cscheid

Joined 16 years ago

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382
Member since
Oct 13
building https://quarto.org at Posit (fka RStudio).

https://cscheid.net https://github.com/cscheid https://bsky.net/profile/cscheid.net

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Recent submissions

Comment · 4 days ago
I mean, it literally does. Something like 70+ billion of those 80 billion are accounting adjustments because their debt is supposed to be handled in stock and their stock price skyrocketed.
Comment · 10 days ago
I don’t think this is pedantic in this case! It’s the relevant precision necessary to understand the way in which the title is notated.
Comment · 16 days ago
> All non-trivial properties of neural networks are undecidable.

hey, I don't know how to say this less directly, but: you're talking a lot about Rice's theorem in your comments, and I think you're using it way too broadly (look, I get it. It's a wild, mindblowing theorem). But it only applies when you take the claim in the piece to be much more general than it has to be, and when you take the narrow claim of the paper (current specific LLMs can be fruitfully analyzed with the tools we have), Rice's theorem just isn't at play.

The math analog is: you're right that the Halting problem says there are many unprovable things, but Lean + mathlib are still incredibly useful, and the halting theorem doesn't actually stop that.

> neural networks are algorithms

Again, that invites an interpretation that is too broad. Very concretely: any one neural network is a _single finite network that you can write as a single formula_. (Another analogy: we can't have an algorithm that solves the general quintic, but we can prove useful things about many specific quintics.)

Comment · 17 days ago
Comment · 18 days ago
Comment · 22 days ago
A few things off the top of my head (we've been on deno since 2022)

- They originally bet on being a TypeScript dialect that didn't quite match the expectations of node in a few small places that ended up mattering hugely.

- One of the original value propositions was "deno compile" and "deno bundle", and those never actually worked well enough to be robust for our real-world use cases (early on they didn't support TLA, then dynamic imports didn't work, then they had issues with ARM compilation)

- Then they simultaneously tried to support node syntax out of the box with npm import specifiers _and_ create a new javascript registry (jsr.io)

- At the point where we expected them to actually make their base-level ecosystem robust, they pivoted to edge compute, and then the writing was on the wall

Comment · 22 days ago
I lead a project built on Deno; it was not my call, just to be clear. Deno turned out unfortunately to be a miss and we had seen the writing on the wall. FWIW, we're moving to a much bigger Rust core program with node for JS user extensibility. (In other words, I'm not willing to risk using the deno_core crates.)

The one silver lining here is that Deno had already increased their node/npm compatibility. Migrating off of the jsr ecosystem and back to npm is going to be less painful than one might imagine. I expect present LLMs to be sufficiently good at the task, for example.

Comment · 1 month ago
Hey, I just wanted to say that this is, um, the fucking best.

I've been waiting for a literal decade for this, for the same reasons as the grand-parent poster. I literally had a chapter of my NSF CAREER proposal on this (failed, woof, but the reviewers were wrong! this rocks). The potential here is absurd. Eg, novel query optimizers and novel DB indexes could be created that, when connected to the right charting tools, would automatically emit efficient graphics and query results. Very, very cool work, thank you.

Comment · 2 months ago
Pauli exclusion is a QM thing. Black holes are a GR thing. Famously, we don’t know how to mix the two.
Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 3 months ago
I'm just going to answer this one candidly. Yes, you are doing something wrong. Immediately: the commit history is useful to understand the context in which a bug was introduced, because it's the best context to understand the _reason_ the mistake was maybe, which is a really good way to prevent regressions. But more generally: when an entire industry has arrived at an accepted practice, you the junior developer (sorry, 5 years is _nothing_: you need to be told this too) have a chance to pick up on it.

Have you heard "have you played guitar for 20 years, or have you played guitar 20 times for a year?" Time only helps with accumulating wisdom if you let it.

Comment · 4 months ago
You're right that I can't reproduce it like a phone camera could, and that the more precise you are the better (and it might be that with my eyes closed I'm doing something closer to addition in log-odds, like a separate comment responded), but this is super useful even coarsely. The visual affordance gives Bayes's theorem a physicality unlike any other tool I've found.
Comment · 4 months ago
Comment · 4 months ago
Gentry Lee is in this? That's very funny.
Comment · 4 months ago
If you stare at the CYK algorithm long enough and see it for the dynamic programming approach it is, you'll then realize that you can do the same parallelization trick for any context-free grammar!

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