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Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa on Monday November 02, 2026 @01:27PM (#50341273)
Most interesting thing that stands out to me is the number of names that appear to be what I would consider an abbreviation of a more traditional name.

e.g. “Pat” is cited, but doesn’t specify whether that refers to Patricia or Patrick.

Always interesting to revisit the idea of the theoretical role “education” plays in society. One might view the primary objective of school as a sorting machine or one that imparts knowledge for its own sake. These two things aren’t specifically mutually exclusive, but you can have only one “primary objective”.

Only having experience within the US myself, I have always found the idea of “forced ranking” for grades a little odd. Though admittedly, I do skew towards being (perhaps a bit too) idealistic in that sense.

I was under the impression it was already established that the cat is both ginger and not-ginger?
I may be confused.

How is priming different from transfer learning?

Re:The designer lamps in my house on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @07:41AM (#49977040)
As a former lighting designer, we would call this “task lighting” and you are completely correct. Generally speaking, task lighting is MUCH more pleasant that simply relying on overhead lights, recessed or otherwise.
Re:A Brief History of the Bloomberg Terminal on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @08:25PM (#49916225)
Was going to say almost exactly this. Very similar experience in my background as well (CAD interfaces).
Re:World Labs is joining AMD on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @07:41AM (#49907490)
Stopped here to say this as well. While he may be lesser-known than the three names mentioned, I’ve been a fan of Justin Johnson’s work since discovering circa ~2019. I believe he is with the WL crew.

Grats to the team.

Came here to say this
Re:Jev: New frontier model 40-400x cheaper and 20-200x faster on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @12:56AM (#49811807)
I’m struggling to understand how this approach is novel.

How is this different from nearest-neighbor within traditional vector search, used by RAG systems? What am I missing?

1. Compute input embeddings 2. Concurrently compute distance-to/logits-of runtime-specified (sic cached) label embeddings 3. Return greatest/closest label

I do appreciate the Kahneman reference.

Or is their base assumption that their primary os users are children?

MacOS certainly feels like a toy to me in many regards.

Re:I am often wrong on Sunday September 20, 2026 @11:16PM (#49782667)
Well, sounds like problems and products are largely solved.

60% of the time, the framework works, every time.

For me, it was about the time of the early announcements for the TPM2.0 reqs for windows 11 that I started to seriously consider alternatives (though I consciously accepted many pain points even then).

The initial debacle that was the Recall recall and announcing the level of AI stuffing of win 11 that made me actively try out Linux mint (which has been quite nice and smooth). LLMs help to diagnose and fix items if you aren’t familiar with Linux. You no longer have to scour message boards for up-front answers (only use them as a “confirmation backstop”).

For work I now use macOS which feels like a toy but is ok overall (probably still some personal habit-based things).

If it weren’t for the fact I still develop plugins for a single, very specific windows-only app in my spare time, I would completely ditch windows, with contempt. Outside of Windows I am continually stubbing my toe on every single use of every single MSFT product with which I interact; primarily outlook, teams, and some azure stuff. Their products feel highly “feature optimized” with absolutely zero (perhaps negative) cross-feature cohesion. e.g. it’s as if the various outlook panes and the boxes of content were designed so modularly and independently that they don’t re-size or scale themselves cooperatively.

I perpetually experience stark jamais vu using their products, i.e. I am forced to use them every day and each time feels as unfamiliar, clunky, and unintuitive as the first time I ever touched them.

Re:Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf] on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @09:04AM (#49625899)
It doesn’t seem this is a question of ToS though. I would hope it is abundantly clear to anyone and everyone:

THEY’RE USING YOUR DATA

As they involve themselves directly, explicitly in the process of scientific research and discovery, it becomes a question of scientific and professional ethics.

Re:Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf] on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @08:56AM (#49625796)
It certainly does not excuse any actions, but it seems like OAI’s initial and continued intent was to scoop Anthropic. Unfortunate that it seems Buckmaster ultimately became collateral damage within the _battleground_ of his own research project.

Strange times.

Re:Solving the Jane Street Reverse Engineering Challenge on Friday September 04, 2026 @11:08PM (#49572729)
Are you me? EE, always manage to go the hard route (inadvertently)…
Re:Fastpotify on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @07:33AM (#49520554)
Kudos, I have been carrying exactly this on my personal “to do” projects list for quite some time. Looks really nice!
Re:Decompiling a Nintendo 64 Game in 84 Days on Thursday August 27, 2026 @10:30PM (#49473680)
- super smash bros

- LoZelda Ocarina of time& majora’s mask

- starfox 64

- Mario party

- extreme G racing

- jet force Gemini

- golden eye

- conkers bad fur day

- Mario 64

- Tony hawk

Man… so much nostalgia

Re:Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B on Thursday August 27, 2026 @08:24AM (#49463649)
I think you mean Dodecahedrillionaires
This article is a classic straw man. It supposes a simplified and trite intent of KA then goes on to explain why THAT intent is doomed from the start.

I mostly used KA between 2010-2015, and received immense benefit. These were the years it was MOSTLY “just videos”. Having revisited more recently, I found the gamification, quizzes, etc. simply distracting.

My understanding is that he started KA as a private YouTube channel to tutor his own family members, made it public, and it grew in popularity organically.

I haven’t used khanmigo, but given the climate and evolution of LLMs over the last 6 years, it is a completely reasonable goal to attempt to employ them in learning (though it sounds like it was not as effective as planned for.. reasons).

KA never pretended to be “all you need” for learning. It was always at least an excellent supplement to a given curriculum, and Sal’s genuine interest in the videos he narrates always sounded (to me) as palpably genuine which also goes a long way. There is a reason most textbook chapters have an initial section called “motivation”. The primary job of a teacher is to incite interest, and potentially direction at strategic points…

As the adage goes: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

Re:How does IKEA come up with names for its products? on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @09:56PM (#49355587)
It’s not load bearing, it’s a way of life.

The names just hit different.

Re:The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services on Saturday August 15, 2026 @09:37PM (#49316074)
I think what you call “TEMU-Fication” is more widely and classically known as “commoditization”.

The article was a nice read, but I was having a hard time understanding why attempt to coin a new word when the exact phenomenon is already (very very) well known.

> It bounced back by training AI models to quickly process mortgages…

Between the years of 2018-2025, I led very many professional discussions and educational presentations regarding the theory and application of AI/ML in the org I worked (a ~120 person org lacking in any substantive expertise or awareness of the field).

One of the most important topics within those conversations was demystification. Several times I was asked (in earnest, by adults, in public fora) about “terminator/skynet scenarios”, sometimes intended metaphorically (related to the profession) and sometimes literally.

My response every single time:

I don’t fear “skynet”. My biggest fears surrounding the continued proliferation of AI are the mundane, boring, and nascent uses that completely bastardize the world as we know it. Uses like mortgage/loan approval, healthcare coverage approval, hiring, legal adjudications etc., etc.

Uses where the decision outcomes have a direct, major, intimate impact on people’s lives.

I am generally pro-AI/ML (when applied thoughtfully), but my greatest fears are and have ALWAYS been in knowing just how much easier it enables these kinds of decisions to inevitably be outsourced or made in an otherwise (more) thoughtless, dehumanizing way.

While it’s easy (and at times cathartic) to criticize big corp leaders, the CEO and company described in the article gives me a visceral reaction deeply within the uncanny valley that is actually difficult to describe.

Re:OpenAI's Only Ethicist Reportedly Left Last Month on Friday August 14, 2026 @03:00AM (#49295485)
“Ethics is largely solved.”
Interestingly, I have personally felt this way about projects in which I was involved in the past(written both by me and by others)…

sometimes starting from scratch just faster and/or easier.

Impressive work for someone of any age!

- any project that involves hardware or physical objects (especially ones you are manufacturing!) is impressive

- the craftsmanship

- references to established standards

- documentation

- actually publishing

As others have said here you can drop the “wannabe” tag (or don’t, we’re all wannabes at heart :))

Nice job and keep up the good work!

Re:Yes you can measure engineering on Sunday August 02, 2026 @11:37AM (#49145558)
Skimmed quickly and seems like a nice system.

I would have liked a comparison to something like Kanban which tries to aggregate to a (seemingly?) similar metric but is a more prominently known system.

Very cool work! Nice job. Road-map looks good too! I always appreciate client/local-first emphasis. I have been seeing a lot of great in-browser apps coming out via 3js,wasm,etc (THANK YOU LLMs)

With interest in this space you may be interested to check out:

- That Open Company in the BIM industry (not personally affiliated, but admirer). - Fovea ArchVision (also not directly affiliated, but can attest that the team are great people.)

It is _emerging_ in the sense that complex (sic non-linear) systems can exhibit unintended or unexpected behaviors.

It is _intelligent_ in the sense that it optimizes a thing that is hard for humans to not anthropomorphize.

Things like percolation theory, swarm theory, and others are similar topics in “complex systems”. Neural networks are interesting because they combine aspects of both complex systems and dynamical/adaptive systems (ie systems with a feedback loop).

A neural network at its very core is a function fitting algorithm. It stores matrices of parameters (ie weights and biases) such that every parameter (and combinations thereof) captures a relationship of your data in exactly the same way the slope and intercept are obtained through Linear Interpolation. All of the Regularization tricks applied just are attempts to incentivize a given parameter to not encode any trends too specifically (think an instance vs a type).

In this way you can ask yourself “how many aspects of your data are required to capture it adequately?” This is what scaling offers.

Re:What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph on Saturday July 18, 2026 @04:22PM (#48961951)
I recall some moves where SO announced they would be revising ToS to disclose their intent to repackage and use the site’s content for sale and/or model training.

Contributors responded by going to delete their own respective contributions en masse. Upon doing so, were banned by the platform mid-process which then led to people going back to revise their contributions to be false rather than deleted.

I guess that’s “LLM related”

Wow, a blast from the past to be sure. Was not but any means avid, but did own a tipman. And was always dazzled when someone showed up with an angel.

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