flâneur

Benedict Neo

43 followers · 105 following · 6471 views

on the atlas — 549

highlights — 1613

  • What if the library of Babel was being constructed before our eyes and there was some mechanism for separating the masterpieces from the random strings of text, and all the masterpieces were dropping as fast as publishers could scoop them up? Would authors stop writing then? What about if the very second someone began composing a story in their private word processor, the demonic Master Librarian read their mind and completed their story in one million ways, then used some oracle to pluck the best for publishing. What then? The answer is probably the same no matter how bad I make it. The autho…
    The Dark Night of Mathematics - by Kirwin Hampshire
  • I have wondered if it is the express goal of these companies to make me kill myself
    The Dark Night of Mathematics - by Kirwin Hampshire
  • The idea is to have a chip with SRAM large enough to fit the entire model, so inference can happen entirely in-memory
    Two different tricks for fast LLM inference
  • A H100 chip (fairly close to the frontier of inference chips) is just over a square inch in size. A Cerebras chip is 70 square inches.
    Two different tricks for fast LLM inference
  • Anthropic’s fast mode offering is basically a bus pass that guarantees that the bus immediately leaves as soon as you get on. It’s six times the cost, because you’re effectively paying for all the other people who could have got on the bus with you, but it’s way faster3 because you spend zero time waiting for the bus to leave.
    Two different tricks for fast LLM inference
  • 三硝基甲苯” means trinitrotoluene (or TNT). It literally means "Benzene with 1 extra carbon atom and three NO2 radicals
    The Chinese periodic table goes hard - YouTube
  • Government agencies, corporations, and other policymakers all want to make decisions based on clear data about positive outcomes. They want to succeed on the metrics—to succeed in clear, objective, and publicly comprehensible terms. But metrics and data are incomplete by their basic nature. Every data collection method is constrained and every dataset is filtered.
    The Limits of Data
  • show me a large dataset with a better operationalization of “good art,” we’ll use it. And this is the core problem, because it’s very unlikely that there will ever be any such dataset
    The Limits of Data
  • git-spice branch fold¶
    CLI Reference - git-spice
  • merger of OpenTracing and OpenCensus
    OpenTelemetry is a CNCF Graduated Project | OpenTelemetry
  • homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.
    Heauton Timorumenos
  • We’re learning where to apply human judgment — auto-merging what’s safe, focusing review where it matters most — and rethinking how we plan and prioritize as the bottleneck moves from coding to decision-making.
    Coding Is No Longer the Constraint: Scaling Developer Experience to Teams and Agents at Spotify | Spotify Engineering
  • first private company to bring an advanced reactor to criticality under the DOE Reactor Pilot Program
    Antares
  • I would argue that one doesn’t really understand how software works until they have watched it work, and inevitably fail, in production. And one doesn’t really know how to create software until they have patched together someone else’s broken pieces
    Being oncall taught me everything - Yao Yue
  • 昔者莊周夢為胡蝶，栩栩然胡蝶也，自喻適志與。不知周也。 Once, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know that he was Zhuang Zhou. 俄然覺，則蘧蘧然周也。不知周之夢為胡蝶與，胡蝶之夢為周與。周與胡蝶，則必有分矣。此之謂物化。 Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn't know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou. Between Zhuang Zhou and the butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.
    Zhuangzi_(book)
  • Zhuangzi awakens from a dream, in which he was a butterfly fluttering freely. He doesn’t know if he is Zhuangzi, who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming of being Zhuangzi. This story puts Zhuangzi in contact with ‘the transformation of things’ – a reality in which identities are always fluid and never fixed
    How to be yourself, when you have no self. Lessons from Zhuangzi | Aeon Essays
  • If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds
    On Living in an Atomic Age – C.S. Lewis
  • The first gyunabe restaurant opened in Shibatsuyutsuki-cho as demand for beef increased; in 1869, a sukiyaki restaurant opened in Motomachi, Kobe
    History of meat consumption in Japan
  • Don’t waste your first few paragraphs defining something everyone already knows the definition of, or telling a rambling story about why you decided to write this
    Half A Month Of Consolation Writing Advice
  • If everything good in writing comes from contact with the world, then your goodness is proportional to how direct your contact is
    Half A Month Of Consolation Writing Advice
  • The problem with bloggers is that they read blogs. So when they want to write about their exciting new opinion, it’s probably an opinion they got from a blog
    Half A Month Of Consolation Writing Advice
  • with its name meaning "bat" connecting to his identity as "Batman"
    Lamborghini Murciélago
  • Children as young as 13 years old are employed as laborers to harvest the fruit, using machetes to clear paths in the rainforest, and climbing trees up to 70 feet (21 m) tall without harnesses to collect berries in the canopy, a process leading to falls and severe injuries in some children
    Açaí palm
  • Humans have a deep appreciation for other humans doing remarkable things. Because of this, there will always be a demand for outstanding chess players, artists, and anyone pushing the boundaries of what is humanly possible
    The Future Role of Human Excellence – Too-biased
  • What's remarkable is that even the best engines will lose to a human working with a machine, because the two enhance each other. They are better together
    The Future Role of Human Excellence – Too-biased
  • A lot of things described as “sci-fi” aren’t really sci-fi at all — they have very little to do with science. They’re technological stories. “Techfi” is far more interesting to me. Technology and science are completely different disciplines, and the vast majority of so-called sci-fi is really techfi, because it’s really about what it means for humans to express themselves via their creations.
    Ken Liu on AI and Freedom
  • The event was significant in Malaysian politics, as it forced the first prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, to step down from office and hand power to Abdul Razak Hussein. It was also a pivotal moment that reshaped Malaysia's socioeconomic policies, as Abdul Razak's government shifted their domestic policies to favour Malays with the implementation of the New Economic Policy (NEP), and the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO)
    13 May incident
  • while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay
    Art & Fear: The ceramics class and quantity before quality – Excellent Journey
  • Plan: A working session with the candidate to define a product to build. The candidate drives ideation, while interviewers ask questions to strengthen it. We focus on an idea in the candidate’s domain so we see their product thinking in action. Build: The interviewer steps out and the candidate brings the idea to life over 2 hours, using the AI tooling and frameworks of their choice. They have complete freedom to pivot or adjust scope as they go. Review: The candidate demos what they’ve built. We debate the key product flows and choices they made; review the code to understand their technical …
    The AI-native interview | Sierra
  • We’re hiring for strengths, not just an absence of weakness. This approach gives us much richer signal about a candidate’s spikes and gaps
    The AI-native interview | Sierra
  • Safe and expressive extensibility would require such a complex API surface that plugins would become incredibly difficult to write. It's much easier to just give plugins a panel they can fully control
    Apps and programming: two accidental tyrannies
  • What the hell is good design? Is it something that gives satisfaction to your own ego? Or is it something that creates a positive response in the eyes, minds, and hearts of millions of people? Also, is it something that is appropriate to its category? Ideally it is all of these.
    Walter Landor
  • Mozart had a pet common starling which could sing part of his Piano Concerto in G Major (KV. 453).[132] He had bought it from a shop after hearing it sing a phrase from a work he wrote six weeks previously, which had not yet been performed in public. He became very attached to the bird and arranged an elaborate funeral for it when it died three years later
    Common starling
  • after struggles and declining profits in 2017 and 2018, she returned back to an active role in managing the company in 2019 and brought it back to a growing course again
    Tao Huabi
  • simulate how water would flow through terrain represented by a two-dimensional array
    How We Hire Engineers When AI Writes Our Code | Tolans.com
  • They are especially revered in Japan, where they are known as O-washi
    Steller's Sea Eagle | National Geographic | National Geographic
  • If you don't understand your own code, it isn't ready for another engineer to review. It isn't ready to be maintained, and it definitely isn't ready for production
    How We Hire Engineers When AI Writes Our Code | Tolans.com
  • Really good candidates will question a spec when something isn't clear. They clarify the problem statement, explore edge cases, and think about the end-user. They can recognize tradeoffs. When something is a little weird or doesn't feel right, they point it out.
    How We Hire Engineers When AI Writes Our Code | Tolans.com
  • When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.
    1989 visit by Boris Yeltsin to the United States
  • the De Beers campaign sought to persuade the consumer that an engagement ring is indispensable, and that a diamond is the only acceptable stone for an engagement ring.[32] The sales of diamonds in the United States rose from $23 million to $2.1 billion between 1939 and 1979
    Engagement ring
  • The typewriter could create 90,000 distinct characters using either one or two of six character-containing rollers, which in combination has 7,000 full characters and 1,400 character radicals or partial characters
    Chinese typewriter
  • Over nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions across two weeks, Opus 4.6 consumed 2 billion input tokens and generated 140 million output tokens, a total cost just under $20,000
    Building a C compiler with a team of parallel Claudes \ Anthropic
  • Python 3.10 adds a new function to the standard library: inspect.get_annotations(). In Python versions 3.10 and newer, calling this function is the best practice for accessing the annotations dict of any object that supports annotations. This function can also “un-stringize” stringized annotations for you.
    Python, type hints, and future annotations
  • How did you do it? How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?
    Dario Amodei — The Adolescence of Technology
  • Blind as we are, we hinder God, and stop the current of His graces.
    What did you encounter this year that truly moved you?
  • “Memento amorous,” which means “remember you must love.”
    What did you encounter this year that truly moved you?
  • I also read it as a guide for how to do good work—immerse yourself in the process, make long-term plans, and execute like an engineer (but don’t forget compassion
    What did you encounter this year that truly moved you?
  • Perl's slogan: "Easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible".
    stas00/the-art-of-debugging: The Art of Debugging
  • He held as many as 12 titles at once, including New York City Parks Commissioner and chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission.
    Robert Moses
  • Studio Ghibli film The Wind Rises depicts the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake and subsequent fire destroying the former Jinbocho campus of Tokyo Imperial University.
    Kanda-Jinbōchō - Wikipedia