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nrub

127 karma · joined September 25, 2009

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nrub··on I hate you Microsoft
I think this overlooks the full picture. It's not about the this one pin prick relating to their license. It's that working with Microsoft in any capacity is filled with paper cuts like this, annoyances, bad design, and overt errors. Every single day.

They're a User hostile company and they make a buck by doing just enough to convince non-experts to keep their enterprise licenses.

nrub··on Qwen 3.8 27B available on Cerebras at 1500 tokens/s
This is exactly what Taalas has already done, and the reason they got quickly acquired by AMD. Their chip runs Llama 3.1 8B at 17k tok/s, and even if llama 3.1 is dated, I can think of many problems I could use it for, especially at those speeds. They're certain to be working on a newer set of weights by now.
nrub··on Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2
Right, but the point is that you can't conclude that a model is necessarily bad because it's not hitting the same scores on benchmarks. I just don't agree with lacker's conclusion, because their logic doesn't seem to consider that. Scoring lower on a benchmark doesn't strictly mean they have a bad model, but it may be the case. Like you said it's one data point, but being the easiest, and obviously most gamed, means you should probably weigh them less heavily.
nrub··on Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2
Or they spent time optimizing their model to real world problems they're facing and didn't waste time trying to game a benchmark.
nrub··on Hands-On with the AMD Ryzen AI Halo
That's true, but that's just one model that has some easier setup in the ecosystem. It's not easy to get a consumer gpu that has 128Gb of vram, so while the Halo chip isn't as performant, the ceiling for running larger models is higher.
nrub··on Write code like a human will maintain it
In opencode you can get granular, allow `git log *`, deny `git add *` and `git commit *`
nrub··on Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents
> simple chart specs can be reliable, but generated charts are often of low quality due to reliance on system defaults; - complex chart specs with explicit details can produce good-looking charts, but they are verbose and agents can struggle with reliability

N of only a few of us working on an analytics agent, I don't think we've been finding this to be the case. We've been impressed with just how good LLMs (even smaller open weight models) are at using Python and R for visualization. Often any shortcomings go away if we iterate a bit to about ambiguity. Are there any threads of research that could better support this claim or highlight where issues might be?

nrub··on Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
Just because they don't know how to use a computer well, doesn't mean you can't teach them.
nrub··on CISA Admin Leaked AWS GovCloud Keys on GitHub
I no longer keep my dotenv files in plaintext. I use `sops` to keep an encrypted env around and you can use tools like direnv to make them available to your shell while you're working. Obviously the LLM could print any of these secrets, but it's less likely. Additionally I find that at least claude seems to avoid reading the dotenv. And lastly, don't make any local secrets that important. Limited scope, dev accounts, etc.
nrub··on If AI writes your code, why use Python?
No, they're not there. Did you read my comment? It's not just flawed or limited implementation, those are things that python just doesn't have.
nrub··on If AI writes your code, why use Python?
Yeah, that's cool, but it would be almost completely unnecessary if python just had actual private methods/classes/properties. It's a lot like pydantic, which is completely unnecessary if you had strong typing.
nrub··on If AI writes your code, why use Python?
Yes, but: a) they're a second class citizen, not guaranteed to be used in whatever niche of the python ecosystem you find yourself in and there's already an n+1 problem with multiple type checker written by third parties, rather than having 1st class language support tool that's consistent. You're not going to get it by default, you're usually going to have to do some configuration (and maybe bike shedding) to get it working; b) they completely negate the idea of python being "easy to read", your code is now littered with `if TYPE_CHECKING:`, `Literal`, `TypeAliasType` and any number of workarounds needed to make your hints work out. Unfortunately the syntax was just not designed with typing in mind, and I think it shows; c) the idea of "hinting" rather than enforced type checking means you have no guarantees that a type is what you need it to be, you have to do a lot of boundary work to make sure the edges of your code are coercing things to the right type. While I love pydantic and find it to be an excellent library, to me it's the kind of code smell you get in languages without strong typing. Also you're going to get a lot of spurious type errors along this path as well;

I will gladly use python's type hints, it's a whole lot better than nothing (IMHO better than typescript), but in it's current form it will always fall short of a language that was designed with strong typing in mind.

nrub··on If AI writes your code, why use Python?
You joking?

- strong typing - real concurrency (heaven forbid you want a background task without having to spool up an external message queue and worker) - immutability - limitations in error handling (sort of just typing really) - limitations in nullability (also typing) - memory layout is usually hidden or abstracted away - no actual private methods or classes

That's far from a complete list, but maybe you're taking for granted the typical pythonic conventions that many practice. It requires a ton of work to design and architect python systems of any non-trivial size for maintainability and understanding. No language is perfect, but there are plenty of languages that make supporting complex systems easier than python.

nrub··on Bring Your Agent to Teams
You have literal Stockholm syndrome. Not joking.
nrub··on Results (Don't) Speak for Themselves: A Case for Documentation
RCA with FM radio, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Howard_Armstrong
nrub··on Devin: AI Software Engineer
I've seen a few suspect benchmarks for recent announcements of LLM releases. I'm sure they made an attempt at an honest benchmark, but until there's an independent assessment and benchmark (preferably multiple) you have to assume that there's bias in anyone's self published benchmarks like this.

I'm guessing it's a fine-tuning of some existing LLM model or API, but this largely seems to be an "agent" and UI that includes some SWE like workflow coding to allow more complex requests to be asked than just an LLM could provide.

nrub··on Where is Noether's principle in machine learning?
There are promising methods developing for Physic's informed neural networks. Mathematical models can be integrated into the architecture of neural networks such that the parameters of the designed mathematical models can be learned. Examples include learning the frequency of a swinging pendulum from video, amongst more advanced ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics-informed_neural_networ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoFW2uSd3Uo

nrub··on Going beyond ‘do you know of any open positions?’
Do what you want with some of those tips, maybe not necessarily good advice. But if you're searching, try these search queries replacing `%s` with your desired role(s):

``` search_strings = [ 'site:boards.greenhouse.io %s', 'site:jobs.smartrecruiters.com %s', 'site:jobs.lever.co %s', 'site:.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com %s', 'site:icims.com inurl:jobs %s', 'site:careers.peopleclick.com %s', 'site:apply.workable.com %s', 'site:jobs.workable.com %s', 'site:apply.workable.com %s', 'site:.taleo.net %s', ] ```

Most of those ATS systems are super annoying. I actually give preference to employers using more modern systems that have up to date user experiences, but regardless, it doesn't hurt to scrape and search all the big ATS players.

nrub··on Executable Examples in Go
Yup
nrub··on Plotting the source code “TODO” history of the most popular open source projects
One option if you're on github, https://github.com/marketplace/actions/todo-to-issue
nrub··on Evolution Is the New Deep Learning
The paper linked above does directly address the case of multiple experiments occurring in the same context. They address this with hill-climbing over those 180 different variations. The use of a bayesian linear regression takes place of the exploration found with Thompson sampling.
nrub··on Prodigy: A new tool for radically efficient machine teaching
They have some hard comparisons in some of their earlier blog posts on how spacy compares to the other popular open source NLP libraries. In my experience it has been much easier to use and faster than things like Stanford's library or NLTK. In general it's aimed at production or commercial use, whereas the other libraries I typically hear mentioned are aimed at a more academic audience.
nrub··on Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor
Have you used paredit-mode in emacs with a lisp dialect? Getting proficient with this mode can be a lot like what you describe. Paredit let's you navigate and edit the tree structure of lisp code pretty effectively. It's not inherently a modal paradigm, but I used it evil-mode successfully. I'd imagine what you describe could be a refinement on that technique. Lisp lends itself well to this type of editing due to it's lack of syntax. Other languages are more difficult.
nrub··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2016)
Artemis Health | Product/Data/Engineering Roles | Salt Lake City, UT | ONSITE, Full Time | https://artemishealth.com

We build analytics and visualization tools for self-insured companies. We're funded, have had great growth, and we've got several open positions that we're hiring for including: - Data Pipeline Manager - Data Quality Analyst - Data Pipeline Engineer - ETL Engineer - Software Engineer in Testing - Frontend Engineer

Our frontend and API stack is built with Angular, Django, and Django Rest Framework, and some Rust. We're using MySQL and Redshift for the operational and analytics databases respectively.

With our backend and pipeline we use some traditional ETL tooling (Pentaho, Kettle) and have started building out the more complex aspects of our pipeline with the JVM and Kotlin, in addtion to some various python scripts. Again using MySQL and Redshift databases.

Feel free to message me paul at artemishealth.com, and have a look at the open positions: http://artemis-health.breezy.hr/#positions

nrub··on Finding Similar Music Using Matrix Factorization
PageRank is analogous to this type of music discovery if you created a graph based on artists who have collaborated together. It'd be about the same as having a teleportation vector that always restarts the random walk back at the artist you're wanting to explore around.
nrub··on Improving Angular performance with 1 line of code
Looks like it's the first suggestion in their production developer guide, https://docs.angularjs.org/guide/production
nrub··on Amazon Provides DIY Echo Plans for Raspberry Pi
I think part of the terms for the Alexa voice service forbid auto-listening.
nrub··on The Bad News About the News
I don't know if that's what he's referring to, but I will comment that KSL is a pain. It's a bloated error filled site, and I really wish the local communities would stick to CL.
nrub··on Is gogs dead?
A month of inactivity and an issue that is 12 days old, and someone is trying to fork the project under a new name?

Seems kind of fickle and impatient. Gogs is a great project, and that thread doesn't seem to imply that it's dead only on a brief hiatus. If development resumes will the new fork merge back in, or will it try to compete?

nrub··on Learn Physics by Programming in Haskell [pdf]
Additionally by Sussman is Functional Differential Geometry. This builds on work from SICM and delves into ideas of Relativity.
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