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geophile

4,814 karmajoined 16 jaar geleden

Submissions

Experiential Reinforcement Learning

arxiv.org
3 points·by geophile·5 maanden geleden·0 comments

Nation-Wide Verizon Outage

yahoo.com
2 points·by geophile·6 maanden geleden·1 comments

comments

geophile
·12 dagen geleden·discuss
That's exactly what I'm doing -- Mini M4 Pro 64GB, qwen3.6.

My hearing is not great, but I think I would have noticed the fan, and I have never heard it. In fact, I had to google to find out if it even has a fan.
geophile
·13 dagen geleden·discuss
Bad managers, in general, grab a metric and then unthinkingly optimize it. I’ve never worked for FAANG, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t have bad managers too.
geophile
·26 dagen geleden·discuss
My experience is almost identical. I have found that I need to be very careful with planning, breaking things down into small isolated steps (I can have qwen do this); and also (me) writing a very clear design. Relying on qwen to fill in a lot of those precise details results in those about-to-write loops.

Yeah, that edit inability is weird. I’ve updated AGENTS.md to limit editing (as opposed to rewriting) and that helps a little.
geophile
·3 maanden geleden·discuss
Oh spare me the cult of Larry Wall. His language was crap, and his pontification was unbearable.

That said, he's not wrong about laziness. I'd state it less cutely: Good software takes time, so be patient. The same can be said of most things created by people. Sure, there are flashes of inspiration, like Paul McCartney sitting down and just coming up with Get Back. But those are quite rare. And even in those cases, it often takes time to refine the idea to its final form.
geophile
·3 maanden geleden·discuss
From perusing reddit, I see some Windows users tempted to consider Linux, often because of Windows 11. But then, many of them won't move because: it doesn't work just like Windows; there is some Windows application they must have, or maybe they just don't want to learn the alternatives. Or they use word/excel/powerpoint and have to interact with others who do also.

The brainwashing, high tolerance for pain and misery (and expense!), and lock-in makes it close to impossible for ordinary computer users to escape.
geophile
·3 maanden geleden·discuss
Can someone write a tl:dr; about what’s going on? I am a very satisfied user of LibreOffice, and some of the comments here, suggesting we will need an alternative, are troubling.
geophile
·4 maanden geleden·discuss
On the Linux subreddits recent, I have seen a great increase in two kinds of posts: 1) That’s it, I’ve had it, windows is dead to me, I have moved/will move to Linux. Help me pick a distro. 2) I’d love to get off window and move to Linux but I can’t because it doesn’t have an app that works identically to word/excel/photoshop/whatever.
geophile
·4 maanden geleden·discuss
I stated no conclusions. I have not tried COSMIC, and I said that it’s COSMIC and Wayland seem to be problematic for people who have tried Pop_OS 24.04. (The one fact I do know is that Synergy, which I rely on, is still working on Wayland support.)

My only “conclusion” is that Pop_OS 24.04 seems to be incompatible with having a desktop that just works.
geophile
·4 maanden geleden·discuss
Yes, I believe I said exactly that.
geophile
·4 maanden geleden·discuss
I have been using Pop_OS for many years, and I’m still on 22.04, which uses X11. I don’t understand the pros and cons of X11 vs. Wayland, I just want a working desktop.

24.04 uses Wayland, and while some people have had no problems migrating, many people are having serious problems. From what I can tell, it’s not a good choice for me yet. This article tells me that it may not be a good choice ever.

I am a huge fan of System76 and Pop_OS, and I am sorry to see how this migration has split the community and forced many people to make difficult choices. I suspect that I will have to leave Pop_OS once 22.04 is no longer supported, in a year.

To be fair, there are two issues. Pop_OS Is introducing a new DE, COSMIC, which is written in Rust. That new DE is another source of instability. I’m afraid that Syatem76 has bitten off far more than it can chew.
geophile
·4 maanden geleden·discuss
All good points. But what would be really useful and easy is allowing the iPhone to be used as a full-fledged computer on a file system completely distinct from that used to run the phone. Then my laptop is just peripherals connected to my phone.
geophile
·4 maanden geleden·discuss
I think it’s a pretty strong statement. It is unfortunately weakened by going along with the “Department of War” propaganda. I believe that the name is “Department of Defense” until Congress says otherwise, no matter what the Felon in Chief says.
geophile
·5 maanden geleden·discuss
Z-order based indexes avoid the resolution problem. Basically:

- Generate z-values for spatial objects. Points -> a single z-value at the highest resolution of the space. Non-points -> multiple z-values. Each z-value is represented by a single integer, (I use 64 bit z-values, which provide for space resolution of 56 bits.) Each integer represents a 1-d range. E.g. 0x123 would represent 0x123000 through 0x123fff

- Spatial join is basically a merge of these z-values. If you are joining one spatial object with a collection of N spatial objects, the time is logN. If you are joining two collections, then it's more of a linear-time merge.

For more information: PROBE Spatial Data Modeling and Query Processing in an Image Database Application. IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 14(5): 611-629 (1988)

An open source java implementation: https://github.com/geophile/geophile. (The documentation includes a number of corrections to the published algorithm.)
geophile
·5 maanden geleden·discuss
The article gets at this briefly and moves on: "I can do all of this with the experience on my back of having laid the bricks, spread the mortar, cut and sewn for twenty years. If I don’t like something, I can go in, understand it and fix it as I please, instructing once and for all my setup to do what I want next time."

I think this dynamic applies to any use of AI, or indeed, any form of outsourcing. You can outsource a task effectively if you understand the complete task and its implementation very deeply. But if you don't, then you don't know if what you are getting back is correct, maintainable, scalable.
geophile
·5 maanden geleden·discuss
I did an approximate calculation.
geophile
·5 maanden geleden·discuss
The analysis misses a point. Wordle uses two lists of five letter words: words that are in the dictionary, and can be used in a guess; and those that can be used as the daily secret word. The latter list is smaller, and sticks to more common words. Wordle has been around for 1550 days, so they have used 67% of the possible words. In another couple of years, they have to either start using uncommon words, or recycle. There's no rush, so it's unclear why this is happening now.
geophile
·5 maanden geleden·discuss
For a long time, I had a MBP (this is in Intel days), with a Linux VM. It was like a reverse mullet, party in front (multimedia), work in back (dev).

And then:

    - Butterfly keyboard
    - Touchbar
    - M-series CPUs, which, while technically awesome, did not allow for Linux VMs.
So I switched to System76/Linux (Pop OS) and that has been wonderful, not to mention, much cheaper.
geophile
·5 maanden geleden·discuss
FWIW, On Reddit, I am seeing more and more discussions on the Linux subreddits or people getting fed up with Windows and switching to Linux. Usually, it's the Windows 11 upgrade that finally did it.
geophile
·7 maanden geleden·discuss
This seems like a good time to remind everyone of a letter by David Packard, to his employees. There is more morality, common sense and insightful business advice here than in any 1000 business titles you would care to name.

https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letter-107-david-packard-...

I think that OPs essay identifies that something bad happened at HP but completely misses what it was. Look at this quote:

    Around 1997, when I was working for the General Counsel, HP engaged
    a major global consulting firm in a multi-year project to help 
    them think about the question: “What happens to very large companies that
    have experienced significant growth for multiple successive years?”
OP says that the findings and recommendations included: "the decade long trend of double-digit growth was unlikely to continue", and "the company [should] begin to plan for much slower growth in the future."

OP then goes on to talk about fighting for resources for investments, a "healthy back and forth" on these tradeoffs, and then losing the "will to fight" following this report. "The focus became how not to lose".

Unlike OP, I did not work at HP. But I have seen up close startups, middle-sized companies, and huge companies, and the transitions among these states. So I feel justified in saying: OP has missed the point. And in particular, he makes no reference to that letter from David Packard.

Look at this quote from the letter:

    I want to discuss why a company exists in the first place. ...  why 
    are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company 
    exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of 
    a company's existence, we have to go deeper and find the real 
    reasons for our being. ... a group of people get together and exist
    as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish 
    something collectively which they could not accomplish separately. 
    They are able to do something worthwhile—they make a contribution 
    to society .... You can look around and still see people who are 
    interested in money and nothing else, but the underlying drives 
    come largely from a desire to do something else—to make a product—to 
    give a service—generally to do something which is of value.
I think this is the essence of what it means to do useful and interesting work in any technical field. Unfortunately, there are many, many examples of companies that have lost their way, forgetting this key insight. HP was certainly one of them. I would argue that Google and Microsoft are examples too. Boeing, for sure.

And sadly, there are very, very few companies that actually embody Packard's ideas. I think that JetBrains is such a company, familiar to many HN readers. Another one that comes to mind, from a very different field, is Talking Points Memo -- an excellent website that does news reporting and analysis, mostly on US politics. It started as a "blogger in a bathrobe", and 25 years later, it is a small, independent news organization, supporting itself mostly through paid subscriptions by a very loyal readership.

To me, the saddest part of the essay is this:

    In the last few years more and more business people have begun to
    recognize this, have stated it and finally realized this is their
    true objective.
(This is right before the "You can look around ..." section quoted earlier.) It seems to me that very, very few business people recognize the way to run a business, as outlined by Packard.
geophile
·8 maanden geleden·discuss
I thought I expressed that: "I came across structured programming. The core idea was ... Then there were Abstract Datatypes, ..."