animal531

The other day I saw the last episodes of The Office again. They totally murdered Andy Bernard (Ed Helms' character) the whole season, but he came up with this gem at the very end: "I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them."

Just change the title to "Foreign student fees in the UK to increase by $1500" (The universities will of course have to charge a little bit extra for the new admin work).

I've often joked that we humans are very much like dogs.

But for some reason it's never taken well when you tell a new parent that raising their baby is going to be a lot like raising a puppy.

Doing some googling against DeepSeek for which more stats are openly available: We need

~508GB+ Uncompressed memory

~256Gb with 3-bit compression (about 3 bits per weight)

~128Gb with 1-bit compression (1.58 to 2.3 bits per weight)

So uncompressed is still about an order of magnitude out of most home systems' reach, but with compression it's not far off.

I've been building some game user interfaces with it, and on the surface it looks amazing. It's iterating at lightning speed, but then after a while you start noticing all the holes.

For example I've made a first screen with a lot of elements, and now I want to create a 2nd similar screen, so I tell it to use the same code as we've created for the first to make the 2nd. With that as input it will create it and a) use e.g. the variables and setup from the first b) copy everything into the 2nd c) copy some things d) make a generic parent for both to inherit from

A human would have realized that this is something we're going to be doing a lot, so the last is the correct answer. Make generics for all elements, e.g. the screen's panel, effects, buttons, text etc. then implement those along with possible overrides etc. for all.

But it seems that it has no clear methodology. Depending on your exact wording along with today's weather you will get any combination of the options.

"What a time to be alive!" : I used to love Two Minute Papers, but these days all he's covering are AI releases instead of actually good papers.

The really interesting parts are easy to identify as the author did, but one can learn a lot from the boring parts as well.

For example with enough information about ship stores/rationing we can learn about how many ships they had, their travel patterns, a whole map of when they were where, the men involved and their whole history.

Alternatively, if there are suspicious gaps then you might find traces of reports that have been deleted, cross-referencing those to ships/officers that didn't report in as usual you might be able to track them to find out more information, etc.

On my Spectrum I came up with: 10 GOTO 20 20 GOTO 10

It would start the Spectrum's "loading screen" border which would then scroll infinitely.

At some point I also opened it up to see what it looked like on the inside, but I managed to damage the keyboard in the process. Thereafter whenever I wanted to play a game (via joystick) I would have to use a piece of wire to manually select the rows/columns of the matching keys to enter the load command.

Now if only they could spend time making Visual Studio 2026 perform up to par.

Just today I created e.g. 100 changes in a file, performed an undo and it rolled back 90 or so of the changes while somehow managing to keep the 5 at the start and the 5 at the end.

I wish we can limit AI in posts such as here, and/or for some creators.

As an example Two Minute Papers used to to be great but these days he's mostly covering AI advances, which to be honest become boring really quickly.

A common meme you'll see on ADHD in online posts are about how people with it are perfectly calm during emergencies, but then when any inconsequential thing happens such as e.g. breaking a shoelace and they'll just unravel and/or take forever to deal with it.

That's quite a complicated problem.

If someone comes to me and asks a general question I can easily say no. But if I go up to for example a librarian and ask them where to find book N, then I would expect them to either know where it is, or how to find it.

If instead I asked them what the weather was going to be tomorrow, then I don't know would again be a reasonable response.

So for me the line becomes a search engine problem where no just means "there are no pages for this search result", but translated into LLM.

I think instead of Yes/No I'd rather want some probabilities such as, "This response is N% accurate based on these research metrics", or "M% accurate based on the latest research on topic O at date P" etc.

Very nice results. For my Unity C# code I use Andy's package: https://github.com/andywiecko/BurstTriangulator

Looking at his performance graph it looks like he does about 1 million points in around 320ms or so (if I managed to read his graph correctly), albeit for float2 values and using Unity Burst which does SIMD+multiple threads.

Two Minute Papers often post info on some cloth papers: https://www.youtube.com/@TwoMinutePapers/videos

Here's just one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wibbnn3hV4U

Unity has begun to roll out CoreCLR in beta now which is a move from Mono to modern .NET 10.

The official release and LTS versions are still some months out though.

My favourite is probably Bepuphysics due to its C# nature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjtwSq3u6Dg

Unfortunately it was created before Unity could use vectorization and other C# engines were just starting out as well.

The source, a great resource for learning C# SIMD, even though its a few years old by now: https://github.com/bepu/bepuphysics2

My favourite way of playing old Civ 1-3 as a kid was to build a solid circle of units that would gradually expand and move out to fill all the available space.

Eventually you'd own all the land and your units would just be camped along the beachline, enjoying some downtime.

Some more interesting topics around the subject that I haven't seen covered in the comments:

- Hololive is huge and they definitely take a decent cut for their efforts. But why do people sign with them? The short answer is that they're a well oiled machine where people go through a sign up process where they create a test video etc. If accepted they're placed into groups (such as Hololive English) etc., but at the same time they also get to interact with all the other groups which immediately raises their popularity significantly.

They also look for some other related skills, for example probably all of the English group can sing semi-professionally on a stage etc.

In general your success is pretty much guaranteed once accepted, it just becomes a question of scale.

- Downsides: Usually the vtuber character, name, image and all other related copyrights belong to them. If there are disagreements then you can leave depending on your contract, but you can no longer use that character in any way. For example Nimi Nightmare used to be Fauna in Hololive, but she left and restarted on her own, whereas some other really popular streamers left but never seemed to resurface.

In general they also don't seem to collaborate much with vtubers outside of their space, so I'm sure there are some rules in play there.

I also wondered this before I ever saw any. There is a gradient from someone streaming with no cam, then a non-human vtuber, then human vtuber and finally a real human.

The simplest answer is probably that we all have our likes and dislikes, but personally for me I fall inbetween the non-human and vtuber section. If they stream permanently as e.g. a fish I find it too odd, whereas apparently my brain is perfectly happy seeing any kind of expressive humanoid that I can link to the speaking person.

If they have no cam then its just a voice over which feels too impersonal for the streaming space, which I don't like.

Roughly speaking FSM + stack based approaches are perfectly fine for 100 entities, but not for 1k.

Once you get to that point you can still make it work but it will take a lot of work to make it as fast as possible, whereas you'd have been better served by more branchless approaches that doesn't parse/jump the FSM.

Memory is a funny thing.

I also take months to learn new names, but I can tell you that my second interview ever was for a company which did low level SCADA work. Even though I never took that job or worked in any such related field I can still tell you what it stands for.

Cultural fit is the number one predictor for a successful fit, however a big wall here is with certain personality types (especially surrounding IT).

In general we don't open up easily to strangers and hate personal questions. We consider many social questions to be just fluff and will either brush them off or pick something with far too much personal information.

These issues especially surface when being interviewed by a non-IT worker.

As a kid I found it interesting that people pretty much always crossed their arms and/or their legs when sitting on the ground in the same pattern.

After that re-trained myself a few times out of interest to do it the other way around, and one goes through the four odd phases of having to focus on it vs it just happening correctly without thinking about it.

From what I remember it could take 2-4 weeks before you would just do it both without thinking and correctly.

There's a matching eye/brain condition where older people very rapidly develop cataracts or other eye problems and they spontaneously start seeing little people everywhere.

Usually their vision becomes blurry, but the tiny characters remain in perfect focus.

I've somehow managed to train mine out of trying to fluff me up the whole time, its become very factual.

Overall it saves me a lot of time reading when it's just focusing on the details.

You also often need several tiers of pausing. For example when paused you want the current game time to be zero, but you also want to ignore only some user inputs. You don't want to disable the menu or pause/unpause actions along with player actions, also you might want to pause dialog but not music (although you might alter it for the menu).

Then there are others such as vfx that can have their own tiers, you might have something in the background that is difficult to pause, stop and/or resume.

Then there are other things such as timers etc. that will need special handling, graphics card interactions etc. When done with those you also need to be able to resume and ensure that all of the previous will continue as if nothing have ever happened.

In the same vein some other "simple" things like saving/loading the game is often anything but.

Not mentioned is that studies are showing that areas over solar farms remain stable in temperature, but surrounding areas get a few degrees warmer, which is problematic for either people living close to them and/or if they are planted next to crops, other infrastructure etc.

Although looking at his, several of them are so covered in dots as to be opaque anyway.

I'd have maybe used different colored dots, e.g. N blue, then remove them and place 1 green etc. as a counter and so on.

I kind of wonder what the key difference is over 40 years for typing text vs code.

I type text at a rather slow rate due to poor training and never having really tried to improve, but when it comes to code I can output code sequences so much faster.

Ah, very cool. My personal favourite is this one: https://archive.org/details/engineeringformu00giec_0/page/n5...

My father owned a copy of it which I still have to this day. It had a lot of different formulas than the ones we were taught in school, and I liked the range of topics that it covered.