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rsp1984on 1/0 = 0 (2018)

Yea, but conceptually it's a bit smelly to have f(x) get larger and larger the closer x is to 0 and then suddenly have it be 0 once x reaches 0.

rsp1984on 1/0 = 0 (2018)

As long as lim(1/x)_x->0 = inf, 1/0 = 0 doesn't make a whole lot of sense, mathematically speaking. I might be wrong but I don't think it was addressed in the article either.

rsp1984on Launch HN: Keep (YC W23) – AIOps and alert management

Product looks solid but please stop it with that dark mode joke. I'm technical within all definitions you could possibly come up with but white-on-dark is just unbearable for my eyes.

rsp1984on Show HN: SuperSplat – open-source 3D Gaussian Splat Editor

Wow, the fade-in animation is most excellent! Mind sharing how you created it?

rsp1984on Windows 11 24H2 hoards 8.63 GB of junk you can't delete

Not trying to sound like a dork, but 9 GB -- that's nothing.

MacOS routinely eats 30-40 GB of HD space in Volumes/Preboot and "macOS Install Data" for god knows what. Plus even a bare bones XCode installation will cost around 20 GB, much more if you actually want to run your code on connected devices.

But of course saving disk space is not exactly #1 on Apple's priority list when the 512 GB and 1 TB disk upgrades sell at 80% margin.

rsp1984on Canvas is a new way to write and code with ChatGPT

Cool, this must be fairly recent. I didn't realize they had integrated it. Will check it out, thanks!

rsp1984on Canvas is a new way to write and code with ChatGPT

Look, I'm just not interested in something that gives me code on the CLI. This is no better or worse than using ChatGPT / Canvas or any other external tool.

My project has well over half a million lines of code. I'm using an IDE (in my case Qt Creator) for a reason. I'd love to get help from an LLM but CLI or external browser windows just aren't the way. The overhead of copy/paste and lack of context is a deal breaker unfortunately.

In case I'm missing something, please let me know. I'm always happy to learn.

rsp1984on Pear AI founder: We made two big mistakes

It was a well planned and executed publicity stunt:

1. Maximize attention on social media by being super obnoxious and arrogant ("dawg I ChatGPT’d the license")

2. 1 day later while the chatter is still going, write a mea culpa and take on the poor victim role ("grew up in a single mother household on government subsidies")

3. --> Repair most of the reputational damage but keep all the attention.

None of this is illegal, but it's exploiting a system of mutual trust and I wouldn't want to live in a world where everybody acted like that.

rsp1984on Show HN: I built a chatbot to converse with 3M SaaS product reviews

Just a nitpick: please use lowercase 'm' for 'million'. When I read the title I thought it had something to do with the company 3M (not really known for making SaaS).

rsp1984on Openpilot – Operating system for robotics

With due respect, this has to be one of the most ignorant takes on robotics I have read in a while. Yes, you can always slap serialization and ZMQ on your framework. That doesn't make it an OS.

And no, the usual robotics stack is not going away anytime soon. Maybe develop some actual useful robots before posting like an expert on robotics topics.

rsp1984on Openpilot – Operating system for robotics

Without taking away anything from the substance or achievement of this release, I find phrases like "openpilot is an operating system for robotics." always quite fishy.

No, it's not an OS for robotics. You can't do actual robotics stuff with it, like drive actuators to control limbs or grippers, do motion control or SLAM or perception or any of the usual robotics stack.

Their website correctly says openpilot is an open source advanced driver assistance system that works on 275+ car models of Toyota, Hyundai, Honda, and many other brands. Should've stuck to that.

Thinking about it some more, it's probably just another engagement baiting strategy to get attention and I'm their gullible puppet. Well played.

rsp1984on alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

I launched gotit.pub [1] last year. It's very much the same thing.

[1] https://gotit.pub

rsp1984on Exact Polygonal Filtering: Using Green's Theorem and Clipping for Anti-Aliasing

OK, I get it now. Thanks for the explanation. I would just never in a lifetime call it a "filter". That's extremely poor naming.

If they called it a choice of basis or influence function, it would've been so much clearer.

rsp1984on Exact Polygonal Filtering: Using Green's Theorem and Clipping for Anti-Aliasing

OK, so reading a bit further this boils down to clipping the polygon to the pixel and then using the shoelace formula for finding the area? Why call it "box filter" then?

rsp1984on Exact Polygonal Filtering: Using Green's Theorem and Clipping for Anti-Aliasing

> This is equivalent to applying a box filter to the polygon, which is the simplest form of filtering.

Am I the only one who has trouble understanding what is meant by this? What is the exact operation that's referred to here?

I know box filters in the context of 2D image filtering and they're straightforward but the concept of applying them to shapes just doesn't make any sense to me.

Can someone clarify?

rsp1984on Gitlab Explores Sale

Counterargument: Atlassian offers a very similar product and is worth $50B. Of course they've got JIRA but everybody hates it.

GitLab (or whoever ends up buying it) could acquire Linear.app for example and eat Atlassian's lunch.

rsp1984on Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

I'm not super deep into web development and since it doesn't have a demo or any other visual preview unfortunately I don't understand what this does or how it could be useful. Let alone how to "install" it for "my website".

rsp1984on Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

you have no idea what you're talking about, do you?

rsp1984on Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

I get where you're coming from. FWIW, at many points I considered just paying for Webflow but their pricing is just nuts. I'm simply not going to pay ~ $1k per year for them to host my static site with a couple 1000 visitors per month.

If Webflow had a competitor with same functionality and reasonable pricing I'd gladly pay for that.

rsp1984on Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

This looks pretty awesome but, speaking only for myself here, the thing I actually want is just Webflow but without the BS and predatory pricing.

A visual editor that produces plain old HTML, CSS, JS and that anyone in our company can use to make changes to pages or create new ones. That's it.

I don't think it exists (if so, pointers would be very welcome!), so here's my comment to incentivize someone to build it.

rsp1984on Anthropic Introduces Claude Projects

Here'a feature request in case people from Anthropic are listening:

I'd like to dump our product knowledge base (emails, tickets, support articles, etc..) into a Project and then create an embeddable chat-bot from it that can handle customer support right from our website.

Most support requests we get are similar or equal to previous requests. It could help our support staff save a lot of time to focus on the requests that actually matter.

rsp1984on Thermodynamic Natural Gradient Descent

Leveraging thermodynamics to more efficiently compute second-order updates is certainly cool and worth exploring, however specifically in the context of deep learning I remain skeptical of its usefulness.

We already have very efficient second-order methods running on classical hardware [1] but they are basically not being used at all in practice, as they are outperformed by ADAM and other 1st-order methods. This is because optimizing highly nonlinear loss functions, such as the ones in deep learning models, only really works with very low learning rates, regardless of whether a 1st or a 2nd order method is used. So, comparatively speaking, a 2nd order method might give you a slightly better parameter update per step but at a more-than-slightly-higher cost, so most of the time it's simply not worth doing.

[1] https://andrew.gibiansky.com/blog/machine-learning/hessian-f...

rsp1984on Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator

Thank you. I think it's a bit misleading then to call it a "terminal emulator". It's not really emulating one of those old boxes, is it? It's providing a text interface to a computer's functions. That's great but it's not emulating anything.

rsp1984on Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator

At the risk of missing something completely obvious: where's the "emulator" part in it? What is it emulating? It looks like a terminal (no emulator) to me. Not trolling, just trying to learn.

rsp1984on eu/acc

If you don't want to work hard (10h+ per day) at a startup, then don't. Nobody's forcing you. Working at a startup and finding it's not for you? Just quit! You can just walk out the door. Nobody's forcing you to stay.

Germany is really great in treating its citizens like infants and it shows.

rsp1984on GPUs Go Brrr

TBH that sounds like a nightmare to debug.

rsp1984on Apple introduces M4 chip

Together with next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU, the high-performance GPU, and higher-bandwidth unified memory, the Neural Engine makes M4 an outrageously powerful chip for AI.

In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending data up to the cloud for processing).

Processing data at the edge also makes for the best possible user experience because of the complete independence of network connectivity and hence minimal latency.

If (and that's a big if) they keep their APIs open to run any kind of AI workload on their chips it's a strategy that I personally really really welcome as I don't want the AI future to be centralised in the hands of a few powerful cloud providers.

rsp1984on Stop Acting Like You're Famous

It really boils down to what you define as "leisure activities" and everyone is different and often multi-faceted in that regard. So this certainly fails as a one-size-fits-all advice.

There are hobbies we do out of pure enjoyment. E.g. for me personally this is (choir-)singing. I know so many people who are better singers than I am (or ever will be) yet I couldn't care less. I am 100% happy with my skill level. If anyone else comes to the conclusion that somebody else is a better singer than I, they're probably right!

Then there are hobbies we do b/c we like the skill itself or b/c we want to have what comes with it. E.g. when I do a SW or HW side-project I really do want to create the best product (as niche-y as it might be) and yes, I do care a great deal about whether others like it or not. Put simply I want to be the best b/c I can be the best. I couldn't imagine doing this just for fun. TBH the whole idea of just-for-fun side projects sounds absurd to me.

rsp1984on AI-generated sad girl with piano performs the text of the MIT License

Potentially controversial opinion: nothing really changes for musicians / artists. There already is an abundance of fantastic (human-made) music for every genre or taste, even before AI arrived.

Artists' biggest challenges today aren't related to making music. They're related to marketing, building networks, building their brand, touring and physically playing shows, getting eyeballs on social media. For every artist that "makes it" there are 100s with equally good skills / product who don't b/c they fall short in any of the above.

So when AI lowers the entry barrier to allow millions to make music that before were limited by their skills, that's great! However those millions of people were never capable or even interested in marketing or selling their art in the first place, so the market competition to serious artists is quite limited.

TLDR: Music is and will be an overcrowded marketplace where brand matters a lot more than skill. AI helps with the skill but not with the brand.