the_fall

If you have an endless pattern of ..., -1, 1, -1, 1, -1, 1, ... and run box blur with a window of 2 or 4, you get ..., 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, ... too.

Other than that, you're not wrong about theoretical Gaussian filters with infinite windows over infinite data, but this has little to do with the scenario in the article. That's about the information that leaks when you have a finite window with a discrete step and start at a well-defined boundary.

I think the US is markedly better for people in certain professions who want to become rich. This is obviously not true for the general population, but the amount of cash that's chasing profits in tech means that a non-trivial percentage of SF Bay Area techies have a shot at financial independence (let's say, $10M in the bank). This is certainly not true for IT workers in most of the EU.

But if you already have enough to never need to work again, you should be fine in almost any liberal and politically stable country, and there's something to be said about moving to a lower CoL place where you can afford a nicer home, etc.

They don't. I'm using Cloudflare and 90%+ of the traffic I'm getting are still broken scrapers, a lot of them coming through residential proxies. I don't know what they block, but they're not very good at that. Or, to be more fair: I think the scrapers have gotten really good at what they do because there's real money to be made.

Maybe I'm getting hung up on words, but my beef is with the parent saying they find real numbers "completely natural".

It's a reasonable assumption that the universe is computable. Most reals aren't, which essentially puts them out of reach - not just in physical terms, but conceptually. If so, I struggle to see the concept as particularly "natural".

We could argue that computable numbers are natural, and that the rest of reals is just some sort of a fever dream.

35 years ago, a good chunk of the current EU was under a Soviet-imposed totalitarian rule. Spain was a dictatorship until 1975. And it's been just 80 years since WWII.

It always boggles my mind that most Europeans are absolutely convinced that nothing like that could ever happen again. Meanwhile, many people in the US are convinced that the government will be coming for them any minute now.

> I believe real numbers to be completely natural,

Most of real numbers are not even computable. Doesn't that give you a pause?

Because inexplicably, there's random pixel-level noise baked into the blue area. You can't see it unless you crank up contrast, but it makes the bitmap hard to compress losslessly. If you remove it using threshold blur, it doesn't change the appearance at all, but the size is down to 100 kB. Scale it down to a more reasonable size and you're down to 50 kB.

Modern web development never ceases to amaze me.

Meh. The room-temperature endurance of modern EEPROMs (e.g., ST M95256) is something like 4 million cycles. If you use a simple ring buffer (reset on overflow, otherwise just appending values), you only need to overwrite a cell once every 32k ticks, which gives you a theoretical run time of 250,000 years with every-minute updates or 4,100 years with every-second updates.

The history of journalism is written by journalists, often in a self-serving way. You'll be hard-pressed to pinpoint the purported golden age of impartial truth-seeking. Early newspapers in the US were often owned by a local railroad tycoon and published hit pieces about his opponents. From the 1960s, this morphed into a way to broadcast the ideological consensus of East Coast Ivy League graduates. Some of their ideas were good and some were bad, but every single day, this consensus influenced which stories made it to the front page and how they were framed.

Weirdly, I think this model was beneficial even in the presence of bias: when everyone read the same news, it helped with social cohesion and national identity, even if the stories themselves presented a particular viewpoint.

But now, everyone can get their own news with their own custom-tailored bias, so there's no special reason to sign up for the biases of Washington Post or The New York Times unless you want to signal something to your ingroup. I don't think this is as much Bezos' fault as it's just a consequence of the internet evolving into what it is right now: one giant, gelatinous cube of engagement bait.

> But gcc is part of it's training data so of course it spit out an autocomplete of a working compiler /s

Why the sarcasm tag? It is almost certainly trained on several compiler codebases, plus probably dozens of small "toy" C compilers created as hobby / school projects.

It's an interesting benchmark not because the LLM did something novel, but because it evidently stayed focused and maintained consistency long enough for a project of this complexity.

They're not coming from anywhere. It's an LLM-written article, and given how non-specific it is, I imagine the prompt wasn't much more than "write an article about how OpenClaw is changing my life".

And the fact this post has 300+ comments, just like countless LLM-generated articles we get here pretty much daily... I guess proves the point in a way?

It's common for compilers to generate mildly unusual code because they translate high-level code into an abstract intermediate notation, run a variety optimization steps on that notation, and then emit machine-specific code to perform whatever the optimizations yielded. There's no constraint along the lines of "but select the most logical opcode for this task".

The claim that the code is inefficient is really not substantiated well in this blog post. Sometimes, long-winded assembly actually runs faster because of pipelining, register aliasing, and other quirks. Other times, a "weird" way of zeroing a register may actually take up less space in memory, etc.

Gun frames can be made out of plastic or aluminum, and there are fixtures for benchtop CNC machines that can be used to make them. This is not nearly as complicated as you make it sound. I think Cody Wilson was basically selling a turnkey solution for that, maybe still is.