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ultra_nick

460 karma · joined December 10, 2019

Doing pre-seed POC work in Texas. Let me know if you'd like to grab lunch/coffee in the Austin area.

A well rounded software engineer with skills in entrepreneurship, devops, machine learning, robotics, fullstack web.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholascgilpin/

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ultra_nick··on Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
Memorize fundamentals and frameworks:

Logic, fallacies, philosophy, and science for arguments

Fundamental algorithms and structures for code

Common joke/meme formats and questions for social skills

ultra_nick··on Every model learned by gradient descent is approximately a kernel machine (2020)
Breaks.

Methods that expect the same input to map to the same output don't work with feedback.

ultra_nick··on Beyond A*: Better Planning with Transformers
If transformers can plan, then AGI only requires better education...
ultra_nick··on Why is everything based on likelihoods even though likelihoods are so small?
In a storm, the likelihood of A raindrop hitting your computer dwarfs the likelihood of THE raindrops[5927] hitting your computer.

Hence why using A and THE is important.

ultra_nick··on How much electricity does AI consume?
Agreed, using neuron layers as vectors seems like a waste. Moving to a graph-like compute model seems like it'd be more efficient.
ultra_nick··on Xonsh: Python-powered, cross-platform, Unix-gazing shell
Xonsh by itself is pretty cool and I hope it continues to grow.

However, I feel like Xonsh needs a killer app to really demonstrate the advantages of the semantics Xonsh provides. Maybe something like Rawdog (https://github.com/AbanteAI/rawdog) + Xonsh?

ultra_nick··on AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source
If anyone wants to work in this area, AMD currently has a lot of related job posts open.
ultra_nick··on "Accelerationism" is an overdue corrective to years of gloom
Actually, the e/acc community has stated it rejects Nick Land's more recent work.

If you read older posts, you'll find the earlier e/acc members got started with Fanged Noumena.

ultra_nick··on Unison Cloud
Unison is a distributed programming language.

YAML config files and Hadoop/Kafka/Kubernetes/etc are additions for non-distributed programming languages. Unison is a grand simplification of everything into one system so that future programmers don't have to put up with our crap.

ultra_nick··on Alzheimer’s cases tied to no-longer-used medical procedure
Prions.

Non-mammal prions have a different enough shape to avoid breaking mammalian biomechanisms.

ultra_nick··on Svelte Native
SDKs for 4+ platforms is added tooling...
ultra_nick··on Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization
Now my managers have even more reason to rush out broken "features" and use bugs to "fix" them later.
ultra_nick··on Recent data shows AI job losses rising, but the numbers don't tell full story
Yes, we've had chess engines and spellcheck for years.
ultra_nick··on The Baldwin Effect
The Baldwin Effect is interesting because it hints at how humans may have evolved intelligence. Below is a textbook excerpt that explains it well.

"... other mechanisms have been suggested by which individual learning can alter the course of evolution. One such mechanism is called the Baldwin effect, after J. M. Baldwin (1896), who first suggested the idea. The Baldwin effect is based on the following observations:

If a species is evolving in a changing environment, there will be evolution- ary pressure to favor individuals with the capability to learn during their lifetime. For example, if a new predator appears in the environment, then individuals capable of learning to avoid the predator will be more successful than individuals who cannot learn. In effect, the ability to learn allows an individual to perform a small local search during its lifetime to maximize its fitness.

In contrast, nonlearning individuals whose fitness is fully determined by their genetic makeup will operate at a relative disadvantage. 0 Those individuals who are able to learn many traits will rely less strongly on their genetic code to "hard-wire" traits. As a result, these individuals can support a more diverse gene pool, relying on individual learning to overcome the "missing" or "not quite optimized" traits in the genetic code. This more diverse gene pool can, in turn, support more rapid evolutionary adaptation. Thus, the ability of individuals to learn can have an indirect accelerating effect on the rate of evolutionary adaptation for the entire population." - Tom Mitchell, Machine Learning

ultra_nick··on A coder considers the waning days of the craft
Compound growth has been the most realistic historically.
ultra_nick··on Ask HN: How do you keep up with advances in AI-assisted programming techniques?
Simply Hackernews makes you better informed than about 80% of other engineers. Follow and read popular documents from a few professors, entrepreneurs, and communities on Twitter/Reddit/Quora to get to about 95%. Hunt for specific information to get to around 98%. Build something new and useful to get to 99%.
ultra_nick··on Appeals court denies judicial immunity to judge who personally searched home
Judges and police shouldn't have legal immunities.

Professionals doing jobs over $10k should have to buy malpractice insurance like doctors.

There's a bill to end qualified immunity currently. https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1470

ultra_nick··on Mint is shutting down, and it's pushing users toward Credit Karma
If you prefer projection over bank statement tracking, then Projection Lab is nice.

https://projectionlab.com/

ultra_nick··on A fourth of U.S. health visits now delivered by non-physicians
Quick care beats quality care past a certain level of time and money.
ultra_nick··on MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems
Are you new to software?

The bugs in programs aren't actual bugs either, windows aren't actual windows, and many would argue that computer science is still more of an art than a science.

ultra_nick··on C Is Not a Low-level Language (2018)
I just write English these days and have my LLM compile it to Python, so...
ultra_nick··on FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel
How?
ultra_nick··on FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel
Are you arguing that freedom of speech doesn't matter because people can say bad things?
ultra_nick··on Create Machines
Venjet is a rising musician on YouTube. He specializes in industrial drum and bass music.
ultra_nick··on Dara Khosrowshahi had a stint driving for Uber and delivering for Uber Eats
Is it common for CEOs not to use their own products?
ultra_nick··on Ask HN: I’m an FCC Commissioner proposing regulation of IoT security updates
I'd like if all IOT devices had an offline mode where network access is shut off.

Most companies don't have the skills to make their devices secure. We should have the option to buy devices without network access. Devices that haven't been updated for a year should shutoff their network access automatically.

ultra_nick··on AlloyDB AI: Generative AI applications with PostgreSQL
Yes, GPU poor people are just using top k semantic search to try to fix the issues will low ram low knowledge LLMs. It's OK for some applications, but other methods need to be investigated.
ultra_nick··on Deep Neural Nets: 33 years ago and 33 years from now (2022)
Google put an LLM into a robot a few months ago. This is the second paper I've seen on it.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08647

ultra_nick··on The force that shapes everything around us: Parking
A land value tax would fix this.

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/what-is-a-land-value-tax-520...

ultra_nick··on The first Oxide rack being prepared for customer shipment
Servers with high quality software integration. These provide the same value to businesses as Apple devices provide to consumers. Hopefully they "just work" and eliminate a bunch of Devops distractions.

Most hardware companies have terrible software. If Oxide can handle manufacturing and logistics, then they'll be huge in about 10 years.

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