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rockinghigh

1,141 karma · joined June 15, 2015

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rockinghigh··on Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes
That's not true when tiling the Earth though. You need 12 pentagons to close the shape on every zoom level, you can't tile the Earth with just hexagons. That's also why footballs stitch together pentagons and hexagons.
rockinghigh··on France's homegrown open source online office suite
Instagram uses it as their main backend. They have hundreds of million of daily users. Some of the critical backend services are in C++.
rockinghigh··on Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product
Tariffs were a huge point of debate in his first administration. The government had to pay $30 billion to farmers to offset the impact of tariffs.

> China implemented retaliatory tariffs equivalent to the $34 billion tariff imposed on it by the U.S. In July 2018, the Trump administration announced it would use a Great Depression-era program, the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), to pay farmers up to $12 billion, increasing the transfers to farmers to $ 28 billion in May 2019. The USDA estimated that aid payments constituted more than one-third of total farm income in 2019 and 2020.

rockinghigh··on Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines
That's definitely happening. The US does this through massive government spending on American solutions. The EU is only starting to go that route as well.
rockinghigh··on iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video]
Completely agreed. Apple seriously regressed the multi-lingual experience. They probably have a model per language. If you have to mix languages in a sentence, well, good luck!
rockinghigh··on GPT-5.2
They add new data to the existing base model via continuous pre-training. You save on pre-training, the next token prediction task, but still have to re-run mid and post training stages like context length extension, supervised fine tuning, reinforcement learning, safety alignment ...
rockinghigh··on I ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer
As you suggested, promotions tend to come more slowly. You're also likely to hit a lower ceiling than someone who is better at promoting their work.
rockinghigh··on Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
You should read the transcript. He's including 2025 in the age of scaling.

> Maybe here’s another way to put it. Up until 2020, from 2012 to 2020, it was the age of research. Now, from 2020 to 2025, it was the age of scaling—maybe plus or minus, let’s add error bars to those years—because people say, “This is amazing. You’ve got to scale more. Keep scaling.” The one word: scaling.

> But now the scale is so big. Is the belief really, “Oh, it’s so big, but if you had 100x more, everything would be so different?” It would be different, for sure. But is the belief that if you just 100x the scale, everything would be transformed? I don’t think that’s true. So it’s back to the age of research again, just with big computers.

rockinghigh··on France is taking state actions against GrapheneOS?
France does not reimburse homeopathic treatments anymore. The NHS in the UK went even further, they funded homeopathic hospitals like the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital and reimbursed homeopathy until 2017.
rockinghigh··on Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
Wasn't the original LLaMA developed by FAIR Paris?
rockinghigh··on Leaving Meta and PyTorch
First, the migration to 2.0 in 20219 to add eager mode support was horribly painful. Then, starting around 2.7, backward compatibility kept being broken. Not being able to load previously trained models with a new version of the library is wildly painful.
rockinghigh··on Leaving Meta and PyTorch
https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/data/flowers/
rockinghigh··on From engineer to manager: A practical guide to your first months in leadership
Selling yourself and your work is always a critical skill. That's how you get hired in the first place.
rockinghigh··on Smollm3: Smol, multilingual, long-context reasoner LLM
The vocabulary size is fairly small (128,256) for a multilingual model. I would guess it doesn't require many additional parameters to support these 5 languages as many tokens can be shared.
rockinghigh··on US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU
You don't need much background in Economics to understand that blanket tariffs hurt companies that rely on imports and exports and lead to higher prices. They used an LLM to come up with a formula that's just the trade deficit when you simplify it and called it "tariffs charged to the USA".
rockinghigh··on OpenAI releasing new open model in coming months, seeks community feedback
They could provide access to the training code. It's useful for training smaller models or distilling larger ones. They don't need to release every details involved in tuning the optimization parameters during the pre-training stage.
rockinghigh··on OpenAI releasing new open model in coming months, seeks community feedback
I don't believe OpenAI provides on-premise serving.
rockinghigh··on Tesla created secret team to suppress driving range complaints (2023)
Getting only 30% of the advertised range would be very unlikely unless you always drive uphill and in the cold. I've had a Model 3 and a Model Y, and would get at least 80-85% of the advertised range in average California weather.
rockinghigh··on Uber charges more if you have credits in your account
I worked in the pricing team at the time. There was essentially no personalization. The biggest factors were your current location, where you're going, the time of the day, current demand level around you, and current supply of drivers around you. Promotions were slightly more personalized but battery level was not used.
rockinghigh··on Breaking Down OnlyFans' Economics
Probably a combination of being a subscription model with auto-renewal and people regretting wasting money for this type of content.
rockinghigh··on Study: Air purifier use at daycare centres cut kids' sick days by a third (2023)
> Results showed increasing the CO2 concentration to just 800 ppm, a level identified as well ventilated, resulted in an increase in viral aerostability. After 40 minutes, when compared to clean air, around 10 times as much virus remained infectious when the air has a CO2 concentration similar to that of a crowded room (3,000 ppm).

> Dr Haddrell said: “This relationship sheds important light on why super spreader events may occur under certain conditions. The high pH of exhaled droplets containing the SARS-CoV-2 virus is likely a major driver of the loss of infectiousness. CO2 behaves as an acid when it interacts with droplets. This causes the pH of the droplets to become less alkaline, resulting in the virus within them being inactivated at a slower rate.

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/cabot/news/2024/virus.html

Ambient carbon dioxide concentration correlates with SARS-CoV-2 aerostability and infection risk

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47777-5

rockinghigh··on Mistral NeMo
The SentencePiece library also implements Byte-pair-encoding. That's what the LLaMA models use and the original Mistral models were essentially a copy of LLaMA2.
rockinghigh··on Gene-silencing tool shows promise as a future therapy against prion diseases
The actual paper: Brainwide silencing of prion protein by AAV-mediated delivery of an engineered compact epigenetic editor https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado7082
rockinghigh··on FTC sues Adobe for hiding fees and inhibiting cancellations
I only look at the details every few months and rank by descending amount to focus on high ticket items. I have certainly missed some of these subscriptions that only happen once a year. If you have enough savings, small expenses are not always worth chasing down.
rockinghigh··on FTC sues Adobe for hiding fees and inhibiting cancellations
Canceling SiriusXM is pretty easy via phone. Adobe makes the process confusing to make you believe you canceled even you haven't yet. It also charges high cancellation fees and has threatening wording.
rockinghigh··on IRS Direct File to open to all 50 states and D.C. for 2025 tax season
No need for personal attacks. The states and the federal government could better coordinate tax filing, it would not be against the US constitution.
rockinghigh··on How many EV charging stations does the US need to replace gas stations?
Most homes have access to 240V outlets that charge much faster, at a rate of 20 to 30 miles of range per hour.
rockinghigh··on Food labels and the lies they tell us about ‘best before’ expiration dates (2021)
They probably mean affogato and espresso.
rockinghigh··on TimesFM: Time Series Foundation Model for time-series forecasting
These models may be helpful if they speed up convergence when fine tuned on business-specific time series.
rockinghigh··on Microsoft bans U.S. police from using enterprise AI tool for facial recognition
The NYPD has had a system built by Microsoft for 15 years:

> Beginning in 2009, the NYPD, in partnership with Microsoft, built a powerful counterterrorism and policing tool called the Domain Awareness System (DAS). The DAS is a central platform used to aggregate data from internal and external closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV), license plate readers (LPRs), and environmental sensors, as well as 911 calls and other NYPD databases. The DAS uses an interactive dashboard interface to display real-time alerts whenever a 911 call is received or a sensor is triggered. The DAS also in- cludes mapping features that make it possible to survey and track targets. The DAS was originally built to support the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative (LMSI) – a public-private partnership – but has since expanded to cover the entire city, giving NYPD personnel direct access to thousands of cameras owned and operated by private orga- nizations. Until the development of the mobility platform and the mobile DAS system described below, the full capabilities of DAS have only been available to the Counterterrorism Bureau and a few other specially trained officers on desktop computers. As the NYPD upgrades its network, access to all DAS capabilities and resources will be expanded to all NYPD’s commands.

https://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/home/POA/pdf/Technology.p...

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