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fxj

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www.seattletimes.com 6y ago

New model predicts when states can safely begin easing corona virus restrictions

fxj
3pts0
www.cnx-software.com 6y ago

TIL: Some 9V Batteries Can Be Recharged with a Simple USB Cable

fxj
3pts0
www.extremetech.com 6y ago

Elon Musk: Starship Will Fly for 20-30 Years, Aiming for Fleet of 1k

fxj
2pts0
iapp.org 6y ago

GDPR: German property firm fined 14.5M for keeping old data

fxj
2pts0
www.extremetech.com 7y ago

Scientists Simulate Human Colonization of the Milky Way

fxj
1pts0
www.nytimes.com 7y ago

Fake Science: ‘Predatory’ Scientific Publisher Is Hit with a $50M Judgment

fxj
1pts0
www.theatlantic.com 8y ago

A year-by-year history of pollution in the Roman Empire

fxj
2pts0
bigbash.it 9y ago

BigBash It – Convert SQL queries into bash scripts

fxj
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Data Scientist at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (Munich, Germany)

fxj
1pts0
www.hearty.ai 9y ago

Presidential debate: live analysis of candidates' heart rates

fxj
3pts0
pando.com 12y ago

Explainer: what is big data?

fxj
1pts0
ens-newswire.com 12y ago

U.S. Sailors Sue Japanese Nuclear Plant Owner TEPCO

fxj
2pts0
community.seattletimes.nwsource.com 13y ago

Apple-Microsoft Lawsuit Fizzles To A Close (1993)

fxj
14pts6
www.physorg.com 15y ago

US West Coast: on frontline from nuclear cloud?

fxj
1pts0
www.informationisbeautiful.net 15y ago

Because every country is the best at something (Visualisation)

fxj
4pts2
www.sciencedaily.com 15y ago

Women Attracted to Redshirts, Research Shows

fxj
5pts3
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask HN: Why isn't Javascript the new BASIC?

fxj
32pts24

I think the battery life of a smart watch cannopt be underestimated. I have all the old pebbles which I love darely but then I got a Amazfit Bip and I stayed with it until today. One month (!) of battery time with a HR sensor and notifications is all I need so why ever change.

I dont know why apple, samsung and google are not getting it. But I would not even touch one of their products with a 2 feet long pole.

Just my experience and 2 ct.

And one thing: Pebble2 is really really nice, but 200 euro? The Amazfit Bip is (was) 40 euros. Why the price difference?

People talk about a Butlerian Jihad against AI as if you could just ban LLMs and be done. I bet some govermenst would like to do that for ordinary people. They can ban visible products (chatbots, public APIs, GPAI services), and laws are already targeting those.

but you cant ban the math!

the same transformer/attention ideas work great as compressors, function approximators, and surrogate models in physics, chemistry, CFD, etc., where they show up as "PDE‑Transformer", "Neural Operator", or "Hybrid Surrogate Model", and not as "chatbot". ;-)

So even if you outlaw certain AI uses, the core tech will just move into scientific and engineering workflows under different names, where most people won’t recognize it. Would be interesting whether it is possible to write a LLM-like program just using compression and function interpolation algoritms.

just my 2 ct

One thing to consider:

The (well-known) Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (if dont know it, look it uop) is often invoked for natural languages, but there’s a pretty direct analogue for programming languages: the language you "think in" during solving a problem biases which abstractions and idioms you reach for first.

If you force an LLM to first solve a problem in a highly abstract language (Lisp, APL, Prolog) and only then later translate that solution to C++ or Rust, you’re effectively changing the intermediate representation the model works in. That IR has very different "affordance", e.g.

- Lisp pushes you toward recursive tree/list processing, higher‑order functions and macro‑like decomposition. (some nice web frameworks were initially written in LISP, scheme, etc...)

- APL pushes you toward whole‑array transforms, point‑free pipelines and exploiting data parallelism. (banks are still using it because of perforance)

- Prolog pushes you toward facts/rules, constraint satisfaction, and backtracking search. (it is a very high abstraction but might suit LLMs very well)

OK, and when you then translate that program into C++/Rust/python, a lot of this bias leaks through. You often end up with:

Rule engines, constraint solvers, or table‑driven dispatch code when the starting point was Prolog.

Iterator/functor pipelines and EDSL‑like combinators when the starting point was Lisp.

Data‑parallel kernels and "vectorized" loops when the starting point was APL.

In principle, an LLM could generate those idioms directly in C++/Rust. In practice, however, models are heavily shaped by their training distribution and default prompts. If you just say "write in Rust", they tend to regress towards the most common patterns in the corpus (framework‑heavy, imperative, not very aggressively functional or data‑parallel), even when the language would support richer abstractions.

By inserting a "thinking" step in a different paradigm, you bias the search over solution space before you ever get to Rust/C++. That doesn’t magically make the code better, but it does change which regions of the design space the model explores.

Same would also be true for python which is already a multi-idiomatic language. So it might be a good idea to learn a portfolio of different languages and then try to tackle a problem with a specific language instead of automatically using python/go/rust because of performance.

Something to consider...

p.s. how would a problem be solved when the LLM would have to write it first in erlang? Is it the automatically distributed?

p.p.s. the "design pattern" of the GoF comes automatically to my mind, which might be a good hint to the LLM to use.

You can of course use any language but here is my advice: you should use the language that you know best to make your life as uncomplicated as possible when you want to understand what the LLM was creating.

Remember, you are the judge whether the code is OK and if you use assembler you might get really performant code, but can you trust it?

Of course it might be a good incentive to learn rust or go. Or challenge yourself to learn something really cool like LISP, COBOL, FORTRAN, APL or J. (just kidding...)

just my 2 ct...

In the long run there is no alternative to really reading your codebase and understanding what is going on. You can leave the nitty gritty details to the LLM but you have to be in the drivers seat and know how the parts of your codebase works together. You have to be the architect and can leave the plumbing to the LLM, but dont try to make a plumber an architect.

just my 2 ct

TOTP is also just password + some computation. So where is the difference? There is a lot of security theatre around TOTP with the QR code and then need of an app but you can write a 8 liner in python that does the same when you extract the password out of the QR code.

   import base64
   import hmac
   import struct
   import time

   def totp(key, time_step=30, digits=6, digest='sha1'):
        key = base64.b32decode(key.upper() + '=' \* ((8 - len(key)) % 8))
        counter = struct.pack('>Q', int(time.time() / time_step))
        mac = hmac.new(key, counter, digest).digest()
        offset = mac[-1] & 0x0f
        binary = struct.unpack('>L', mac[offset:offset+4])[0] & 0x7fffffff
        return str(binary)[-digits:].zfill(digits)

https://dev.to/yusadolat/understanding-totp-what-really-happ...

WebAssembly in the browser does feel great when you look at things like Pyodide/Pyolite, JupyterLite, xeus, webR and even small tools like texlyre – you get a full language/runtime locally with zero server, just WASM and some JS glue. The sad part is that VS Code for the Web never really became that kind of self-contained WASM IDE: the WASI story is focused on extensions and special cases, and running real toolchains (Emscripten, full Python, etc.) keeps breaking or depending on opaque backend magic. So right now the best “pure browser” experiences are these focused notebook/tool stacks, not the general-purpose web IDE people were hoping vscode.dev would become.

MCP is a fad 6 months ago

MCP is just a small, boring protocol that lets agents call tools in a standard way, nothing more. You can run a single MCP server next to your app, expose a few scripts or APIs, and you are done. There is no requirement for dozens of random servers or a giant plugin zoo.

Most of the “overhead” and “security nightmare” worries assume the worst possible setup with zero curation and bad ops. That would be messy with any integration method, not only with MCP. Teams that already handle HTTP APIs safely can apply the same basics here: auth, logging, and isolation.

The real value is that MCP stays out of your way. It does not replace your stack, it just gives tools a common shape so different clients and agents can use them. For many people that is exactly what is needed: a thin, optional layer, not another heavy platform.

Get money from donors. Wikipedia shows how that can be done. Or get money from the EU.

Mozilla is a strawman for google that they can claim there exists another browser that is not chrome because of antitrust laws. And now that Microsoft forcefeeds win11 user with Edge it will not take long and google doesnt need firefox anymore.

For sure I would give a donation to firefox if they would build a decent browser which listens to the user but not as they do now.

just my 2 ct

I see it at our place that seniors get more productive but also that juniors get faster on track and more easily learn the basics that are needed and to do basic tasks like doumentation and tutorial writing. It helps both groups but it does not make a 100x coder out of a newbee or even code by itself. This was a pipe dream from the beginning and some people/companies still sell it that way.

In the end AI is a tool that helps everyone to get better but the knowledge and creativity is still in the people not in the input files of chatgpt.

In my experience AI is wikipedia/stackoverflow on steroids when I need to know something about a field I dont know much about. It has nice explanations and you can ask for examples or scenarios and it will tell you what you didnt understand.

Only when you know about the basic notions in the field you want to work with AI can be productive. This is not only valid for coding but also for other fields in science and humanities.

I agree, you need to know the "language" and the keywords of the topics that you want to work with. If you are a complete newcomer to a field then AI wont help you much. You have to tell the AI "assume I have A, B and C and now I want to do D" then it understands and tries to find a solution. It has a load of information stored but cannot make use of that information in a creative way.

Also AI cannot draw conclusions like "from A and B follows C". You really have to point its nose into the result that you want and then it finally understands. This is especially hard for juniors because they are just learning to see the big picture. For senior who already knows more or less what they want and needs only to work out the nitty gritty details this is much easier. I dont know where the claims come from that AI is PHD level. When it comes to reasoning it is more like a 5 year old.

Learning == Compression of information.

It can be a description by a shorter bit length. Think Shannon Entropy and the measure of information content. The information is still in the weights but it is reorganized and the reconstructed sentences (or lists of tokens) will not provide the same exact bits but the information is still there.

The question is: Is it like jpeg compression where the errors do not accumulate but the image comverges to a self inverse compressed image or does the data set converge to a single point which is meaningless?

just tried this: take the graph of the functions x^n and exp(x) how many points of intersection do they have?

chatgpt gave me the wrong answer, it claimed 2 points of intersection, but for n=4 there are 3 as one can easily derive. one for negative x and 2 points for positive x because exp(x) is growing faster than x^4.

then i corrected it and said 3 points of intersection. it said yes and gaev me the 3 points. then i said no there are 4 points of intersection and it again explained to me that there are 2 points of intersection. which is wrong.

then i asked it how many points of intersection for n=e and it said: zero

well, exp(x)=x^e for x=e, isnt it?

That not only works for compilation but also for more general code transformations like code parallelization with OpenMP in C and Fortran, Array-of-lists to List-of-arrays, or transform python code to parallel C-code and make a python module out of it.

I have created some pipelines this way where the LLM generates input files for a molecular dynamics code and write a python script for execution on a HPC system.

I didnt get the explanation of the multiplication. After reading the wikipedia article it made mode sense:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracovian

The Cracovian product of two matrices, say A and B, is defined by

A ∧ B = BT A,

where BT and A are assumed compatible for the common (Cayley) type of matrix multiplication and BT is the transpose of B.

Since (AB)T = BT AT, the products (A ∧ B) ∧ C and A ∧ (B ∧ C) will generally be different; thus, Cracovian multiplication is non-associative.

A good reference how to use them and why they are useful is here (pdf):

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

Damn, he mentioned Andy's Krabblergarten. Now it will be overrun with even more tourists. My serious advice: Don't go there!! The Schnitzels are aweful and the Beergarden is ugly. ;-)

Too bad that Google, Apple, Intel now have offices here. This drives the rents up. Gentrification already killed the gay quarter. All luxury appartments and people now start complaining that the vibes of the quarter are gone. Who would have thought...

Hamburg is more conservative than Munich (I have lived in both cities). It is more like Austin wehen you compare it to a city in Texas. And Hamburg is in no way as hippy as San Francisco was. The closest I would compare Hamburg to is Boston.

In the golden 70s Munich was a melting pot for musicians, gay people, Hippies. They still have the nudist beach in the city centre. Try to find something like that in the US.

Hamburg has a harbor and is at the riverside of a large stream so that makes it a complete different setup. Munich on the other hand still has a castle in the inner city (Residenz) and has many historical buildings. Hamburg has the status of a "state" in Germany while Munich is the capital of Bavaria (a state in Germany). Both cities are rich and the rich people also celebrate the weath in both cities. If you want a party city you better go to Berlin. (Arm aber sexy (Poor but sexy)) is their slogan.