a_e_k

"What do you call the person who graduated bottom of their class in medical school?"

(At least that's how I've heard it phrased before.)

a_e_k

gisterendiscuss

From what I've read, lefties are typically classified into "over-writers", "side-writers", and "under-writers". That video caught my attention too, as it shows pretty clearly that he's an over-writer.

I myself am probably somewhere in between an over-writer and a side-writer lefty, edging slightly closer to an over-writer. Maybe a 20 degree angle to the line as my thumb wraps around my other fingers?

I've never found a fountain pen that I've liked because every time I've tried one, I ended up tearing the paper as I go as I'm essentially pushing the nib across the page and so the nib snags on the paper, digs in, and makes little holes. And I left pencils behind as soon as I could in school because every day I'd come home with the side of my left hand silvered with graphite.

These days, my preference is a Pentel EnerGel, a Uniball Signo, or a Pilot G-2 (i.e., gel pens like the article mentions). They can write easily without much force and dry quickly enough so that my hand doesn't smudge. For my daily pocket carry, I've also learned that I always want the capped variants rather the click kind, or else I'll end up with stained inner pockets and scribbles on my thigh. This makes the G-2s nice for home and desk use, but not for daily carry.

(And though the article suggests using cursive and not getting hung up on legibility, somewhere back in grade or middle school I switched to using either print style, or an engineering-hand-like small caps style, depending on mood. Both in the interest of legibility, despite my left-handedness.)

a_e_k

15 dagen geledendiscuss

I've seen that sort of thing before - I told it I was going to go take lunch or dinner, and it told itself this would be a great opportunity to try to keep plugging along while I was AFK.

a_e_k

15 dagen geledendiscuss

Once on a late-night session, I had Cline!Claude spontaneously point out the time to me and suggest that I get to bed and come back fresh the next day.

I don't think it's in the system prompt, but that the harnesses time-stamp each turn in the context.

And from what I've seen, they also include the current and max context, so that the model can decide whether to continue work, suggest compaction, or prefer actions that might reduce the growth of its context.

a_e_k

26 dagen geledendiscuss

I became a fan of Kaitai Struct [0] when doing some amateur sleuthing last year. It has a web-based IDE [1] for writing and testing structure definitions against hex dumps, and can generate binary parsers in Python (and many other languages) right from the Web IDE.

[0] https://doc.kaitai.io/user_guide.html

[1] https://ide.kaitai.io/devel/

a_e_k

vorige maanddiscuss

Off topic, but that photo is amazing, and got a good laugh out of me. It definitely falls in the "pets and owners who look alike" category.

a_e_k

vorige maanddiscuss

I do like that general idea. I bet it would be possible wrap in a handy elisp macro.

a_e_k

vorige maanddiscuss

Yep. `C-h k` to look up what a key does, `C-h f` to look up a function, and `C-h v` to look up a variable/setting will get you pretty far.

I'd also add `C-h b` to show you the key bindings. (And `C-h` after a prefix key will usually show you the bindings that start with that prefix.) `C-h a` for apropos to search commands by substring can also be useful.

The thing that makes it really "self documenting" is that these help commands reflect the live environment at the moment you use it. If you've added a new binding in your init.el, `C-h b` and `C-h k` will show it. If you've added a new function in your init.el, or loaded a custom package, all those functions can now be found via `C-h f`. The help system will show you the doc strings for them and provide hyperlinks right to the source.

Moreover, this works for anything that you define on the fly. Open an Emacs lisp buffer, type some elisp code to define a function or variable, execute the definition, and now it'll appear under the above in the help system the next time you invoke help.

a_e_k

vorige maanddiscuss

> The only problem is that, in the name of not breaking backwards-compatibility (or something like that), the archaic defaults have remained.

As a user since '97, I've often felt that this philosophy is entirely, well, backwards. I know how to read the release notes to learn of such changes and how to edit my personal init.el file to revert a setting if I don't like the new default. As long as no one takes away the option, the default doesn't really matter too much to me. But newcomers who might not yet be comfortable with editing their init.el files could really benefit from a more optimal out-of-box experience.

(And besides that, often the newer option is something that I've already moved on to, so making it the new default means I can now remove it from my init.el. I always enjoy when I discover that I can cut something from my init.el because it's now in base Emacs.)

a_e_k

2 maanden geledendiscuss

On the other hand, crafts like knitting and other fiber arts can be very repetitive and people still enjoy them.

(Personally, I've also enjoyed unit origami, which involves folding the same module many times over and assembling them.)

a_e_k

2 maanden geledendiscuss

I loved the keyboard on my HP-48G. It had such a nice crisp tactile feel to the key presses - a bit of snap - that I got to where it could usually operate it by touch without looking.

(These days it's stored safely away with batteries removed, so I don't use it that much anymore. For convenience, I usually just use either Droid48 on my phone, or Emacs Calc at my computers.)

a_e_k

2 maanden geledendiscuss

I had that experience with the last house we rented before we bought.

We were quiet, predictable, don't-rock-the-boat tenants, and the rando owner mentioned that they valued that enough that raising rents wasn't worth the potential risk of new tenants who might cause them more hassle.

a_e_k

2 maanden geledendiscuss

Yes, I get that and meant to imply it with "frontier". But my question was more about how my biggest uses by far of data center-provided AI in terms of tokens have been in things like experimenting with agentic coding on my desktops. If I'm just tapping away at my phone with some questions in a chat window, my AI needs are much lower. Compete with me for the HW resources that I need to make full use of your data center-provided AI supply, and I'll just drop my demand accordingly.

(I know, I know... the answer is probably that they expect me to just move my software development to the cloud, too. Joy!)

a_e_k

2 maanden geledendiscuss

Analogous to that, this is something that I'd been wondering about with respect to hardware prices as silicon is reallocated from consumers to data centers: how am I to make heavy use of frontier (edit: i.e., cloud/data center-provided) AI models if I can't easily buy a machine worth using it on?

a_e_k

3 maanden geledendiscuss

I'm reminded of The Hobbit with the phrase "Good morning" in the first chapter:

> "Good Morning!" said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat.

> "What do you mean?" he said. "Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?"

> "All of them at once," said Bilbo. "And a very fine morning for a pipe of tobacco out of doors, into the bargain.

a_e_k

3 maanden geledendiscuss

From the linked post, it didn't read like a separate KV cache was needed:

> The draft models seamlessly utilize the target model's activations and share its KV cache, meaning they don't have to waste time recalculating context the larger model has already figured out.

a_e_k

3 maanden geledendiscuss

Ah. We're back to the days of Emacs' old `M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead`, then. (Psychoanalyze-pinhead ran the Eliza chat-bot and fed it bizarre quotations collected from the Zippy the Pinhead comics.)

Or better yet, pitting Eliza vs. Parry (https://logic.stanford.edu/complaw/readings/elizaandparry.pd...), where Parry was meant to simulate a paranoid schizophrenic. That was 1973, more than 50 years ago.

Everything old is new again.

a_e_k

3 maanden geledendiscuss

At least for the CPU/GPU split, llama.cpp recently added a `--fit` parameter (might default to on now?) that pairs with a `--fitc CONTEXTSIZE` parameter. That new feature will automatically look at your available VRAM and try to figure out a good CPU/GPU split for large models that leaves enough room for the context size that you request.

a_e_k

3 maanden geledendiscuss

From my recollection of doing fun palette stuff back in the DOS VGA days, I'm betting it was more like:

    pal.r = pal.g = pal.b = (77 * pal.r + 150 * pal.g + 29 * pal.b) >> 8;

Hardware floating point was rare before the 486 DX and Pentiums. Not to mention that Integer<->FP conversion was slow. And division of any kind has always been slow. So you'd see a lot of fixed-point math approximations with power-of-two divisors so that you can shift-right.

a_e_k

3 maanden geledendiscuss

I think the point the GP was trying to make is that the GitHub UI ought to be able to allow you to submit a branch with multiple well-organized commits and review each commit separately with its own PR. The curation of the commits that you'd do for stacked PRs could just as easily be done with commits on a single branch; some of us don't just toss random WIP and fixup commits on a branch and leave it to GitHub to squash at the end. I.e., it's the GitHub UI rather than Git that has been lacking.

(FWIW, I'm dealing with this sort of thing at work right now - working on a complex branch, rewriting history to keep it as a sequence of clean testable and reviewable commits, with a plan to split them out to individual PRs when I finish.)

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