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The Antikythera mechanism – 254:19 ratio
A couple of followups on a recent episode of In Our Time.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 5,273 posts.
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Maximum likelihood estimation and loss functions
When I started learning about loss functions, I could always understand the intuition behind them. For example, the mean squared error (MSE) for regression seemed logical—penalizing large deviations from the ground-truth makes sense. But one thing always bothered me: I could never come up with those loss functions on…
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A visual proof that a^2 – b^2 = (a + b)(a – b)
A visual proof that a2 – b2 = (a + b)(a – b). Sophie Germain wrote, “It has been said that algebra is but written geometry and geometry is but diagrammatic algebra.”
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XFCE 4.20 Released
After almost two years of work, we are happy to announce the release of Xfce 4.20.
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In-Depth Ruby Concurrency: Navigating the Ruby Concurrency Landscape
I was honored to present a talk on Ruby concurrency at RubyConf 2024. It represents a high-level distillation of much of my writing and research over the past year. The conference itself was great, and presenting was such a fun experience. Here is the talk, titled “In-Depth Ruby Concurrency: Navigating the Ruby…
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Quick takes on the recent OpenAI public incident write-up
OpenAI recently published a public writeup for an incident they had on December 11, and there are lots of good details in here! Here are some of my off-the-cuff observations: Saturation With thousa…
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Tenstorrent and the State of AI Hardware Startups
Semi-custom silicon is a bigger problem than Nvidia.
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School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study
Psychologists at the University of York, who tested the impact that smartphones have on children’s behaviour for a new two-part documentary series for Channel 4, found that a ban in school impacted positively on sleep and mood.
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Should you ditch Spark for DuckDB or Polars?
There’s been a lot of excitement lately about single-machine compute engines like DuckDB and Polars. With the recent release of pure Python Notebooks in Microsoft Fabric, the excitement about these lightweight native engines has risen to a new high. Out with Spark and in with the new and cool animal-themed engines— is…
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Hacking physics from the back of a napkin (2020)
February 24, 2020. The computational power of a humble napkin is awesome. I discuss three napkin algorithms — dimensional analysis, Fermi estimates, and random walks — and use them to figure out why rain falls, the length of the E. coli genome, and the mass of a proton, among other things. These examples suggest a…
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Fast LLM Inference From Scratch (using CUDA)
This post is about building an LLM inference engine using C++ and CUDA from scratch without libraries.
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Preferring throwaway code over design docs
If you have discipline to throw away your first idea, draft, throwaway PRs often drives more progress than a design doc.
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Array Languages for Clojurians (2020)
appliedscience.studio ships with Moz DA 25 and 70 referring domains — a rare descriptive .studio pickup. Listed at $100.
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Konwinski Prize
Why I launched the K Prize, aka, why want to give $1M to the first open source AI that gets 90% on contamination-free SWE-bench.
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Computing Inside an AI
Since the launch of ChatGPT, explorations in two directions kicked into high gear.
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Silicon Valley Tea Party a.k.a. the great 1998 Linux revolt take II (1999)
Anyway, here's what happened: Not to say that big brother is everywhere, but short of having microsoft people monitoring our lists and newsgroups (with wouldn't overly surprise me, after all they also tried a PR compain with magazines, posing as simple users who liked microsoft products), the announcement was…
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Byte Latent Transformer: Patches Scale Better Than Tokens
We introduce the Byte Latent Transformer (BLT), a new byte-level LLM architecture that, for the first time, matches tokenization-based LLM performance at...
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A quick look at OS/2's builtin virtualization
A while ago, someone on the fediverse mentioned "OS/2's virtualization features" to me. I don't remember who it was, sorry. I had the chance to take a look at this today.
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macOS 15.2 breaks the ability to copy the OS to another drive
macOS 15.2 was released a few days ago, with a surprise. A terrible, awful surprise.
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Wishing for a more orderly disruption may misunderstand government reform
Wishing for a more orderly disruption may misunderstand the nature of government reform
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Sharing new research, models, and datasets from Meta FAIR
Meta FAIR is releasing new research artifacts that highlight our recent innovations in developing agents, robustness and safety, and architectures that facilitate machine learning.
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Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit
Elon Musk’s latest legal filing against OpenAI marks his fourth attempt in less than a year to reframe his claims. However, his own words and actions speak for themselves—in 2017, Elon not only wanted, but actually created, a for-profit as OpenAI’s proposed new structure.
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Garbage collected smart pointers in Rust via concurrent cycle collection
Scheme to the Spec is a series on the more complex, often overlooked aspects of programming language implementation.
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Researchers discover new third class of magnetism
A new class of magnetism called altermagnetism has been imaged for the first time in a new study. The findings could lead to the development of new magnetic memory devices with the potential to increase operation speeds of up to a thousand times.
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I replaced my son's school timetable app with an e-paper
How I replaced my son's school timetable app with an e-paper
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Noninvasive imaging method can penetrate deeper into living tissue
MIT researchers developed a non-invasive imaging technique that enables laser light to penetrate deeper into living tissue, capturing sharper images of cells. This could help clinical biologists study disease progression and develop new medicines.
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My PhD advisor rewrote himself in bash (2010)
The point of these scripts is not to ban all use of constructs like the passive voice. (When it comes to writing, there are exceptions to every "rule.")
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Donald Bitzer has died
CHM remembers Fellow Don Bitzer, computer pioneer who co-invented the flat-panel plasma display and was called the "father of PLATO.”
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Eyes Wide Shut: Hidden in plain sight
Eyes Wide Shut is the last work of legendary movie director Stanley Kubrick, and like many of his films it contains layers of meaning not easily deciphered or understood on first viewing. Released in 1999 to mixed responses, Eyes Wide Shut has since garnered considerable interest and has come to be