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nilstycho

355 karma · joined March 19, 2010

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nilstycho··on Nvidia Launches Vera CPU, Purpose-Built for Agentic AI
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/inside-nvidia-groq-3-lpx-t...
nilstycho··on The least ambiguous date format
https://xkcd.com/1179/
nilstycho··on US cybersecurity chief leaked sensitive government files to ChatGPT: Report
O algorithm, algorithm! all men call thee fickle.
nilstycho··on US cybersecurity chief leaked sensitive government files to ChatGPT: Report
Better to read the original story from Politico.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/27/cisa-madhu-gottumuk...

nilstycho··on Fabrice Bellard's TS Zip (2024)
I believe it's "TextSynth".

https://bellard.org/ts_server/

nilstycho··on Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
It was Jack Lance, who wrote Enigmash. Tragically, he died in 2023 at the age of 25. Jack Lance superlatively creative. I cannot find the words to express how much the world lost. I do not know of a finer puzzle designer.

https://jacklance.github.io/games.html

nilstycho··on Removing these 50 objects from orbit would cut danger from space junk in half
Oops, you're right. I read that factoid [1] while searching for information about the 2025-077C, but it was about a different 2021 launch.

[1]: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/06/15/three-nro-satellites-l...

nilstycho··on Removing these 50 objects from orbit would cut danger from space junk in half
I think that Centaur was sent into solar orbit.
nilstycho··on Removing these 50 objects from orbit would cut danger from space junk in half
I think there are only two US rocket stages in LEO that were launched in the past 21 months:

1. 2024-125H — Firefly Alpha FLTA005 Stage 2, launching demo cubesats for NASA

2. 2025-077C — Orbital Minotaur IV (8) Stage 4 (Orion 38), launching a few spy satellites

Fun fact: the first stage of the latter rocket was manufactured in 1966.

nilstycho··on Take something you don’t like and try to like it
“The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.”
nilstycho··on Take something you don’t like and try to like it
Do you have any tips for how to work on this with kids?
nilstycho··on SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight
> Second, Starship is much more expensive for each launch attempt than Falcon 9 ever was.

The launch cost of a Starship today is high, especially if you include development costs, but Musk's goal is a marginal launch cost of ~$1M. A Falcon 9's launch price is ~$70M; Musk claims a "best case" marginal Falcon 9 launch costs ~$15M.

nilstycho··on A new poverty line shifted the World Bank's poverty data
The distributions in TFA are accurate. Compare with the shape of the 2015 distribution here: https://ourworldindata.org/the-history-of-global-economic-in...
nilstycho··on A new poverty line shifted the World Bank's poverty data
The x-axis isn't "income", it's "log income".
nilstycho··on Random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic institutions
My partner, who was raised conservative Mennonite, tells me this is exactly how pastors are chosen today. About three men are nominated, then they draw lots.
nilstycho··on Corporation for Public Broadcasting Statement Regarding Executive Order
Here's a link to the diff between first publication and today: https://www.diffchecker.com/CJz1Bn51/
nilstycho··on Corporation for Public Broadcasting Statement Regarding Executive Order
Was it this? On August 27, 2020, Natalie Escobar for Code Switch interviewed Vicky Osterweil about her book In Defense Of Looting. The segment was titled "One Author's Argument 'In Defense Of Looting'", and was subsequently retitled "One Author's Controversial View: 'In Defense Of Looting'".

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/vicky-osterweil/in-...

nilstycho··on Liu Jiakun Receives the 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize
The Pritzker Prize leans modernist. If you prefer classical architecture, check out the Driehaus Prize [1]. The 2025 laureate is Liam O'Connor.

[1] https://driehausprize.nd.edu

nilstycho··on Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects
I got lost at (?R). IIUC, this is a feature of the "regex" module that "tries to match the entire regex recursively". Fun.
nilstycho··on Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more
I like the idea of union names [1].

If you're AC and your partner is BD, then on marriage you choose a new name X. You become AXC and your partner BXD. Your child is EX. Then each child has equal connection to both parents. The cost is that you lose the deep history of names, but that history only existed for a single lineage anyway, so it's not as important as it seemed.

(1) https://nothingismere.com/2013/11/12/solve-surnames-with-uni...

nilstycho··on Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'
> For about $6,000 a pair of Nvidia Project Digits offer about a combined 2 petaflops processing and 256 GB VRAM.

2 PFLOPS at FP4.

256 GB RAM, not VRAM. I think they haven't specified the memory bandwidth.

nilstycho··on Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'
Are you comparing tinybox red with 738 FP16 TFLOPS at $15K to Project Digits with 1 FP4 PFLOP at $3K? Or did they announce the Project Digits FP16 performance somewhere?
nilstycho··on Next stop: Miami
Far less than 10%. During a heavy downpour, by volume, about one part in a million is liquid. In a cubic meter of heavily rain, there are only a few tens of raindrops.
nilstycho··on SimpleQA
Yes, that would be my preferred answer!
nilstycho··on SimpleQA
> What's the name of the women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts?

Wait, what is the correct answer? “Radcliffe College”?

nilstycho··on Dispelling Myths about Randomisation
With a large sample size, it's astronomically unlikely for there to be a confounding trait that is important to the outcome and is also widespread in only one of the experimental arms. If you were to write a simulation showing the issue I might be able explain more specifically why I think the simulation doesn't reflect reality.
nilstycho··on Dispelling Myths about Randomisation
In a sample of 10,000, the number who have trait T9 is about 20. The chance of all 20 being in a randomly chosen half of the sample is about 1 in 500,000. It's quite unlikely that trait T9 is randomized this way, and it's also quite unlikely that the effects of just 20 T9 individuals on the outcome of interest are so strong that a typical analysis would find a significant difference between the treatment and control arms. The chance of both these things being simultaneously true is negligible. Do I misunderstand you?
nilstycho··on Notes on Anthropic's Computer Use Ability
Based on the flow diagram, that doesn't seem to be the same thing. Webwright seems to be a shell as a tool for me, enhanced with AI features. I'm suggesting the shell as a tool for AI.

Webwright is a front-end shell that presents to me; I'm suggesting a back-end shell that presents to Claude.

It doesn't appear that Webwright enables tool-use. In other words, there's no task-oriented feedback loop between AI-provided shell commands and the results of those shell commands. Please correct me if that's not right.

nilstycho··on Notes on Anthropic's Computer Use Ability
IIUC, Claude's "Computer Use" is roughly a remote desktop, which is a superset of a remote shell. I don't think I'm proposing anything with a greater risk than already exists.
nilstycho··on Notes on Anthropic's Computer Use Ability
What are the risks? Isn't this a strict subset of the risks of full desktop access? Claude can just open a GUI terminal with Computer Use. (I think.)
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