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lr1970

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Implementing eigenvalues needs complex numbers

This is exactly why eigenvalues are less flexible than singular values. You can have a real valued matrix that does not have any eigenvalues in the field of real numbers, all eigenvalues are complex numbers. Examples: rotation matrixes in R^2 have no eigenvalues in R. Singular values, on the other hand, are always real (they are eigenvalues of the Hermitian matrix MM^*) and can be used the same way for the matrices over real (R) or complex (C) numbers, hence extra flexibility. Added bonus -- singular values are never negative.

Instead of "more flexible" a better statement would be -- eigenvalues convey more information than singular values.

> For the first time, California discharged just over 12,000 megawatts, equivalent to 12 large nuclear plants, of energy from its battery arrays.

Clueless journalist conflates power (megawatts) with energy. They need physics 101. For electrical energy common unit is megawattHour (megawatt drawn for entire hour). A smaller unit would be megaJoule (megawatt drawn for 1 second).

UX in my Audi Q5 (2024) is terrible. With two phones in the car you never know which one is connected and whose google maps is being currently displayed. And then come the buttons designed with a contempt for a driver. I recently had to change a flat tire which is a story in itself. German engineering is soooo different these days.

pricing depends on so many factors like reserved/dedicated/spot/on-demand instances have all different prices.

Or you can have your own negotiated private pricing which is a whole different story in itself.

GPT-5.5 3 months ago

When I ask GPT-5.5 about its knowledge cutoff date it says "August 2025". Really?

Claude Opus 4.7 3 months ago

Just asked Claude Code with Opus-4.6. The answer was short "Drive. You need a car at the car wash".

No surprises, works as expected.

and uv forcing it into a single project directory made it quite inconvenient and unnecessary duplication of the same sets of libraries.

Actually, uv intelligently uses hardlinks or reflinks to avoid file duplication. On the surface, venvs in different projects are duplicate, but in reality they reference the same files in the uv's cache.

BTW, pixi does the same. And `pixi global` allows you to create global environments in central location if you prefer this workflow.

EDIT: I forgot to mention an elephant in the room. With agentic AI coding you do want all your dependencies to be under your project root. AI agents run in sandboxes and I do not want to give them extra permissions pocking around in my entire storage. I start an agent in the project root and all my code and .venv are there. This provides sense of locality to the agent. They only need to pock around under the project root and nowhere else.

How is pixi better than uv?

pixi is a general multi-languge, multi-platform package manager. I am using it now on my new macbook neo as a homebrew _replacement_. Yes, it goes beyond python and allows you to install git, jj, fzf, cmake, compilers, pandoc, and many more.

For python, pixi uses conda-forge and PyPI as package repos and relies on uv's rattler dependency resolver. pixi is as fast as uv (it uses fast code path from uv) but goes further beyond python wheels. For detail see [0] or google it :-)

[0] https://pixi.prefix.dev/latest/

From fyn's roadmap:

2. Centralized venv storage — keep .venvs out of your project dirs

I do not like this. virtual environments have been always associated with projects and colocated with them. Moving .venv to centralized storage recreates conda philosophy which is very different from pip/uv approach.

In any case, I am using pixi now and like it a lot.

GPT-5.4 5 months ago

I wonder how much can I read into it about gpt-5.4's personality.

Modeled on Sam Altman's personality :-)

<joke> How to tell a software engineer from a real one? A real engineer thinks that 1 kilobyte is 1000 bytes while software engineer believes that there are 1024 meters in a kilometer :-) </joke>

The biggest red flag for me is the author hiding their name. If you wrote quality book about a programming language you are not hiding your identity from the world.

One of the best movies about history of Apple and people involved is "Pirates Of Silicon Valley". Pretty accurate portrayal of Steve Jobs, Woz and the rest.

From "4 hour body" description on Amazon:

How to lose those last 5-10 pounds (or 100+ pounds) with odd combinations of food and safe chemical cocktails

• How to prevent fat gain while bingeing over the weekend or the holidays

• How to sleep 2 hours per day and feel fully rested

• How to produce 15-minute female orgasms

• How to triple testosterone and double sperm count • How to go from running 5 kilometers to 50 kilometers in 12 weeks

• How to reverse “permanent” injuries

• How to pay for a beach vacation with one hospital visit

After reading this description I put this book in the BS category.

There is only one or two lines of dialogue in the entire film.

Technically speaking with only one actor in the entire film there can be no dialog. These were couple of expletives. I love the movie -- it is so different.

The vast majority of advertisers returned,

They returned in the first few months of the Trump administration when Elon was an important man in the government with direct access to POTUS. But after Musk fell from the Trump's good graces the same advertisers quickly took their marbles and quietly left twitter.