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Cake day: February 15th, 2024

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  • “Language models don’t apply to us because this is not a language problem,” Nesterenko explained. “If you ask it to actually create a blueprint, it has no training data for that. It has no context for that…” Instead, Quilter built what Nesterenko describes as a “game” where the AI agent makes sequential decisions — place this component here, route this trace there — and receives feedback based on whether the resulting design satisfies electromagnetic, thermal, and manufacturing constraints… The approach mirrors DeepMind’s progression with its Go-playing systems.

    This is kind of interesting and cool, and it’s not a hallucinating LLM. I’ve designed a couple of simple circuit boards, and running traces can be sort of zen, but it is tedious and would be maddening as a job, so I can only imagine what the process must be like on complex projects from scratch. Definitely some hype levels coming from the company that give me pause, but it seems like an actual useful task for a machine learning algorithm.



  • I like that, though I might consider that rhyme, alliteration, and especially repetition also aid retention by requiring less data to be committed to memory as-is. References to other works are also very much a shorthand for cramming pre-existing memes (in the Dawkins sense) into less “word-doing.”

    I dunno. The whole thing breaks down pretty quickly, as most analogies between mental and computational process do, but it’s fun to think about.









  • It’s always sad to lose a friend, but even with a new administration, nobody can really trust USA anymore, USA is currently descending deeper into a authoritarian regime, and resistance is effectively being systematically removed. As it is, there seems to be little hope that USA will ever become a functional democracy.

    I hope that a better US administration will come after this one and that it will improve the things that can be improved easily (tariffs, visas, rhetoric, and other transactional policies), but at this point Trump has poisoned the well and it will take a generation of good (or at least understandable and workable) behavior by both US parties to rebuild a fraction of the trust and soft power the orange idiot has squandered in barely half a year.







  • Great, but I don’t think that graph is showing any particular spike, just a nice and gentle upward trend in share. The article also overlooks that there is a certain element of Windows and MacOS computers being replaced by tablets and phones, while Linux is already an enthusiast choice on the desktop, meaning it will be insulated somewhat and gain market share through attrition.

    On the plus side, Steam and Proton and maturing DEs/distros and enshittification of Windows certainly make Linux a much more viable “normie” option than it’s ever been. We’re a far cry from the CD-ROM of Red Hat that came with my “Intro to Linux” book in 1999 but couldn’t use my Winmodem or printer and really preferred to run XWindows in grayscale.