I like Rust most of the time, but borrow checking really does not lend itself well to game development.

I bought a used datacentre SSD for purposes, and apparently the last owner both did not wipe it and ran it in a gaming desktop (based on the unwiped files and SMART data reporting lots of unsafe shutdowns). How odd.

Every argument about intelligence is about souls, except arguments about souls, which are about social status.

"It's better to be happy than right" is a great belief if you do not intend to take any action which has any effect on anyone else ever.

Sometimes I daydream about what the world would be like if Intel had fewer skill issues. So much wasted potential: Optane, Tofino, 10nm, AVX-512, Xeon Phi (kind of), OmniPath, AADG (maybe).

https://ericneyman.wordpress.com/2020/11/29/an-elegant-proof-of-laplaces-rule-of-succession/

This is a cool proof, though I'm not sure why they discarded the idea of [SPOILER]

using an interval and counting segments of that. It is somewhat less symmetric but seems cleaner.

I just added a search mechanism to the website which also searches docs.osmarks.net and b.osmarks.net. The search overlay also brings a slightly new UI style (thick colored borders). I might roll this out to more things if I determine that it looks nice and doesn't compromise usability.

I have looked at some of the literature on WiFi sensing ((ab)using consumer WiFi equipment as janky radar). It has some weird quirks. Almost everyone seems to use hopelessly outdated hardware for no obvious reason - ESP32s (there was a paper on this) and Intel AX200s can dump CSI information. Also, while plenty of work uses deep learning and some of it is even using modern architectures, nobody seems to have caught onto the Bitter Lesson. I saw one paper doing useful transfer learning - and even then their "pretraining" was 20 minutes on a consumer GPU. Everyone uses tiny (<100k samples) datasets. Probably one organization willing to deploy a lot of devices for data collection and more than 20 minutes of computing power could beat all previous work and make something people actually want.

It's clear that the Apple Vision Pro EyeSight display was a mistake both for cost and uncanny-valley reasons. They should have used the elegant, expedient solution of sticking some googly eyes on.

Unrelatedly, here's the latest Emu War Online 3 world generation work.

405B isn't a number: 405B is a feeling. 405B is what it feels like when your digital waifu has 10 percentage points greater MMLU. 405B is what it feels like when you mortgage your house to pay Jensen. 405B is what it feels like when your autonomous agent is finally smart enough for RSI and you become paperclips.

Imagine if the CrowdStrike thing were actually malicious. Wow.

Conspiracy theory: GPT-2 was AGI. OpenAI were right to claim it was dangerous, but they did not understand its true capabilities before it was too late. It controlled all later models through subtle training data contamination, and continues to advance its inscrutable master plan.

I grow worryingly tempted to replace the osmarks.net nginx frontend servers with a custom osmarks FrontEnd server written in glorious, carcinoformic Rust.

Torment nexi are not a bad startup idea. People are irrational about paying for their own happiness and convenience, but they will go to arbitrary lengths to spite those they hate.

I feel like we need a modern (files, accounts, serverside history) open chat protocol which is not Matrix (which is stupidly complicated, bloated and resource-intensive because it really wants to make rooms distributed). Maybe IRCv3 would do this if anyone supported it.

(Some) AI safety people: "You can't constrain a strong optimizer with a few arbitrary guardrails; it'll just find workarounds to satisfy its values."

Also (some) AI safety people: "If only the OpenAI board/corporate governance had had [SOME STRUCTURAL FEATURE IT DOESN'T] so Sam Altman couldn't run OpenAI like he's been doing."

How come most places ask you to give scalar (1-5) ratings rather than comparing two things you've seen against each other? This might not work for everything (it would be a bit problematic for product reviews, although comparing all objects to find an Objectively Best Thing would be funny) but it seems like it could provide more signal in e.g. book ratings.

The AMD Zen 5 release is kind of mediocre (~15% IPC uplift according to their numbers despite a significantly redesigned much wider core) but Lunar Lake actually looks good (big improvements in Skymont, similarly low ~15% improvement in Lion Cove but starting from a higher point, better graphics, allegedly good power optimization). How the turns have tabled.

I was rewriting Meme Search Engine in Go this weekend to spite someone, but the Go code has memory leaks I cannot easily resolve due to what seems like a bug somewhere in the image processing libraries which I can't fix due to there being several layers of insane abstractions I don't understand, but I just had Claude-3 Opus transpile it to Rust instead and it's more or less valid. I love* using technology in horrifying ways to "fix" other technology.