit to multiple related projects. If i split up projects into individual Git repos, everything is suddenly more complicated. Keeping dozens of projects in the same Git repo avoids this problem, but now developers are forced to clone projects they don't use.

I'm a Git novice, maybe managing submodules isn't as bad as it seems to me or the author of this article. What is your experience?

modulus1··on Juno: A free environment for the Julia language
Couldn't get it to work: Couldn't connect to Julia

INFO: Couldn't find Jewel package, attempting installation... ----------------------------------------------- We couldn't install Jewel.jl for you. Try using Pkg.add("Jewel") in a Julia repl.

modulus1··on 3D Object Manipulation in a Single Photograph using Stock 3D Models
And they appear to have some way to fill in the part of the photo occluded by the cut-out objects.
modulus1··on Software performance is counterintuitive
There's a ton of variables feeding into the performance of your software. I've spent a lot of time trying to improve cache coherence, branch mispredictions, etc... with very little to show for it.

Asymptotic complexity is the best place to start. I thank academia for this 'naive' model.

modulus1··on Google Code Jam – Contest scoreboard
I'm always amazed at the speed of these guys. Top guy got it all done in an hour. I don't know if they are geniuses or if they practice this stuff every day.
modulus1··on Is the Universe a Simulation?
Mathematics is like a fractal, given some axioms it explodes into an infinite set of true equations. No one has to observe math for it to exist. I think our universe(s) could be the same way, given some natural laws, or equations, everything we know is defined to take place. Why would there have to be anything 'running' the simulation.
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