dvt

19,033 karmajoined 14 tahun yang lalu

UCLA alum (philosophy, mathematical logic), startup guy, data engineer, CTO, immigrant, amateur kayaker. Find me at https://dvt.name (under construction) or @davvv on Twitter.

Submissions

Mira: An agent that never forgets anything. Persistent, shared memory

3 pointsby dvt5 bulan yang lalu0 comments

The Agent Fallacy

noemititarenco.com

4 pointsby dvt6 bulan yang lalu0 comments

Why Your AI "Fine-Tuning" Budget Is a Total Waste of Capital in 2026

noemititarenco.com

2 pointsby dvt7 bulan yang lalu1 comments

The Era of the Business Idiot

wheresyoured.at

120 pointsby dvttahun lalu127 comments

comments

kemarin duludiscuss

> Pangram does work

It's trivial to see how many people think Pangram is absolute trash[1] (because it is).

> You appear to be misinformed about how Pangram specifically works, it is not based on pattern detection of that sort. I recommend reading their whitepaper, it's a pretty understandable explanation of exactly how they trained their classifier.

I did read their paper (which is, by the way, very scant on details), and they trained their classifier in the laziest way possible: here's a chunk of "human-written" text and here's a chunk of "AI-written" text, put them in the right bucket, and do this a zillion times. Literally zero sophistication. Also: what do you think "pattern recognition" is, if not a "classifier"?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/academia/comments/1rm11rs/pangram_c...

kemarin duludiscuss

Pangram doesn't work, and I wish people would stop treating it as gospel (but the AI/anti-AI grift is real). Here's a fun paradox: I can literally tell ChatGPT: "Say X" and it will say "X"—so that's a case where content is both AI generated and not. What if it changes a few words? Moves some sentences around? Where does something go from human- to AI-generated? (This is the classic Sorites paradox.)

Pangram tries to look for common patterns (rule of three, em dashes, etc.) but these are heuristic methods and not to be taken as gospel. There is no provable method to make a distinction between AI and human-generated other than the fact that AI-generated text tends to reek of pseudo-intellectual undergrad with a thesaurus.

kemarin duludiscuss

Who implements transliteration rules? I assume operating systems? Or text renderers?

3 hari yang laludiscuss

This is pretty crazy, literally built something almost exactly like this for a project I'm working on (a local-first AI agent that does work on folders while you sleep). Basically going from JSON "Lego blocks" to full reports (including charting, though a subset of what Flint offers). And with post-generation validation and retry steps.

Functions extremely well and the result is a very clear (and consitent) human-readable "output layer." Cool idea, fun to see people converging on similar concepts in the space.

4 hari yang laludiscuss

I'm using Kokoro for a fun little side-project browser-based game I'm working on. It's legitimately super good for being only 85mb (for the wasm version) or 300mb (for the webgpu version).

4 hari yang laludiscuss

> to reveal both players to each client during the same tick

And I explained why this is not feasible given modern network topology. Players move around maps and peek around corners in between these "tick updates" the client gets from the server; therefore, we have to use clever methods of interpolation and prediction as well as server consensus to ensure that gameplay is smooth (e.g. models can't just pop in out of nowhere, movement feels good) while also being as fair as possible (e.g. we don't favor one player's view over another's).

5 hari yang laludiscuss

A tick is the smallest amount of time the server does its "work" in. It does not mean, as the person I'm replying to was implying, that clients are 100% always lined up, because a game is played (locally) at much higher update rates.

So a server, of course, does send updates (player position, etc.) every "tick," but that doesn't matter. Even assuming zero dropped packets (suppose we're playing over TCP), it would feel like shit (stuttering, rubber-banding, pop-in, jittery physics, etc.) to play a game over a ~60ms latency that updates ~60 times a second vs other people that also are ~60ms from the server, so game engines do a lot of interpolation and servers are in charge of concensus. Hence, it's a bit of a misdirection to say: "can't you just send everyone the right player data every server update?" because servers obviously already do that (and that's not really the hard part, anyway).

Local interpolation and remote concensus is the hard part, and games handle this differently. In CS, for example, two players cannot kill each other (with guns) simultaneously. Valve's engine requires that someone always wins a gunfight (which sometimes can feel random). However, I would argue that feels way better than, e.g. in Halo, where you can headshot each other (and both players die), which feels dumb and frustrating.

So when building these servers, there are lot of tradeoffs to consider (a lot of which might change the feel of the game).

5 hari yang laludiscuss

Well, if you cheat in WoW, Blizzard might just sue you[1], so that tends to be quite effective :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzar....

5 hari yang laludiscuss

> so I would consider it absolutely tenable

Always confuses me why people speak so authoritatively on topics they aren't versed in. PVS culling is not even remotely comparable to occlusion culling, mainly because wallhacks are not relevant accross the map; in fact they are only useful when opponents are always well into your PVS range.

FYI: there are also some clever ways to get around PVS culling (mostly by inferring opponent position based on other indicators, like gunfire).

5 hari yang laludiscuss

"Same tick" is a misnomer for a few reasons. First of all, games use UDP, which is basically a "fire and forget" protocol (which means packets get dropped routinely). Second of all, realtime games use some interpolation/prediction to make up for latency (and aforementioned dropped packets).

So it's sort of a "relativistic" temporal system, not a linear "oh now you're at t=1, now you're at t=2" kind of timeline. And there's all kinds of complicated ways you create concensus between multiple clients, between server and clients, etc. (A lot of this remains an active research area.)

5 hari yang laludiscuss

This has been done before in both 1.6 as well as Source. I helped with some of these implementations back in the late-2000s when I was playing professionally and I even tried to kickstart an anti-cheat hardware solution about a decade ago[1].. spent way too much time working on some of these problems. The main issue with occlusion was slightly increased latency, visual jitter because of interpolation (especially around corners), and a few other more technical problems[2]. It's good enough for public servers, but not tenable in serious competition.

Cheating has always been a problem in FPSs, and it likely won't go away. That's why premier competitions have always been on LAN.

[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/introducing-gameref-the-anti-cheat-h...

[2] Hard to fully obfuscate audio sources, hard to obfuscate hitboxes since you still need them for collision checking (e.g. if a grenade bounces off an enemy player behind a wall—the server does not do all physics for all clients), and this is on top of the engine itself sometimes requiring actual entities, so you're stuck with these dummy entities in memory, and so on.

10 hari yang laludiscuss

Location:Los Angeles

Remote: Yes

Relocation: Case-by-case

I'm an engineer and data professional interested in team-building, consulting and architecting data pipelines. At Edmunds.com, I worked on a fairly successful ad-tech product and my team bootstrapped a data pipeline using Spark, Databricks, and microservices built with Java, Python, and Scala.

At ATTN:, I re-built an ETL Kubernetes stack, including data loaders and extractors that handle >10,000 API payload extractions daily. I created SOPs for managing data interoperability with Facebook Marketing, Facebook Graph, Instagram Graph, Google DFP, Salesforce, etc.

More recently, I was the CTO and co-founder of a crypto gaming startup. We raised over $6M and I was in charge of building out a team of over a dozen remote engineers and designers, with a breadth of experience ranging from Citibank, to Goldman Sachs, to Microsoft. I moved on, but retain significant equity and a board seat.

I am also a minority owner of a coffee shop in northern Spain. That I'm a top-tier developer goes without saying. I'm interested in flexing my consulting muscle and can help with best practices, architecture, and hiring.

Would love to connect even if it's just for networking!

Blog: https://ai.dvt.name/whos-david/ (under construction)

GitHub: https://github.com/dvx

Email: [d]@[dvt].[name]

12 hari yang laludiscuss

This is a very authoritative answer that should be more nuanced and caveated as implementation-dependent. In some cases, repetition penalties take precedence over sampling; top_k and top_p can also be handled before or after the temperature step. In other cases, `0` is turned into like 1e-10 or some super tiny float value (which can drift if you do any arithmetic with it). Routing, quantization, etc. can also have an effect on sampling. And yes, in some cases, setting temperature to 0 can mean "pure greedy decoding" which makes the decoder about as deterministic as it can get.

12 hari yang laludiscuss

[dead]

12 hari yang laludiscuss

An alarming number of people don't understand that LLMs work via purely stochastic processes, so I'm happy to see in-depth pieces like this. I'm looking for a job and maybe this is why it's so hard to get a callback these days: resumes are just dumped in some LLM black hole and no one really knows how it works. The author says:

> temperature 0.1 — low, supposedly nudging the model toward deterministic outputs

This is not correct (and is briefly touched on later in the piece when he sets temperature to 0), temperature is not some kind of "deterministic" switch, but rather it affects the sampling distribution (which becomes more "spiky"—but is still very much a distribution).

12 hari yang laludiscuss

This is one of the few AI hills I will die on: not disclosing AI tool usage when you produce a product where the writing is the end result (in this case, the website I'm being sent to) is disrespectful to your readers and users.

    `The quickest way to see QSOE run — no hardware, no -kernel juggling.`

    `Real hardware, real disk.`

    `A working plan, not a contract: milestones may shift as the work reveals what's really next.`

I have no problem with using AI to draft docs, or as an editing tool, or even to help writing (if, e.g., you are not a native speaker) but this is just egregious low-effort slop. If you can't even put the time to write your own documentation (or at least disclose AI tool use), why would I trust you to even test your own sofware?

14 hari yang laludiscuss

Went over a few of these with a pretty keen eye, and they aren't that particularly interesting. The Docker one is just a weird bug, it's not a vulnerability, and certainly not a "0-day" (which is a pretty loaded term and people expect bad stuff to happen).

The nghttp2 nghttpx one is more interesting, and could potentially be used for phishing, but it's very hard to line up properly because the request queue is non-deterministic so basically impossible to target a specific victim (assuming proxy traffic).

The VLC one is just a straight-up crash/bug. And VLC crashes all the time when using weird codecs, so that's nothing new.

Am I missing something here?

15 hari yang laludiscuss

Likely doable with metaparameter tuning (used to work on a team with data scientists that were routinely doing this in various situations). Seems like a cool idea.

17 hari yang laludiscuss

In a world where Fira Code, Hack, JetBrains Mono, and like a zillion others (of equal, if not greater, quality) are offered for free, this is obviously a pure marketing play and it's sad we live in a world where even fucking fonts are so heavily monetized.

17 hari yang laludiscuss

Usually you need to be well-published/cited in the field, so a minor would likely not qualify. People joke around, but philosophers are some of the smartest people I've ever met, and it's not even particularly close. (I graduated ~10 years ago, so most of them are sadly lawyers or in academia these days, though some are engineers or entrepreneurs.)