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thethimble

1,170 karma · joined April 11, 2010

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thethimble··on BB(3, 3) is Hard
But if the universe is infinitely large then any finite thing should fit in it, right? Or are we saying that BB(748) can be infinite?
thethimble··on Recursive Recipes
It’s like a self compiling compiler that can’t be bootstrapped!
thethimble··on ChatGPT – Dalle3 System Prompt
Who’s to say this isn’t true of our current reality!
thethimble··on HTTP/3 adoption is growing rapidly
I’d strongly recommend Beej’s guide to network programming. It’s very approachable and will clear these concepts up for you.

https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/html/split/

thethimble··on NSO group iPhone zero-click, zero-day exploit captured in the wild
Best way to secure your devices is to not be a target!

/s

thethimble··on Meta AI releases CoTracker, a model for tracking any points (pixels) on a video
Does anyone understand the business angle for meta here with these models? I still don’t understand why their research division exists and how it relates to their core business. I’m a huge admirer of their work but don’t understand the why.
thethimble··on ChatGPT Enterprise
I’ve found the consumer GPT4 latency to be fantastic. It seems they’re offering an improvement above this.
thethimble··on GPT-3.5 Turbo fine-tuning and API updates
This way they can ensure their safety/alignment mechanisms don’t get undermined with third party training data.
thethimble··on Record labels hit Internet Archive with new copyright lawsuit
Without women?? Genuinely curious how this is sustainable.
thethimble··on The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
This is what we should be discussing - the blatant taking-for-granted of how good things objectively are in favor of a cultural delusion that we are oppressed.

We are living in the best of times as measured by infant mortality, lifespans, literacy, poverty, and technology.

thethimble··on The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)
The idea that everyone involved in the economic system of app development simply lacks moral character is a pretty weak take. Most apps/companies exist within a capitalistic framework. They likely wouldn’t exist without early external capital providing upfront funding for R&D.

In your mind, who should bear the cost of building and maintaining large services like Instagram?

thethimble··on Building a Networked Key-Value-Store on an FPGA
> The hashtable is capable of looking up a key every clock cycle

Does the SRAM latency still allow for single-cycle reads at 10G?

thethimble··on Don’t Talk to Police (2012) [video]
Thanks for the continued insistence!
thethimble··on Don’t Talk to Police (2012) [video]
It seems like there’s a practical approach and a literalist approach here. I never understood the insistence of “don’t talk to the police” in relation to the questions above. If you can give the “right” answers, why wouldn’t you?

I understand how this might be compromising fundamental rights, but at the same time I just want to get home. Is this wrong?

thethimble··on Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace
This is the most hilarious meme on HN
thethimble··on Reddit banned Reddiw's (alternative API) subreddit and author's Reddit account
How do you juxtapose this with the fact that Reddit is still unprofitable? Engineers cost money. Venture capital isn’t an infinite well.

The profitability of a business is a testament to its sustainability (or lack thereof). Persisting unprofitable structures is inherently unsustainable - despite how valuable they may be to users.

thethimble··on Ask HN: What's the best self hosted/local alternative to GPT-4?
Google has recently announced infrastructure for fine tuning and RLHF on their pre trained foundation models. I imagine all cloud providers will follow suit.

https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/docs/generative-ai/models...

thethimble··on Purely Functional Data Structures (1996) [pdf]
Purely functional data structures are very common in purely functional languages like Haskell but are also used in non functional languages via libraries like immutable.js.

At a high level, immutability forces you to be extremely deliberate about state changes in your application. This improves reasoning/understanding, reduces bugs, and eases debugging.

An example of immutability that you might be familiar with would be react props/state. You don’t modify your state. This makes reasoning about state much more simple.

thethimble··on Meta has started its latest round of layoffs, focusing on business groups
A related point would be Meta is exposed to revenue risk as customers pull back from advertising in a recessionary environment. This appears clearly in Meta’s financials.

An unrelated point would be that layoffs usually target the lowest-performing segment of the workforce and offer legal protection to the company against unlawful termination. Of course not all laid off workers are poor performers but there is obviously a correlation here.

thethimble··on Having a 20GB file that lets you ask an offline computer any question is amazing
And yet more recently everything began shifting to the cloud (storage, compute). Centralization leads to better economies of scale and therefore more efficiency.

It’s not clear to me this will ever change. While local compute will always improve (so local models become more viable), I believe that the largest and most capable models will always be cloud based.

thethimble··on TikTok is now banned in Montana
China

https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-bytedance-shou-zi-chew-8d8...

thethimble··on Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
> safety reasons for providing a phone

Isn’t this a red herring? Do you need to provide a smart phone or just a phone? If it’s a smart phone do you need to enable unfettered access or just the safety related apps you need?

thethimble··on Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news
We need a similar app that removes existentially cynical themes from HN comments
thethimble··on GPT makes learning fun again
Agreed - it seems that calling out LLM accuracy is a meme here - hyperbolically: “because LLMs can be inaccurate they are useless”.

There seems to be less next-level analysis: which topics are more prone to inaccuracy, does the critique loop actually help LLMs overcome those inaccuracies, and do the benefits of LLMs outweigh the consequences of these inaccuracies?

thethimble··on Meta is about to start its next round of layoffs
We’re literally on hacker news right now
thethimble··on A Baby GPT
GPT’s vocab size is north of tens of thousands. Included in this vocab are the 256 unique byte values (2^8). This means GPT can already generate/interpret all byte sequences.

The vocab size is larger than 256 (or in your example 2) because some sequences of bytes occur much more frequently than others. This allows the model to generalize more efficiently.

By analogy consider that we think of “words” as atomic concepts much more than we think of the individual lines that make up the letters in a word - even though the former can be thought of being composed of the latter.

thethimble··on Superhuman: What can AI do in 30 minutes?
The entrenchment of smartphones in society dramatically increased between iPhone 4 and 14. Technical capability is just one axis.

Still, I think LLMs are different than phones in terms of scaling. Faster processor speeds don’t necessarily result in more user value for phones, but scaling up LLMs seem to predictability improve performance/accuracy.

thethimble··on Sex worker-led payment platform shuts down after being cut off by processor
I have a feeling that a government run payment system would also forbid illegal activity (eg laundering, etc). I agree that a private payments network is not ideal but the question at hand is how should transactions facilitating illegal activity be handled?

To be clear I’m not passing a moral judgement on sex work - just pointing out the fact that it’s presently illegal in many forms and jurisdictions and that fact is relevant.

thethimble··on Ask HN: Do you think this is the start of the new financial crisis?
Even if your argument were true there would have to be a theoretical interest rate that minimizes inflation (how can a function increase in both directions but not have a minimum?).

That said I think there’s reason to be skeptical about the link between rising rates implying more bonds sold - particularly as you consider other factors like creditworthiness.

thethimble··on Amazon to lay off 9,000 more workers after earlier cuts
> if remote work was legally mandated

This is hilarious

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