Townley

Using Chinese could lead to a small amount of gains, but it's nowhere near as drastic as you'd think

Putting aside the question of whether English's larger training corpus would be a dimension of quality: content is "tokenized" before the model sees it. The "~4 English chars/token" rule isn't a strategy to optimize around because in practice, many English words become one token, the same way Chinese words do.

"I love you" and "我爱你" both tokenize down to 3 tokens. So no efficiency gains from a Chinese translation. "Telephone" is just one token, and "电话" (Chinese word for telephone that spans 2 characters) also gets condensed into one token. Sometimes there are minor gains, like "经济" being one token but "economy" being two. But it doesn't end up materializing in the gain you'd hope for by increasing meaning-per-character.

You can play around with OpenAI's tokenizer here. Great for getting particular about how to save tokens in prompt and tool definitions https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer

It’s heartening that there are people who find the problem you described “fun”

Writing a FastAPI websocket that reads from a redis pubsub is a documentation-less flailfest

It sounds like their vision for space-based data centers presupposes nearly-free energy costs, delivered via a colossal solar farm made possible by falling launch costs.

Temporarily putting aside (extremely fair) feasibility questions around those two pre-requisites, data centers are a not-bad choice for things to do with unlimited space energy.

Aluminum smelting or growing food are the two I’d think of otherwise, and neither of those can have inputs/outputs beamed to a global network of high-bandwidth satellites.

A competitive geoguesser clearly got there through memorizing copious internet searching. So comparing knowledge retained in the trained model to knowledge retained in the brain feels surprisingly fair.

Conversely, the model sharing, “I found the photo by crawling Instagram and used an email MCP to ask the user where they took it. It’s in Austria” is unimpressive

So independent from where it helps actually improve performance, the cheating/not cheating question makes for an interesting question of what we consider to be the cohesive essence of the model.

For example, RAG against a comprehensive local filesystem would also feel like cheating to me. Like a human geoguessing in a library filled with encyclopedias. But the fact that vanilla O3 is impressive suggests I somehow have an opaque (and totally poorly informed) opinion of the model boundary, where it’s a legitimate victory if the model was birthed with that knowledge baked in, but that’s it.

> These companions can take a variety of forms — in the 2004 study, which looked at 100 6- and 7-year olds, 57 percent of imaginary friends were human, 41 percent were animals, and one was “a human capable of transforming herself into any animal the child wanted.”

Real world data is a messy thing

In C# you can do

string foo = "bar";

string nameOfFoo = nameof(foo); // “foo”

Kinda nice for iterating through lists of variables and saving them to a key/value map

At work I’ve recently moved from a Node/TS monolith to “Python+TS react in a sea of .NET microservices I debug and contribute to”

It’s been the second time in my career I’ve been surprised by not hating C# (the first was goofing off with Unity in 2018). The language itself has a lot of niceties; for example a method to turn the variable foo into the string “foo”. The Neovim LSP set itself up just by installing the dotnet executable. And the syntax for creating complex workflows were pretty ergonomic once an experienced .NET dev walked me through what I was even looking at. I still prefer FastAPI + well-typed Python as the backend framework of my dreams… but I’d work in .NET again.

Blazor hasn’t sold me yet, but seems like a fine choice. It fits in the same class of tools to me as Django Templates, HTMX, or JS handlebar rendering. There’s a class and size of apps for which that’s perfect, and there’s some value in a fullstack language keeping your stack monolingual. But IMO the framework should stand on its own against frontend frameworks like React, Vue, or Svelte… with the simplicity of monolingualism added as a cherry on top. Otherwise you’re optimizing towards the number of languages your devs need to learn over which frontend framework would be the best fit for your app. And between the DX and expansiveness of the JS ecosystem, it’s been hard to imagine going back once you’ve spent a few years eating the shamefully-complicated-constantly-shifting-and-reforming elephant that is learning TS React and friends

Those diapers say 10-18lbs on the package, but they actually hold waaaaay less urine than that

—First dad joke my brother in law bestowed upon me after my daughter was born

My teenage niece is getting solid at chess, but I can still beat her handily. So we came up with a fun handicap the last few times we’ve played:

Every third turn, my four year old daughter gets to move for me. She doesn’t know the rules so she chooses a piece and we give her the full rundown of options where that piece can legally move. Neither of us can influence her choice, but there’s some degree of psychological play allowed for everyone’s entertainment

It’s been unexpectedly rich and fun for everyone involved:

- My daughter is slowly learning the game and likes hamming up the choice

- I exercise a different part of my brain around guarding eventualities and conservative movements

- Pure cackles of joy and glee from my niece whenever my daughter reaches for the queen

Another application of GLSL/SDL: you can make custom shader materials for yourself in ThreeJS using the ShaderMaterial. You write the GLSL code in a string within the material and it’ll be applied to the mesh the material is attached to

Gives you the ability to make some cool looking effects like fresnel without post-processing filters

A single person sifting through 15,000,000 pounds of trash at a rate of one pound per minute would take 28 restless years

But finding one of 2^256 private keys would take millions of years. This math felt correctly conservative https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2847/how-long-wo...

There’s a chance that if Moore’s Law holds, a computer might catch up after decades of continued exponential growth. But my money’s still on the trash spelunker in that race

> All of us must navigate the trade-off between “me” and “we.” A famous Talmudic quote states: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?” We must balance optimizing for oneself with optimizing for others, including the public good... To take an extreme example, Big Tobacco surely does not support the public good, and most of us would agree that it is unethical to work for Big Tobacco. The question, thus, is whether Big Tech is supporting the public good, and if not, what should Big Tech workers do about it.

The duty to align your professional life ethically scales with your ability to do so. I personally don't cast aspersions on anyone working in tobacco farms or in a gas station selling cigarettes; they're just trying to get by. But if you're one or two levels up Maslow's Pyramid, it's right to weigh your personal needs against the impact of your work. You'll also be better off for it, knowing that the world would be worse off if you decided to switch gears and become a carpenter/baker/bartender/choose your adventure.

I'll also say: there are ways to contribute morally outside of your 9-5. Volunteer to teach a neighborhood kid to code. Show your local sandwich shop how to set their hours online, or maybe even build them a cookie cutter Squarespace site. Donate a small fraction of your salary (eg 0.5% local, 0.5% global) to causes you believe in, and scale up over the years.

Wait I remember those ads and I’m now confused.

If vision-restoring eye transplants are the novel domain of futuristic moonshot research, how did Jerry Orbach’s eye donation give the “gift of sight for two New Yorkers” twenty years ago?

EDIT: Ah I follow now: he donated his corneas, which is a more routine procedure than an aspirational, vision-restoring full eye transplant

If a malicious party has access to the API key, it should be revoked regardless

For the last badge, it wasn't masterful strategy: I played until I got lucky with an overpowered Ring of Wealth run, and farmed the dwarven floors for like 3 days before breezing through the demon halls and ascending. That one and only six challenge run landed with 1,050,700 points, which was just enough to get the final "Over 1 million points" badge.

That was the last round I played, almost a year ago. I consider myself free from the game now, but look back on it fondly :)

Excellent game, I lost an embarrassing amount of time last year getting all of the badges.

The mobile versions are great because they’re ad-free, and work without internet access when on airplanes. And since it’s turn-based, it’s very interruption-friendly. The Reddit community is also a lot of fun: equal mix of strategy and memes.

Also notable: some dogs do get asthma, and cats have asthma commonly

https://www.webmd.com/pets/cats/asthma-symptoms-cats

I agree with your overall point that cloud resources probably shouldn’t be a problem for Amazon that factors into the hours of processing time. But is it true that AWS could provide at-cost resources to sister companies?

More of a legal/organizational question. But assuming Amazon Fresh is a legally-distinct entity with service agreements with Amazon Web Services, wouldn’t offering those services at below-market-rate be considered anticompetitive (and also call into question the legal separation of the two entities)?