deepnet

Predators discourage most rats and kill some.

Pray spends less time at a location if there are predators. The prey is skittish.

Glue traps kill Rats, new rats fill the niche. Some rats learn to avoid them.

Wolves harry deer and kill some but the deer don’t eat all the baby saplings because fear means they move on more often.

Rats have the numbers, killing some of them isn’t the best solution.

Cats are smart when the rats change behaviour so does the cat.

Older cats teach younger cats.

Glue traps are a completely different solution.

They also kill a lot of spiders so you get more flies.

Nurturing predators is a way better solution.

An NY bodega is an ecosystem.

Embrace Extend Oopsy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Root reason & comp sci application is mentioned near start :

“ Many moons back I was self-learning Galois Fields for some erasure coding theory applications.”

Erasure codes are based on finite fields, e.g. Galois fields.

The author is fraustrated by access to Galois fields for the non-mathematician due to Jargon obscucification.

Also large Application section : “

Applications

The applications and algorithms are staggering. You interact with implementations of abstract algebra everyday: CRC, AES Encryption, Elliptic-Curve Cryptography, Reed-Solomon, Advanced Erasure Codes, Data Hashing/Fingerprinting, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, etc.

Having a solid-background in Galois Fields and Abstract Algebra is a prerequisite for understanding these applications.

“

I sympathise with your fraustration at math articles.

This is not one of them, it is rich and deep. Xorvoid leads us into difficult theoretic territority but the clarity of exposition is next level - a programmer will grok some of the serious math that underpins our field by reading the OP.

Xylitol is a sugar from birch tree sap.

Thank you German is not my strong point

Ironically, a primary use case for AI will be to summarise AI summaries of articles and CVs.

In a sea of slop…

I am not an LLM [edit] ( as far as I know ;-), but thanks for the profile crit I probably should tidy it up.

Because the article is currently down so the summary is all there is for now.

Yes it provides no extra information but in the [hnews hug of death] of the article it is the only information at the moment

Trump has ~91k files in the data

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GomVrWxWMAA5S-_?format=jpg&name=...

[edit] site down - reddit link to the 10tb

https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1k0h9uu/anonymou...

Also x link to data

https://x.com/YourAnonFrench_/status/1912099907038572980

Yes !

tl;dr air pump saves turning the heap, insulation keeps heat in, currently Raspi sensing methane, moisture and temp controlling water & air inputs has improved my home hot heap yields 80% and completely automated it - 100% labor free.

The 4 key factors for a hot heap are moisture, temperature and oxygen and green ( high nitrogen ) to brown ( high carbon ) ratio ( approx 2 green to 1 brown by weight ).

I have a 1 cubic metre heap ( the minimum to generate the necessary heat ) and I have an specialised product, a double wall insulated ‘hot’ bin which keeps it working even in winter.

A hot heap steams so water input is necessary.

Hot heaps need oxygen, which is the hard part - manually turning the heap.

The temperature rises to 70 degrees C after a week, which kills all but the extremophile hot heap bacteria which are aerobic rather than the cold heap anaerobic bacteria.

I added an air pump input to the bottom and I have a water hose and sprinkler the top.

I run the air every day for 10 minutes. And the water for when it feels dry.

Now it never smells and composts in 7 weeks instead of 12.

I have now bought a methane, moisture and temperature sensors, electric valve for water and so a RaspberryPi is graphing the sensor inputs and recording the heap water and oxygen timings.

Very importantly, I have a pile to collect greens ( veg and grass ) and a pile for browns ( leaves and cardboard ) so I can fill the hot bin in one go.

Once I get some time I’ll write it up.

A hot heap captures more carbon, releases less methane and makes much compost, much faster, from same amount of base material ( less evaporates ).

Ideally takes 6 weeks to compost a whole heap - using hot methods.

Also kills fungi & pathogen and all weed seeds and readily ‘eats’ ( dissolves ) carcasses and meat and other nature that should be avoided in cold heaps.

Takes a bit more management and monitoring but is easily automated.

Ultrasound selfies at home, clinical trial reports self administered ultrasound scans on par with professional ones.

https://www.nibib.nih.gov/news-events/newsroom/ultrasound-se...

tl;dr I agree, cool project, and yes the Aaron Schwartz piece is powerful

It is good to have heroes, exemplars and role-models to offer inspiration.

Especially in difficult times it is good to be reminded of the huge differences individuals acting selflessly can make, both directly and to other individual lives and by inspiring others and even creating movements.

It is important we do not forget the past and those who have passed.

The future is not always so different from the past.

If you treat people as overly simple machines you might as well mechanise that part of the process.

Human workers have hand skill, learning, intelligence, wisdom, introspection, communication, colour and pattern recognition all of which are not being utilised making the job repetitive and unfulfilling.

Then the threat of firing based on a random metric - this would create a culture of fear and one would expect a high turnover of any ‘good’ employees.

I agree this would be a horrible place to work.

Which is the genius of the allegory - how the wrong metric can make efficiency and progress impossible.

Of course even a good metric becomes corrupted according to Goodhart's law:

“ When a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a good metric because people will seek to game it.”

‘The Wire’ remains a salutary lesson on how all stats when tied to pay and promotion will get ‘juked’.

A metric can measure nothing but random chance ( there is always some randomness that is rarely accounted for ) - this makes management impossible and workers disempowered.

Even with good stats there are too few Baysians vs Frequentists in corporate numerical analysis.

In terms of the company in this analogy a useful exercise is to imagine how to improve things.

An immediate solution could be to allow the workers to make multiple sequential draws and to discuss what percentage of red beads constitutes a good draw and discard and resample if more red beads than that.

Let workers share their best practices and it may be that there is a subtle skill that can be learnt about how one wields the paddle in the box of beads to steer it away from red clusters.

Or divide and conquer and take fewer beads and allow the workers to discard all red beads, then combine the pure samples and batch up to correct size.

It is very well designed, the palette makes the information easy to grok as an overview - without being overwhelming.

Impressively subtle design.

From the iPhone 16 settings page :

“Apple intelligence is not available when language is set to English ( United Kingdom )”

The workers control the paddle and the scooping of the beads.

A smart worker will eyeball their draw for red and redraw a few times until they get a good draw.

There may be other ways to flick off red beads by tilting and tapping.

None of this is excluded behaviour at least in this article.

Yes, we can but try, and ( only ) in trying find it so. For better or for worse.

Fascinating man and pragmatic scholar, James.

Empirical and stoic

Scary stuff

Indeed this is the risk if Trump breaches the USA’s 1994 treaty agreement by surrendering territory in a ‘peace-deal’ then not only will the USA be oath breakers but who will trust a nuclear non-proliferation treaty in the future.

Perhaps Trump will not want to look weak and stand firm but it seems not unlikely that he will Kowtow to Russia and give them what they want at the expense of our Ukrainian allies.

My takeaway ( and an indication of who actually needs a performance review [ e.g. the manager ])

“ It’s my opinion that the biggest factor in an employee's performance – perhaps bigger than the employee’s abilities and level of effort – is whether their manager set them up for success “

The USA & Russia made a pact to defend the Ukraine, based on the Ukraine giving up their nukes.

“ As the United States mediated between Russia and Ukraine, the three countries signed the Trilateral Statement on January 14, 1994. Ukraine committed to full disarmament, including strategic weapons, in exchange for economic support and security assurances from the United States and Russia.”

If the USA doesn’t defend them adequately the USA will have broken their 1994 agreement - with all the trust implications for future agreements.

By invading the Ukraine, Russia broke its 1994 deal.

The USA and Russia also agreed in 1994 to Ukrainian autonomy and sovereignty, e.g. the freedom to join NATO and the EU if they want - which gives the lie to NATO membership as a cause !

Russia agreed in 1994 that the Ukraine had the right to join NATO or anything else it wanted to do - that is the the definition of autonomy and sovereignty.

Thus implicitly, in fact, Russia agreed to defend the Ukraine’s right to join NATO.

Russia has broken treaties to invade many of it neighbours recently, this needs to be questioned not apologised for.

In 1994 Russia and the USA agreed to Ukrainian sovereignty and its borders in return for the Ukraine voluntarily disarming its nukes:

It was promised the USA AND Russia would provide the Ukraine adequate defense in lieu of giving up their nukes.

Which gives the lie to “Russia invaded because of impending Ukrainian NATO membership” - the USA & Russia already promised to defend their 1994 borders AT THAT TIME.

The USA and Russia also agreed in 1994 to Ukrainian autonomy and sovereignty, e.g. the freedom to join NATO and the EU if they want.

It is Putin that has broken his pact with the Ukraine by invading.

“

As the United States mediated between Russia and Ukraine, the three countries signed the Trilateral Statement on January 14, 1994. Ukraine committed to full disarmament, including strategic weapons, in exchange for economic support and security assurances from the United States and Russia. “

If the USA cedes Ukrainian territory to Russia in a peace deal the USA will also have broken its 1994 agreement to defend the Ukraine’s 1994 borders and its autonomy ( to join NATO if it desires ).

Fascinating, nice catch

200 countries pledged $300 billion per year in total - not very much since climate change disasters are already costing tens of billions a year and many human lives in the US alone.

Also this target is 11 years away.

Definitely disappointing.

The article contains Young’s surviving eyewitness account of the much-memed ‘demon core’[0] incident involving Louis Slotin.

Young expresses anger at the pressure put on Slotin to enact the experiment so dangerously in person.

“ Hospitalized for observation, Young was released, but forever after blamed Slotin’s death on Groves’ insistence on obtaining test results before proper equipment was available. “There was no need to kill Louis Slotin to show that making critical mass measures should be made by remote control,” he wrote in 1975, still angry.”

As the demon-core incident is often attributed to Slotin showing off and his careless youthful bravado, Young’s account is valuable as is testifies that pressure for results from the head of the project Gen. Leslie Groves was the cause that the experiment was not performed remotely.

Young further testified that Slotin’s quick reactions saved him and others from a fatal dose.

“ Slotin immediately knocked the two hemispheres of radioactive material apart with his hand, probably saving the other technicians and scientists in the room—including Young—from immediate death. “

So Slotin was not a fool but under deadline pressure for results and his actions saved others.

Young is a fascinating chap, no formal science education but worked his way up to scientist and made the world’s first working breeder reactor in his spare time.

[0] “ The meme-ification of the “Demon Core””

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42200699

Good point !

“professional environments” have flaws - and can be as you assert dehumanisating - more so when orgs are large, and rules enforced blindly or with ‘zero tolerance’.

I meant it as a proxy for a forum where mutual respect and civility are theoretically expected.

Although in the real world not always present.

I agree that rules can potentially be overbearing and curtail free expression but also protect and nurture expression where it is suppressed by an unruly culture.

As in most things, it is difficult to find a good balance and a healthy community is self-regulating.

Code communities are very democratic, they produce good code and good coders.

Democracy is good governance not a dictatorship of a majority.

A benevolent dictatorship is said to be a most efficient form of government, until it ushers in a non-benevolent dictatorship.

Democracy is not perfect but relatively sustainable in that there is a peaceful mechanism for change and a means of consensus.

Small communities don’t need too many rules but in time as they grow it becomes necessary.

Arguably a win for the community of users in the long term as those developers who would like a safe environment, more akin to a professional one, will be encouraged to contribute.

In the short term Ken will have to wait for the time out to end, so a loss for sure.

On balance the future is bigger than the present so suffering today for a better future is utilitarian.

And there are a lot of sensitive folk who have been scared off of communities by what they saw. In this thread a couple have commented about the pre CoC community, that they would have contributed but for the fear of getting barked at.

As a younger dev I bailed on some IRC communities after getting weirdly threatened.

Frustration after being very patient with one’s donated time and feeling unreciprocated can lead to frayed nerves and in the short term being rude is brief and often effective - so it is very understandable that this sort of thing will arise.

Good to discuss how we handle these difficult situations of onboarding newbies without scaring some of the lurking next generation of devs.

As a headline this penalty seems harsh, but efforts were made to mediate before the committee made the ruling and proved unsuccessful.

This process is defining the future culture of the kernel code community and it is widely accepted that it should be less toxic and more welcoming and akin to what is expected in a professional context where most devs also function and also have to patiently onboard new developers.

There may be room for improvement of the process, for instance, like in many settings the burden of patient onboarding may need to fall on a community process with an onboarding ramp that doesn’t fall only on the shoulders of those accepting patches.

As a community it behooves us to step in earlier and help new devs polish their contributions before submission.

Especially if we see a fraustration brewing, step in and offer code review to the new developers, who want to contribute, but need some guidance.

Often just guidance about the right questions to ask and where and how to find the answers oneself before asking.

The eternal September doesn’t have to be so, offering to help with onboarding a new dev helps everyone.

Spin glasses are a proposed model of learning in Neural Nets[0] along with state changes and sand pile collapses.

So this paper is worth reading if you study learning in neural nets

[0] Spin-glass models of neural networks Amit et al 1985 https://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevA.32.10...

This was why Hopfield was awarded a physics Nobel - spin glasses as emergent learning.

Along with Expected Energy of Brownian motion in gases for Hinton’s Boltzmann Machines ( and of course backprop being Newtonian downhill on the manifold of correctness ).

Langland’s worthy crossovers and the utility of the generalisation.