cckolon

The US Navy still uses nomograms for chemistry control on nuclear reactors!

This is so cool. I would have loved this in college.

I’m implementing the Lox programming language (from Crafting Interpreters [0]) in Rust.

https://github.com/cckolon/rlox

[0] https://craftinginterpreters.com/

Exploration-exploitation tradeoff strikes again

How does this differ from something like MarineTraffic?

Your computer is a sweet machine

Nice, that’s really cool.

I use full length vectors (512 dimensions) and have seen very fast lookups with pgvector (HNSW index) and sqlite-vec on 20k vectors. I think any decent vector database should be able to handle 44k entries… which one are you using now?

This is really cool. How is reranking built in? Is there a model that runs inside the database? If so, how did you choose it?

Thanks! Yeah embedding is simple enough and my needs were small enough that I didn’t want to pay. Both llama-server and ollama are great options, and if container size isn’t an issue you get a greater variety running what you want with sentence transformers.

Cool site :)

This is a really cool idea. By “different models” do you mean models fine tuned on different sources? How would you decide how to classify chunks?

Aren’t most inventions anti-labor by this rationale? We employ fewer farmers than we used to, but this is good for society because people who would be farmers are now working on other things.

https://carlkolon.com

My submarine combat game was on the front page a while ago!

https://bearingsonly.net

5 - 9 means strong effects, definitely not placebo.

It’s impossible for anyone to say this convincingly about their own experience. If it were easy to tell whether an effect was due to placebo, we wouldn’t need blinded trials!

Reminds me of Randall Monroe’s obsession with Simple English

https://xkcd.com/547/

Example 01 is basically the “green jellybeans cause acne” problem

https://xkcd.com/882/

My wife is a doctor. When I showed her this paper she said “that’s true for humans as well”.

I do think it’s common for managers (especially new ones) to desire too much validation from their reports. James Stockdale offered some advice here in a 1980 Proceedings article [1]

[Leaders] must be fair and they may be compassionate, but they cannot be addicted to being loved by everybody. The man who needs to be loved is an extortionist’s dream. That man will do anything to avoid face-to-face unpleasantness; he will sell his soul down the river for praise. He can be had.

[1] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1980/september/le...

https://ewatchbill.com - a fair schedule generator that uses simulated annealing to minimize a ‘unfairness’ heuristic. I wrote it for my friends in the Navy who have to write duty bills every month.

https://bearingsonly.net - a submarine combat game in the browser.

Reminds me of a Rickover quote:

"If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible."

This would be useful when chunking PDFs scanned with OCR. I've done that before and paragraph breaks were detected pretty inconsistently.

Hey all, the page crashed but it's back up now, sorry for the downtime!

Maybe you don't want to give yourself away!

I didn't make a solo game mode, but you can play against yourself by opening the link in a new tab if that's helpful

That's exactly the type of thing I was going for here!

yeah I love that!

Outside the "basics", I've seen Newton's method come up again and again in my work. I also work on some map software and geometry (especially trig) has been really useful.

For resources, I love this blog https://www.redblobgames.com/

I think using slack asynchronously (and developing norms that support it) is useful. Also imo there's an unspoken tradeoff when you work for a full remote company across time zones. Most workers seem comfortable with trading the convenience of remote work for the possibility of getting pinged outside work hours.

https://archive.ph/win4r

A semantic search engine for jrnl, the minimalist command-line note-taking application.