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plasticchris

1,824 karma · joined January 17, 2016

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plasticchris··on Undergraduate shows that searches within hash tables can be much faster
search for sparse hash, there are many examples.
plasticchris··on Undergraduate shows that searches within hash tables can be much faster
In memory constrained environments you just make the underlying array a sparse vector, then it can be mostly empty without using much memory at all.
plasticchris··on Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more
Someone with the last name Blank told me their family lore was that the (Ellis island era) immigration paperwork person just gave up.
plasticchris··on Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more
https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/136933/difference-be...
plasticchris··on To buy a Tesla Model 3, only to end up in hell
Look at the statistics over time?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_...

plasticchris··on To buy a Tesla Model 3, only to end up in hell
Backup camera is also required in the USA, along with the seatbelt chimes.
plasticchris··on It sure looks like Meta stole a lot of books to build its AI
Even accepting that, the law should be encouraging creative output by individuals and there is justifiable fear that this will be used to bypass protections designed to reward such behavior.

For a more direct counterexample, I can memorize something and type it back out, but if it is copyrighted the law doesn’t make an exception just because it passed through my head.

plasticchris··on The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job
If the interviewer were better they would instead ask: if no one else on the dev team knows the type system how do you handle that situation?

Which gets at the real risk, maybe valid, that someone super smart who isn’t the best communicator will go and make a bunch of code that no one else in the company can reason about. Maybe you get a really nice explanation of the type system, or they are aware this is an esoteric approach but used it anyway because you said anything goes and it’s cool.

plasticchris··on It sure looks like Meta stole a lot of books to build its AI
Buying a single copy of a work does not grant you a license to duplicate or distribute that work.

So just buying copies wouldn’t have helped them.

plasticchris··on It sure looks like Meta stole a lot of books to build its AI
If we are going to afford models like this treatment equivalent to sentient beings in this regard, why not others? In your extrapolation these ai walking among us are property of giant tech companies…
plasticchris··on Two Hard Things (2009)
I like telling it as 3 hard things: caches and naming things.
plasticchris··on Wildfires are erasing California's climate gains, research shows (2022)
Smoke particles reduce overall solar radiation absorbed by the earth-atmosphere at local and/or regional scales during individual fire events or burning seasons.

Source: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2013.02.020

plasticchris··on Celestial Navigation for Drones
Or in short, the sensors are strapped down to the platform being measured - like your phone’s sensors for example.
plasticchris··on Kalman Filter Tutorial
Only if you can make a linear model of those things…
plasticchris··on Physicists who want to ditch dark energy
Yeah, the best analogy for people that know a little physics is aether - it’s obviously ridiculous now, but there was a time when it filled in some unknowns and people took it seriously. It would be nice if it weren’t presented as fact in tv and planetarium shows, but what can you do?
plasticchris··on Who killed the rave?
A much more plausible take was that the matrix used human brains as coprocessors, credit to (who else?) Neil Gaiman for the idea.
plasticchris··on AMD 'Strix Halo' Ryzen AI Max+ Debuts with RDNA 3.5 Graphics and Zen 5 CPU Cores
Last time I played with it, 70b models are much larger than 24gb without a lot of quantization.
plasticchris··on Justin Trudeau promises to resign as PM
The data set seems to be here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

Not sure what it implies, but there it is.

plasticchris··on The Recursive Book of Recursion
The point was pedagogical, sometimes the “best” explanation just doesn’t work for a student. Some might get confused about where the state of the caller goes and get hung up.
plasticchris··on The largest hydroelectric dam in the world has been approved
Considering transmission losses it might make more sense to dam many smaller rivers. And the Mississippi is an important freight route, a dam would complicate that.
plasticchris··on The Recursive Book of Recursion
Call stacks help form a mental model for some people. It’s a way to help get an initial grip on the topic, one of many. Teaching usually involves many simplified models which in my experience helps a lot with initial understanding.
plasticchris··on An Unreasonable Amount of Time
I imagine he would say to practice is to realize and to realize is to practice.
plasticchris··on The chocolate of the future will have less cocoa or none at all
Always has been. Middlemen eat most of the margin. A bushel of wheat is cheaper than a fancy loaf of bread.
plasticchris··on The chocolate of the future will have less cocoa or none at all
It was used as a sweetener at one time…
plasticchris··on Zen and the Art of Aibo Engineering
That’s true, but the question (minus the robot bit) is a zen koan.
plasticchris··on Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals
Or they inherited a home and can barely afford insurance, taxes, or upkeep on it. So they could afford to live there but couldn’t afford to buy it.
plasticchris··on Facebook's Little Red Book
People like to look at the start of the sigmoid and extrapolate.
plasticchris··on PR process killing morale and productivity
Yeah, that’s what I meant in the first comment :)
plasticchris··on PR process killing morale and productivity
run it in a hook that runs before the commit is made
plasticchris··on PR process killing morale and productivity
That’s why you hook the linter up so it runs on every commit / push. No need to ask, it always runs. And no need to quibble over style. Don’t like it? Change the linter.
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