Hacker News: pigscantfly

New comment by pigscantfly in "Ereader Easy Swedish"

pigscantfly — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 18:25:38 +0000

Honestly probably just literary license -- this author seems to employ pretty florid prose. I'd say it actually sounds more natural to say "towards the west / mot väster" in Swedish since it's more common to use as a noun vs. as an adverb than in English.

If you're in the US, I recommend bokon.se for ebooks -- they're one of very few sites that accepts American credit cards. Otherwise, you're kind of stuck with libraries (if you have one nearby with a good foreign language section) or packing your suitcase. I'd also recommend Historiepodden on Spotify and Sommarprat on sverigesradio.se -- don't really watch TV myself but others here have mentioned svtplay.se if you're into that.

New comment by pigscantfly in "Ereader Easy Swedish"

pigscantfly — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 06:27:20 +0000

It converts to lätt svenska (simplified Swedish), which is usually intended for beginners / students and I believe is the point here. The translated text is missing a lot of details, though, yes.

New comment by pigscantfly in "Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything"

pigscantfly — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 06:01:20 +0000

The samples your input is batched with on the provider's backend vary between calls and sparse mixture of experts routing when implemented for efficient utilization induces competition among tokens with either encouraged or enforced balance of expert usage among tokens in the same fixed-size group. I think it's unknown or at least undisclosed exactly why sequence non-determinism at zero temperature occurs in these proprietary implementations, but I think this is a good theory.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00951 pg. 4 [2] https://152334h.github.io/blog/non-determinism-in-gpt-4/

New comment by pigscantfly in "Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything"

pigscantfly — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 02:58:17 +0000

This isn't really true unfortunately -- mixture of experts routing seems to suffer from batch non-determinism. No one has stated publicly exactly why this is, but you can easily replicate the behavior yourself or find bug reports / discussion with a bit of searching. The outcome and observed behavior of the major closed-weight LLM APIs is that a temperature of zero no longer corresponds to deterministic greedy sampling.

New comment by pigscantfly in "Show HN: DeepSeek Your HN Profile"

pigscantfly — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 21:02:52 +0000

Absolutely love this project -- great job. Remarkably insightful from just a bit of input -- would love to point this at Twitter profiles.

Roast: They know so much about ancient history, it's like they lived through it! Prediction: The user might embark on an AI-driven archaeology project, blending their passion for history with machine learning.

New comment by pigscantfly in "Normans and Slavery: Breaking the Bonds"

pigscantfly — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 22:31:37 +0000

Other folks may have more apt examples to share, but I would examine the history of Dacia and also the Sasanian fortification lines both east and west (but especially east) of the Caspian Sea -- both of which separated the empire from nomadic tribes of the steppe.

I believe these involved depopulated regions both north and south of the main defensive structures to allow harrying of invading forces while denying access to plundered resources.

Eventually, they were overcome by the Hephthalites (aka White Huns) following heavy Sasanian losses north of the limes in the AD 484 Battle of Herat, but it's interesting to note that the defensive structures separating southern 'civilization' from the steppe were considered a joint responsibility of the predominant (Roman/Sasanian) empires in spite of their generally being at war with each other, as the nomads were a shared threat.

Edit: Another great example is drawn from Caesar's description of Helvetian practices in his Gallic Wars; the Helvetians, a Germanic tribe located in modern Switzerland, had deliberately depopulated a wide area around their territory for defensive purposes.

New comment by pigscantfly in "Fish in remote tank made into fractals with Video Feedback Device [video]"

pigscantfly — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 06:57:08 +0000

The guy who invented psychedelic light painting is still living in SF and giving occasional shows -- have known him for a few years as a neighbor, ran with a pretty interesting crowd in the 60's and 70's.

[1] https://billhamlights.com/history/

New comment by pigscantfly in "I am starting an AI+Education company"

pigscantfly — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 19:05:53 +0000

I think this perspective is belied by the vast over-subscription of free public education in places where it has previously been paid only[1] (at this point, mainly in Africa). It does seem like there is strong evidence that most children and parents recognize the value of education and are self-motivated to pursue it where it is accessible to them. I believe it follows that lowering cost and barriers to quality education will improve outcomes without a need to otherwise coerce participation.

[1] See, most recently, Zambia

New comment by pigscantfly in "Five common English words we don't know the origins of–including 'boy' and 'dog'"

pigscantfly — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 17:57:07 +0000

Similarly, it bears striking resemblance to the Swedish 'pojke', which can be colloquially shortened to 'pojk' and also means boy. It's apparently been derived from Finnish within the last millenium, though, so could be a false cognate.

New comment by pigscantfly in "Discovered June 16th, large asteroid to pass between Earth and moon on Saturday"

pigscantfly — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 22:46:17 +0000

The LOCKSS [1] digital preservation threat model (I've been told, there's a whitepaper if curious) considers nuclear first strikes and large solar storms -- they maintain a global network of servers for archiving and preserving academic research.

[1] https://www.lockss.org/why-lockss

New comment by pigscantfly in "Group chats rule the world"

pigscantfly — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 18:19:51 +0000

This is a very real take on where memes 'start' nowadays in the valley.

New comment by pigscantfly in "Italian streets that don't exist on any map (2022)"

pigscantfly — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 03:08:47 +0000

No-fee PO Boxes also cover situations in which USPS doesn't deliver to a house in a rural area (no carrier service, as noted in your source [2]). It's very common in many small towns.

New comment by pigscantfly in "Daniel Kahneman has died"

pigscantfly — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 17:53:00 +0000

Thanks for sharing this -- I read the book maybe a decade ago and largely discounted it as non-replicable pop-sci; this changed my opinion of Kahneman's perspective and rigor (for the better!)

New comment by pigscantfly in "The Google employees who created transformers"

pigscantfly — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 16:13:43 +0000

It would have gone much better for Google if the Brain team had been permitted to apply their work, but they were repeatedly blocked on stated grounds of AI safety and worries about impacting existing business lines through negative PR. I think this is probably the biggest missed business opportunity of the past decade, and much of the blame for losing key talent and Google's head start in LLMs ultimately resides with Sundar, although there are managers in between with their own share of the blame.

New comment by pigscantfly in "Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down"

pigscantfly — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 05:21:57 +0000

Yes, this is one of the top outlets focused on the valley tech scene. It's subscription based, and they are more expensive than most others, which is probably why you haven't seen it posted much.

New comment by pigscantfly in "North Korean science fiction"

pigscantfly — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 18:47:41 +0000

"The Dead Mountaineer's Inn" is a fairly unique sci-fi noir also from the Strugatsky brothers that was my first introduction to their work. It interested me enough that I read all their other books afterwards -- worth checking out!

1. https://www.npr.org/2015/03/19/392634682/mountaineer-is-a-mu...

New comment by pigscantfly in "Electric bike, stupid love of my life"

pigscantfly — Sun, 16 Jul 2023 17:40:15 +0000

I had a foldable e-bike for two months (was great) in SF before it was stolen. Someone saw me ride up to my house and enter the basement entrance where I kept it locked to a pole in a utility closet. Later on, they grabbed a food delivery bag, told another tenant they were making a delivery, got buzzed into the building, and stole the bike. They didn't get either battery, but I haven't bought a bike since.

New comment by pigscantfly in "AI Canon"

pigscantfly — Thu, 25 May 2023 20:01:25 +0000

Just curious, are there any sources you could share on that? Or is this the kind of intel you need to be in the really, really in-crowd for in order to know what's really going on?

[Edit]: Can't reply that deep in the thread, but thanks for the insight!

New comment by pigscantfly in "Google DeepMind"

pigscantfly — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 19:22:05 +0000

95% of those people have left Google because the ethics and safety teams prevented them from releasing any products based on their research. We have those ex-Googlers to thank for ChatGPT, Character.ai, Inceptive, ... which you'll notice are not Google products but rather competitors.

New comment by pigscantfly in "The Complete Guide to All the Taquerias of Redwood City, v2.0 (2008)"

pigscantfly — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 17:00:10 +0000

Hard to pin down precisely, but the tacos are better and more consistent in my opinion than eg. the Grullenses on El Camino in Redwood City and Palo Alto. It's also a bigger spot with murals, nicer seating, full salsa bar, and usually some people watching games around the bar. Just a great spot to stop in!