News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

adw

Re:The Fall of Scientific American on Monday October 26, 2026 @03:14AM (#50240199)
It was screamingly obvious from what I wrote.
Re:The Fall of Scientific American on Monday October 26, 2026 @02:56AM (#50240056)
Where did I say “for the whole marathon”? The point of pace setters is that they run shorter distances faster and then drop out. They’re given a tempo to run by the lead group, yes, and they enable that lead group to run faster by providing shelter. This is true from the 1500 upwards; look at Josh Kerr’s recent mile record, the Breaking 2 project, etc.
Re:The Fall of Scientific American on Monday October 26, 2026 @02:53AM (#50240031)
Jasmin Paris has won a fair number of extremely difficult ultras in mixed company, for example. Really long ultras are not an exclusively male domain. The marathon is if anything too short.

(Have a read about persistence hunting).

The article’s point is that the assumption that “men evolved to hunt” is unsupported by the evidence and therefore implicitly sexist. This is a defensible position.

Re:The Fall of Scientific American on Monday October 26, 2026 @02:49AM (#50240004)
“Y'all realize that the competitors can run faster than the pace setters, right?“

Generally they can’t - the pace setters run at a pace above typical max for the distance (but within max for the shorter distance they are running), sheltering the people they’re pacemaking for.

You want to believe things are simple, but they’re not.

Wildly, severely not, honestly. They're going about retail second-hand on Reverb, with thin supply. You might do better having a look in the Chase Bliss Audio Discord.
Re:Boards of Casio on Friday September 25, 2026 @01:15PM (#49847294)
It's not a ROMpler, but Hydrasynth Explorer.
Re:The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @02:18AM (#49797370)
Melanie Matchett Wood is elliptic curves, which Anthropic got some results on recently.
Re:The k-server conjecture is true on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @10:02AM (#49712680)
I’d be shocked if anyone with any kind of post-secondary education in any numerate discipline couldn’t give you at least an informal definition of a metric space. Certainly all the physicists, all the geneticists, all the ML people.
Re:Matt Mullenweg put on 'leave of absence' on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @07:51PM (#49636301)
Fidji Simo has well documented chronic health issues so there’s no reason to assume that the ostensible and actual reasoning are far apart there.
Re:Meet the Ig Nobel Prize Winners on Saturday September 05, 2026 @03:20PM (#49579750)
The famous levitating frog guy has the double; one Nobel, one IgNobel.
Re:.name Termination on Thursday September 03, 2026 @05:33PM (#49557398)
Schools use it!
Re:The death of San Francisco's Market Street on Thursday September 03, 2026 @05:33PM (#49557390)
The Noah Smith/Nate Silver axis of opinion-politics writers are — literally — Stephen J Smith and Skip Bayless for people who think politics is sports. They're in the entertainment business.
Re:.name Termination on Thursday September 03, 2026 @01:36PM (#49553697)
There are many examples; k12.<state>.us is another.
Re:And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @11:07PM (#49356151)
The implication (given that the US is an outlier here) is that prevention is much better than cure here; that means reform of healthcare and social housing so people are less likely to wind up in that trap.
> Yet IPv6 hasn’t been adopted.

news to literally anyone on a mobile internet connection (which is most internet connections!)

Re:Postmortem for Kernel Soundness Bug #14576 on Saturday August 01, 2026 @03:25PM (#49137561)
What is the error rate of human programmers? Anyone who tells you that either human or A.I. code is magically exempt from issues is selling you something.
Other post-train mechanisms have meaningful bandwidth for introducing new information to the model (on-policy distillation is more or less the other extreme). RLVR aligns the model to particular behaviors it could already (unreliably, intermittently) express, it doesn't introduce new behaviors; the behaviors were latent in the pretrain/midtrain.
Re:Some thoughts about Anthropic's new cryptanalysis results on Wednesday July 29, 2026 @04:25PM (#49102585)
This paper is less dramatic than you think it is and really just re-explains what RLVR does.

Let's stipulate that what pretraining does is train next token prediction over a gigantic corpus. You can then sample from this distribution repeatedly (cf the Large Language Monkeys paper) and count how often it passes some deterministic verifier.

What GRPO-style RLVR does is precisely this, but then reward the trajectories which passed the verifier. These distributions are _by construction_ within the accessible output space of the pretrained model; you're reweighting the distribution so that pass@k goes up, because that's (for applications like programming) very useful. RLVR is about making sampling more efficient; the only new information being added to the system is the presence of the verifier, and note that you only get a reward when the verifier passes, so there's essentially no mechanism for "teaching new facts" here.

She went to UCL which is also a tier one university, though.
Re:Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns on Wednesday July 22, 2026 @06:59PM (#49014620)
One of the coolest things about seeing a show at the Fillmore is getting the posters they hand out. A number of bands sell, or have their artists, sell show posters (which then become collectible limited editions); it's way less offensive when it's King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard than when it's Wizards of the Coast.
I mean, they kind of have, but mostly by finding an infinite money glitch.
Re:Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled on Monday July 20, 2026 @11:02PM (#48987554)
They’re skint too. It’s something you would really like the research council to take on.
Re:Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled on Monday July 20, 2026 @09:41PM (#48987104)
The living-costs stipend for an EPSRC PhD student is around £20k so it's about ten percent of that... big commitment for a student to make!
The usual answer is "config macros", because if you don't give people something Turing complete they'll just m4 their way into Turing completeness and that isn't really an improvement. (Starlark in Bazel, etc.)
Another intuition is that near a minimum you can Taylor expand the function and show that the higher order coefficients (past the square) are negligible.
Re:United Wizards of the Coast recognized by NLRB on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @07:22PM (#48653013)
It is common for big workplaces to have multiple unions and essentially all unions are sectoral and role-specific rather than company specific.

Take the NHS; it will have to deal with ten plus separate unions - https://nhsunions.org/#about – of which the biggest powers are the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Nursing, but the cleaners are GMB or Unite and they're huge pan-working-class institutions.

Education has to deal with the NEU, the NASUWT, and the NAHT, each of which has a different political slant. Some unions in the UK have been historically rather centrist in their politics (a good example of that is Prospect, https://prospect.org.uk/about/, which is a roll-up of a number of scientific and finance unions), some are firebreathing communists, but all of them work across employers.

There's also no such thing as a closed shop in the UK – because there are much stronger worker protections, there's less of a need for one.

(I was, at one time, in a majority-UCU workplace; https://www.ucu.org.uk.)

> you cannot go to a bank and ask them to help you acquire something 100x worth your cap.

you literally can, it's the entire point of eg management buyouts

It's just an acronym, "parameter-efficient fine tuning". LoRA is one method, prefix tuning is another, there are more.
> So much precision is required that session musicians are playing most of the things you hear, not the actual artists.

In pop music this has been true since the 60s. For independent music it has mostly never been true. This hasn't changed much.

Older »