sltkr · HackerTrans

The question is if they can tell it's fiber _before_ cutting through it and damaging it. This seems way easier with PVC pipes than with fiber cables.

sltkr

15 days agodiscuss

> That is how insane the times are becoming

Gee whiz what an interesting way of thinking.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah

sltkr

18 days agodiscuss

Presumably this is calculated into the contract.

If the price is expected to fall over time, then the negotiated price is below market at the beginning and above market at the end. From the suppliers view, they take a loss in the early years that they recover later.

Apple probably pays a premium to shift this risk to the supplier. Besides that they don't take a loss just because prices tend to fall. They only lose if market prices fall more steeply than expected.

sltkr

18 days agodiscuss

PyPy is an option too.

sltkr

19 days agodiscuss

[flagged]

sltkr

21 days agodiscuss

compression = prediction + entropy coding was already an insight from Claude Shannon in the 1950s

Since LLM are inherently token predictors, that makes using them for losless compression almost trivial. For something close to the state of the art see e.g. Fabrice Bellard (of course) ts_zip: https://bellard.org/ts_zip/

I think some of the confusion comes from the fact that there is a pretty big difference between the techniques employed by compressors that optimize compression ratio at the cost of nearly everything else, like ts_zip above, and practical tools that intend to balance compression ratio with limitation on CPU speed / memory, like zstd.

When optimizing for compression ratio, the prediction + entropy coding paradigm dominates. Practical tools, even modern ones like zstd, are mostly based around sliding window compression à la LZ77 (unzip/deflate), with the main selling point of more modern tools being that they scale up to larger window sizes and run really really fast. Some of these (like LZO) don't even have an entropy coding step to save time. zstd has both Huffman coding and FSE: Huffman coding is suboptimal but presumably it's an option because it's faster, and on lower compression levels it's preferable to be fast.

Anyway, the bottom line is: don't get confused between the state of the art in terms of compression ratio, and practical tools. Those are quite different things.

sltkr

21 days agodiscuss

I agree that that's the best way to take these kind of "rules", but that's the opposite of how the blog author presents it:

> the 3-30-300 test — a standard that has become the go-to for solving a universal urban problem

> 3-30-300 is a catchy, straightforward test that sets a clear benchmark for measuring equal access to nature.

> I found that my closest park isn't 300 metres away, it's 400 metres. That's close, but a fail.

It's a standard. It's a benchmark. And a park at 400 metres is no good; it must be 300 metres or else it may as well be 4 kilometers away. This isn't treating the test as a useful guidance, but as a hard target. As Goodheart's law states: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

When you focus exclusively on satisfying such metrics, you can end up with ineffective policy. Missing the forest for the trees, if you will.

sltkr

23 days agodiscuss

It nailed 2 out of 4, which I'm not going to repeat to preserve a modicum of privacy.

But unfortunately I'm not a professional footballer _or_ a fictional character in a Henry James novel (though I looked up the reference and it's close!)

sltkr

23 days agodiscuss

No university requires you to declare support for that belief.

sltkr

24 days agodiscuss

No, there is no such requirement.

sltkr

24 days agodiscuss

How is forcing prospective academics to pledge alegiance to the American woke left anything _but_ political? DEI statements were nothing more than obligatory loyalty oaths.

sltkr

24 days agodiscuss

There is a comparison here: https://loreline.app/en/docs/comparison/

sltkr

25 days agodiscuss

The post suggests replacing the linear congruential generator (LCG) with a permuted congruential generator (PCG). The latter has more random-looking output.

Another solution is to switch to a cryptographic hash function. For example, using sha256(seed || event type || counter) only requires storing seeds and counters in the save game.

This has several benefits:

  - You can find efficient implementations on all platforms without having to roll your own.
  - Gives the same output on all platforms by design.
  - Output is practically indistinguishable from randomness by design.

The main downside is that sha256 is significantly slower than any non-cryptographic PRNG, but considering how few random numbers you need during a typical game, this doesn't really matter.

sltkr

27 days agodiscuss

> Claude models have been getting notably worse at chatting over time, clearly inversely correlated to their ability to code.

Funnily enough, the negative correlation between chatting and coding skills seems to apply to humans as well.

sltkr

last monthdiscuss

If you compress the HTML, which you want to do anyway for HTML/CSS if you care about file sizes, then most of the base64 overhead goes away:

    $ head -c 1000000 /dev/urandom | base64 -w0 | gzip | wc -c
    1009042

    $ head -c 1000000 /dev/urandom | base64 -w0 | zstd | wc -c
    1000300

So gzipped base64 can add less than 1% overhead. Of course a binary format can be even more efficient (also when decoding, I imagine) but the question is if the difference is big enough to introduce an entirely new format when base64 data URIs are already widely supported.

Then the other question is why this proposed packed format is better than the dozen already existing formats like Web Archive, CHM, MAFF, MHTML, etc.

sltkr

last monthdiscuss

Where is the joke? What is funny about hundreds of thousand of Swiss people being unemployed and housing costs increasing every year?

And clearly you still haven't bothered to read the initiative, which doesn't kick out anyone, but demands the government revises immigration laws if the population hits 9.5 million before 2050.

But you _have_ found time to dig through my comments to find dirt on me to ridicule me. Clearly you're a hateful and despicable person.

> Better focus your efforts on finding a job that the foreigners stole from you

I never said a foreigner stole anything from me; I merely objected to the idea that Switzerland needs _more_ foreigners to work jobs, while hundreds of thousands of residents are looking for work. I'm clearly a terrible human being for wanting to... checks notes work a job for a living.

sltkr

last monthdiscuss

Hacker News admins: can we please ban illiterate morons like this who think they are contributing anything of value by responding directly to the post title alone, while obviously not having read the actual posted article?

sltkr

last monthdiscuss

Interesting that you're downvoted for pointing this out. Lots of people in Switzerland are struggling to find jobs, but no, they're all unfit, and we must import more immigrants.

Then of course those immigrants are laid off and contribute to the unemployment number, and rather than hiring them back, people will say we should import even more immigrants, and so on.

sltkr

last monthdiscuss

> On the other hand, it's already now hard to find people for almost any kind of work.

Lots of people in Switzerland are struggling to find jobs, especially in the tech sector after mass layoffs and outsourcing.

If you're looking to hire a full-stack software engineer in Switzerland, send me a message! But I bet you won't, because there isn't actually an abundance of jobs in Switzerland.

sltkr

last monthdiscuss

That's an easy answer, but it doesn't explain why nearby/culturally related countries like South Korea and Taiwan have similar or even lower fertility rates, despite never having a one child policy.

And of course China's fertility rate now is even lower than it was at any point when the one child policy was in effect.