dwrodri

As someone who used LaTeX heavily in grad school, using Typst in VSCode to create bespoke invites to an event was quite nice! Would highly recommend giving it a spin.

This reminded me of lucidrains, perhaps one of the most prolific PyTorch users and paper implementers on the Internet. His implementations were crucial references to my own ability to boostrap my paper-implementing skills. Looks like he is still around and doing really awesome stuff. https://github.com/lucidrains

I could see this being really useful for people who need VM-Sandboxed software, but also need quick and dirty bridges between host/guest. Great contribution!

Canonical was simply 14 years too early, but we are rapidly apporaching this vision: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/02/ubuntu-for-android-c...

question to clarify:

If the LLM designs the circuit, it is clear "contamination" if the tool calls which wrote the RTL / Verilog are also in the same context window as the specification design.

If a windows DLL, distributed without a license that says anything regarding, is it a "clean room implementation" if there is some nonzero chance the source code was leaked into the weights at pre-train time? I guess there should be some sort of method for subpoenaing frontier labs to ask "can you grep for this code in the training set for this model", but that might not be practical or feasible.

was about to hop into the thread to make a jeer about the highly compensated engineering team at Anthropic apparently not testing their website on iPhone screens.

Accessibility is important, and I find that "Reader Mode" in most browsers is quite good. Everyone should have access to the tools to consume content. Did your browser not provide that functionality?

When I was a vision engineer at a previous role back in 2022-ish, laptop-class Intel chips used in their SFF NUCs were powerful enough to run small finetuned convolutional nets by dancing across the different on the package: first decode using QSV, and then downsize using the CPU, run the images through an OpenVINO model running on the iGPU, and aggregate results and append metadata using the CPU core. You could have 50% of the hardware in today's high-end security cameras for 10% of the cost.

I have to assume that hardware advancements in the past four years have only pushed the efficiency envelope further.

My deepest conflict with Python as someone who works with it professionally is balancing "keep it simple and clean" with an acknowledgement that reality is often is complex and messy.

Synchronous, mostly functional python scripts written with the standard library and perhaps a few dependencies generally feel like the best the language has to offer, and they frequently make great prototypes (and I have put a few in production).

But I have also dealt with a lot of important stuff that felt like the wrong tool for the job:

- Airflow tasks, and durable workflows as a whole on top of a database

- async stuff, and generally the fact that you need `aiofile` to interact with the filesystem asynchronously

- "Productionized" stuff around NumPy and DataFrame APIs. I think there are genuinely fascinating uses for this stuff and its still great! JAX stood out as the the API that truly "clicked" for achieving "simplicity" despite the difficult challenges that it solves.

Typing woes appear the most when I am handed a prototype to productionize. Good static analysis of types carries you so far, it makes me frequently wonder if something even more aggressive than what TypeScript does would have been ideal. There is a great scripting language trapped underneath a mountain of adjustments that have been made to Python so it can "be used for writing large scalable software systems" and it makes me question whether that ever should have been the point of Python in the first place.

P.S. INB4 Stroustrup quote about languages people complain about vs ones they don't use and all that. You can tell Go was designed for very specific use cases and hasn't catered too much to use cases outside of that.

Something of consideration: Flock cameras were installed after discussions across the HOA and local police department, after a multiple crimes happened in an area. So long as a discussion about the lifetime of the cameras is raised eventually, this sounds like a measured and reasonable use of surveillance.

There is still something to be said about the lack of alignment between Flock the company and the HOA as to how that data is used, but the compromise was explicit, and there was at least some coordination within the community. At the heart of the issue with automatic surveillance is the lack of accountability over those who retain the data and the lack of consent of those surveilled, and measures were taken to address one of those two within your community.

I was asking around a while ago about better single-node solutions to "durable workflows" than Airflow before I was familiar with the terminology. Admittedly, Go + durable workflows in the cloud feels like the perfect marriage. Seeing the gated features makes me hesitant, unfortunately, but definitely considering this!

Google has muddied the waters on their Gemini usage statistics as it now powers a big chunk of Search. Depending on how you cut it, Gemini (and Gemini powered products) are probably producing the most output tokens seen by the most human eyeballs by a large margin.

Google at its core is not a dev tools company and it has become evident that is where the money is given the verifiable nature of software. Hixie's reflections on his tenure at Google still ring in my head to this day, though I have never worked there[1].

The people at the helm of Google no longer see the company's identity as something which must be channeled through a product or an experience. Some will point to the DoubleClick acquisition, others will point to Google Reader, or Pichai's ascension. Despite his very short tenure, MBA/McKinsey-brain is a very real phenomenon and it's no mistake that it shaped the "promotion packaged as a product launch" culture that steered Google away from seriously betting on anything that wasn't ads. To quote the signull tweet linked elsewhere in this thread, you can have everything at Google, except for permission.

Most importantly--I don't think there's a single tech product where I can point and say "Google wouldn't do that". You can contrast this with say, other Alphabet companies which don't suffer from this remotely as much. It is VERY clear what Waymo and YouTube are trying to accomplish, and while it frequently makes a ton sense for the companies to share infrastructure and product knowledge, YouTube does an exceptional job on the product side of making it very clear what they would and wouldn't do. They have experimented and shut down experimental features before (is their MOOC functionality still around?), but since it's fairly clear Google specifically is no longer working in service to the mission of providing the world's best digital portal for accessing information, I think it would behoove of them to figure out what their mission is.

1: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1

I like the linking of "construction of a type is evidence of correctness"!

Author here:

A lot of my professional C++ experience comes from the computer vision space where I am specifically linking against FFmpeg (libav does its own share of memory management tricks that don't always play well with RAII).

I think of static functions (even within member classes) as a signifier of "hey, you don't need a constructed object for this to work and it doesn't depend on class instance state".

In application code, I was typically relying on Myers Singletons and the implicit thread-safeness more than what you see here. I debated dropping the static keyword because it stands out as odd especially in a private class method, but settled on keeping it.

A very specific limitation of this approach is indeed "Day of Month" and "Month of Year" aren't given their own types! The type specification should likely be applied specifically

Author here. The post didn't get much traffic when I uploaded so I didn't engage much with the thread. Looks like I should've come back!

I specifically wrote that by hand to note the specific shortcomings of this approach when evaluated under King's thesis. I do acknowledge that I use LLM models heavily when drafting the code snippets in this blog post, and I do a mini review in the conclusion of the downsides of using these models.

Admittedly probably some aggrandized boasting here, but I think empirical verification of that Adam modification alone would be a meaningful contribution, unless that's prior work?

I wish computer mice did this.

I know multiple people whom are quite attached to 10+ year old mice that haven't been manufactured for quite some time, and would like to keep the familiar shape and design.

Serious FreeBSD question: I like a lot of what FreeBSD promises, but have been hesitant to make the leap for my home server as I enjoy hosting game servers via steamcmd. I know FreeBSD has Linux binary compatibility, but I am unsure how this would play out for all of my hosting needs. Also, I have some old Nvidia GPUs in this machine, which I might get rid of as they are no longer supported by the latest releases of ML packages, but I also might keep them around for self-teaching CUDA.

How do FreeBSD users get around the inconveniences associated with the "the rest of the world" running on Linux?

Author here, welcoming feedback and ideas for how you'd approach challenges such as these. There was a long road of operational tasks to get to a "quick" iteration loop in my debug UI, that I'll be ready to share that story once my new ranker is outperforming my old one. As of right now, the entire data + ranking operation runs on an few-years-old gaming PC with 24GB of ram and 12 cores.

The NMF model was fairly simple to get off the ground, thanks to the maturity of the deployment ecosystem surrounding it. Getting the Set Transformer to beat it in my internal benchmarks has been a journey, hopefully I'll share later this year!

I only write about once a year, but in 2025, I started getting serious about using LLMs to make headway on some of my larger side projects, and the results are getting promising. Link here: https://derekrodriguez.dev/magic-the-gathering-is-full-of-in...

I would love to host an ultra high quality stream on my own web server, and then have that exact stream piped to YouTube live via OBS. Is there an easy way to do that now?

YouTube likely won't support streaming 3440x1440 60FPS video, and while discord technically supports it, they usually compress the footage fairly aggressively once it's sent up to the client, so I'd like to host my own; it only needs to support a few people. I wouldn't mind hosting it so my friends and side project partners can watch me code and play games in high quality.