wolfd

Could be a neat post, but it was too obviously LLM-generated for me to care about reading it deeply. I’m really fine with people using LLMs to write code and understand stuff, but at least drop a disclaimer when you’re blogging straight Claude text.

I think that it’s fine, and good, to critique the way that corporations do their business. That’s kinda one of the core tenets of capitalism, no?

This is free software.

I wish there were more human written articles posted here. The ending of this is so obviously an LLM being prompted to connect this news back to the site’s purpose. There just isn’t a link, so it makes something up.

This seems wrong to me? I use it to do so every day.

I hope you and I never get the opportunity to learn how this would end. We’ve had nukes on Earth for less than 100 years, do you expect the next few thousand to go that well? Do you think in that time, nobody will ever roll a nat 1 on a wisdom check?

I think it’s possible that there’s a technical reason for monochrome cameras. For example, to let in the maximum amount of IR light for tracking. Bayer filters reduce the amount of light getting in, so it might help the IR LEDs be visible on surrounding walls in the dark.

Still hoping that you’re right, though.

I would assume that this was a carrier request/demand that got filtered down to some poor employee that had to implement it. There’s a linked bug, but the bug is restricted.

I don’t know if this was one of the intended outcomes, but this will probably cause some struggling college and universities to shut down.

International students raise quite a lot of money for higher-ed institutions because they pay full price without financial aid. The loss of that income is going to make a bad situation for higher-ed budgets much worse. Unless you are Harvard or Stanford (or a few other universities that are endowments with schools attached), you’re probably already in a budget crunch or eating into your endowment.

A side note, one of the founders of the college I went to has been convinced that higher-ed needs an entirely new business model in order to survive, and is founding a new school called Greenway (https://www.greenwayinstitute.org) that is trying to blend internships and co-op programs into an engineering education.

Are you talking about the 3D rendering in the article? The source is linked, and it was uploaded to Wikimedia in 2013.

Edit: Oh! I see, the article URL was changed after you made your comment and before I made mine.

The gates are extremely fast, and you don’t need to wait at all when you tap your card. In practice, this ends up being a pretty big deal for the number of passengers going through some of those gates. The whole experience is noticeably faster than any other ticket gate I’ve been through.

I believe it was this https://www.luciteria.com/element-cubes/plutonium-for-sale

How are these levels actually encoded? Do they use special unwritable tokens to wrap instructions?

I think the goal is to not antagonize the administration but convince them that they're making a mistake and to reverse it.

Good question, I always wonder the same thing. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mold-Linker-2024-Performance seems to show that that the newer linkers still outperform their predecessors, even after maturing. But of course this doesn’t show the full picture.

I’m not sure if you’re intending to leave a negative or positive remark, or just a brief history, but the fact that people are still managing to squeeze better performance into linkers is very encouraging to me.

Could you explain why you think that Linux created more problems than it solved? In my eyes it is the backbone of most of what I do as a developer and I can’t imagine trying to work without it.

It’s absurd but LLMs for military targets is absolutely something that some companies are trying to sell regardless of the many known failure modes.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-07-05/the-us...

https://youtu.be/XEM5qz__HOU

This document was referenced by Smarter Every Day in his latest video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU

What do you mean by “tearing”? Like, VSync-off tearing or a different effect?

A major issue with motion interpolation is that it can’t be perfect, and is often far from it. The implementation on many TVs is jarring, you’ll see super-smooth motion while an object is moving a slow or medium speed, but as soon as the patch of pixels that it’s tracking goes really fast, it assumes the patches are distinct, and the motion will be juddery. Individual objects switching from high-framerate to low in the span of a half-second is quite noticeable to my eyes, but I admit that most people around me don’t seem to care.

Maybe one day the real-time implementation will be good enough, but I find that it’s shockingly bad most of the time.

I would be _shocked_ if Zuck wasn't thinking 24/7 about how to capitalize on LLMs. I'm sure there are a thousand ideas (maybe even a few good ones?) being thrown around Meta at how to use LLMs to beat Google/Microsoft+OpenAI at the "search buddy" game.

I find it interesting that they haven't rebranded "CNC" as something in Korean.

When I was in uni, the computer science school actually did occasionally check these reports. Specifically, a guy named Chris checked them. Some friends of mine apparently used this to send him messages.

`sudo hi chris`

The implementation as it stands is actually easier the way they do it. They replace the image by scaling Rick to the image size. That means that they can still automatically put your output images in a grid without any extra code. They could have zeroed the pixels, but that could have led to confusion about if things were working or not.

It's silly and you're able to patch it out if you so desire. But most importantly, they released the model to everyone so it's way more open than OpenAI's DALL-E 2 (for better or worse). I don't think the argument that they're trying to control you really makes a lot of sense given how widely accessible this model is.

I made this page (posted in another thread yesterday) because I was rather underwhelmed by the .gif. I think the page shows in much better detail the difference between the telescopes' capabilities.

https://blog.wolfd.me/hubble-jwst/

(If you're on mobile, you should be able to zoom in and still use the slider)

Thanks for finding those images! I threw together a page that lets you compare them via a slider. You should be able to zoom in on mobile!

https://blog.wolfd.me/hubble-jwst/

The .gif comparison was a bit... upsetting since the color palettes are so limited and the resolution is so low, so it really didn't put JWST _or_ Hubble in a good light.

I think that that idiom is perhaps overstated, it can be good, but it can also be an excuse to be morally corrupt.

I am fond of Starlark, the Python-like configuration language of Bazel. It's code, but they've removed most of the footguns that you encounter when using Python as configuration (e.g. you can't mutate global state).

I think it's a pleasant middle ground between config and code, it's definitely code, but limited.

The free market is really only able to be efficient when consumers have choice. With healthcare, choice is usually not an option (e.g. you get charged for the cost of your care even if you are unconscious when they bring you to the hospital). I wish it was that simple, but it's not. Getting policy right is a very difficult task, but I don't think we can fall back to the free market to solve that problem.