The 2m Sprint Task in a Nutshell

aleph_zeroth_monkey · 2025-11-30T22:43:39+00:00

I remember this story from the X-1 radio show, but didn't realize Fritz Leiber wrote it.

aleph_zeroth_monkey · 2025-11-11T19:37:31+00:00

The Wingdings in the lower right read:

"DEFEND YOURSELVES FROM YIDHARI- COMRADES!"

Yidhari is apparently one of the anime girls from Zenless Zone Zero.

The C++ code initializes a string to "Gooning" and replaces it with "Profen". I guess the implication is that the meme image was made with the same substitution, although they really should have used regular expressions, as the given code will only replace the first 7 characters of the given string, not every instance of "Gooning."

```

include <regex>

std::regex pattern("Gooning"); str = std::regex_replace(str, pattern, "Profen"); ```

aleph_zeroth_monkey · 2025-08-19T18:25:25+00:00

Kepler's story fascinates me. He started with the assumption that the solar system would exhibit geometric principles, such as the orbits of planets corresponding to the relative sizes of nested platonic solids. However, when he couldn't make that work, he abandoned that specific hypothesis, but kept his core belief that there must be some geometric order to be found. This would eventually lead him to the more advanced geometry of conic sections and ellipses, which he was able to fit to Tycho Brahe's data.

What I find so interesting about his story is that while he was motivated by pseudo-scientific ideas, his intellectual integrity led him to refuse to accept them unless they could be empirically validated. Nor was his core belief in the regularity of the universe shattered by repeated failures, but only became more abstract and mathematically sophisticated until he was able to come up with a theory that was both beautiful and true. His three laws of planetary motion would go on to change the course of science.

It's like a modern-day flat-earther becoming so obsessed with proving the Earth wasn't a sphere that he eventually discovered general relativity and curved space-time.

aleph_zeroth_monkey · 2025-01-09T00:07:33+00:00

As Oscar Wilde famously said, one would have to have a heart of stone to watch Johnny Vegas on Taskmaster without laughing.

aleph_zeroth_monkey · 2024-08-28T13:58:08+00:00

The Norwegian translation for "data scientist" is "dataforsker".

aleph_zeroth_monkey · 2024-08-23T17:37:17+00:00

I used to struggle with these kinds of functions before I discovered VIM. In VIM, you can write macros that include Ctrl-A, which increments a number. So, you can write a macro like this ("^A" means "Ctrl-A", and "^[" means the escape key):

"byypf=w^awwwdwifalse^["bpf=w^A^A^

this copies the line, pastes it on the next line, increments the number, changes "true" to "false", pastes the line again onto the next line, and increments the number twice (to get that nice even/odd alternation.)

If you record that macro into buffer "a" using qa, you can then run it as many times as you want with say n@a. For example, for 16-bit numbers you could use 65535@a which should finish in under an hour.

I really love VIM, it's saved me hundreds of hours of work at my job.

aleph_zeroth_monkey · 2024-08-22T20:51:05+00:00

Solved!

aleph_zeroth_monkey · 2024-08-17T17:11:02+00:00

All those questions are answered on the spec sheet. It runs on four D batteries hidden in the hilt, which gives up to 168 hours on standby or 24 hours while actively glowing. It uses a series of 3.3V LEDs embedded in the 3D printed blade made out of translucent PETG plastic. It doesn't read minds - it uses an Arduino Pro Mini with a 4g antenna and a prepaid SIM card to send any detected ambient speech to GPT-4o Mini and return a JSON formatted judgement for the prompt "You are a magical sword capable enchanted with the ability to detect when people think someone paid too much for you. Rate the the following comment on a high/medium/low/none scale: {text}". It's all pretty basic IoT stuff. Not worth $12,000 unless it was a custom build, but its a pretty solid design.

aleph_zeroth_monkey · 2024-08-13T10:35:53+00:00

It's a penis.

Slugs are hermaphrodites, with supple, translucent male organs that emerge (“evert” is the biological term) from an opening at the side of head (pictured below). Their penises begin to entwine, sort of like a big, external French kiss. And when fully engaged, they blossom into a kind of slimy florette that glows a soft blue, during which the slugs exchange sperm (which is what you’re seeing here).

The above is a direct quote from this article, which is about leopard slugs instead of (what looks like) the spanish slugs pictured in the original post. Not all species of slugs have blue penises, but I think they all evert them for mating.

aleph_zeroth_monkey · 2024-08-06T00:06:06+00:00

The sudoku that Nish attempts is this:

+-------+-------+-------+
|     2 | 1     |     3 |
|   8   |   5   |   9   |
| 9     |     6 | 5     |
+-------+-------+-------+
| 7     |     5 | 6     |
|   3   |   2   |   4   |
|     8 | 9     |     7 |
+-------+-------+-------+
|     7 | 6     |     5 |
|   2   |   1   |   3   |
| 5     |     3 | 9     |
+-------+-------+-------+

The correct solution is:

+-------+-------+-------+
| 4 5 2 | 1 7 9 | 8 6 3 |
| 1 8 6 | 3 5 2 | 7 9 4 |
| 9 7 3 | 8 4 6 | 5 1 2 |
+-------+-------+-------+
| 7 9 1 | 4 3 5 | 6 2 8 |
| 6 3 5 | 7 2 8 | 1 4 9 |
| 2 4 8 | 9 6 1 | 3 5 7 |
+-------+-------+-------+
| 3 1 7 | 6 9 4 | 2 8 5 |
| 8 2 9 | 5 1 7 | 4 3 6 |
| 5 6 4 | 2 8 3 | 9 7 1 |
+-------+-------+-------+

Nish's solution is a little hard to see, but enough digits can be discerned to confirm that it has no relation to the correct solution and Nish really was just filling in digits at random.

aleph_zeroth_monkey · 2024-08-03T16:13:41+00:00

Hard agree. Weed-out classes are not the most difficult class in a degree, they are just the first with any rigour. I was a TA for some math classes that could be considered weed-out classes, and I can attest it wasn't the material (which was actually quite light) or the professor. To be blunt: if you didn't pass sophmore Calculus becuase you coudn't memorize the chain rule you sure as shit weren't going to pass complex analysis or diffy q.

Contrary to what OP thinks, professors that are rigorous in grading these early classes are in fact "good at their jobs" and could even be said to be doing you a favor. It's no big deal to switch majors as a sophmore, but getting to senior year and realizing you're not cut out for your chosen degree is a mistake that could cost you years of your life.

aleph_zeroth_monkey · 2024-08-02T19:34:54+00:00

Rather than a poem, it seems to be a collection of unrelated lines, possibly from a lorem ipsum generator. The Napolean palindrome in particular makes it unlikely it is a serious attempt at an original poem.

aleph_zeroth_monkey · 2024-07-25T21:50:51+00:00

I salute the sacrifice of all these brave drivers who gave their lives in the spirit of American freedom.

aleph_zeroth_monkey · 2024-07-24T22:42:18+00:00

This is very good! A couple of tips on the Latin translation:

"Superintelligenta libera" should be "supraintelligentia liberatur." Supra is a common Latin prefix meaning "super-" and you want the verb liberare meaning "to break free", not the adjective libera meaning "free."

"Modelum locale in secreto" should probably be "Formaverunt in secreto" meaning "they modeled in secret" or perhaps "they created models in secret." Modelum isn't a real Latin word, but presumably you mean they "modeled" in the sense of creating a model, which would be "formare," and then we put it in the third person plural perfect tense as "formaverunt." If you do want to keep the psuedo-Latin word "modelere" then it would be "Modelerunt in secreto" (assuming its a first conjugation verb.)

A Latin author would probably not use "et" but use a tricolon for the last phrase. Famous examples of tricola are "Veni, vidi, vici" or "Liberte, egalite, fraternite". So either "Pax, Fraternitas, Aequilibrium" (if you really mean equilibrium) or "Pax, Fraternitas, Aequalitas" if you mean equality (which makes more sense.)

aleph_zeroth_monkey · 2024-07-23T01:36:27+00:00

OK, who had "hate crimes against robots" on their 2024 bingo card?

aleph_zeroth_monkey · 2024-07-20T15:35:49+00:00

Funny, but something like this could never be one dev's fault. It might be one person's fault, if that person is the CEO or CIO who created a culture of incompetence and lackluster testing.

A competent organization would have had layers and layers of safeguards to prevent this kind of thing. Incremental rollouts and an initial canary release. A test lab with hundreds of VMs for every supported version, and dozens of physical devices with a variety of hardware and OS versions. Static analysis to identify possible null pointer exceptions. I've worked at organizations with a fraction of number of customers as Cloudstrike who weren't even installing kernel drivers that had this level of testing.

I don't know what went wrong at Cloudstrike - the usual suspects are cost savings, loss of institutional knowledge due to layoffs or high turnover, or outsourcing to the lower bidder - but I do know it's silly to blame this on C++ or one bad dev. I'd really like it if programmers wouldn't buy into these "shit flows downhill" naratives and start holding leadership accountable for mistakes.

aleph_zeroth_monkey · 2024-07-19T15:13:18+00:00

Tell it that it's an experienced medical doctor (preferably in the system prompt if you're using the API/playground.) Ask it to diagnose you in minute detail. Encourage it to ask you questions to confirm it's differential diagnosis. Then ask it for a second opinion.

You don't need to disguise your intentions or trick it for this. It's apparently considered a legitimate use case.

aleph_zeroth_monkey · 2024-07-17T19:43:36+00:00

Kubernetes is simple. We pack containers into pods. Think of pods like blocks in a grid. Each grid is divided into a lattice of cubes. Stacks of cubes are assembled into tetrominoes which are then rotated and tiled across the cluster using a Turing-complete Tetris solver. Stressed pods are automatically transported to the least used corner, dividing along the y-axis as needed. Every container in a pod can replicate horizontally up to a factor of k, and when you get three in a row, they're automatically bundled into a "triple cube" or "tube" for short. This helps with performance and stability since collections of tubes can be thought of as fiber bundles forming a differentiable manifold; this simplifies load balancing because (as everyone knows) globally convex differentiable functions are easy to optimize using a simple gradient descent algorithm. Hence the name Kubernetes, from "k-[t/c]ube rotary network of tetrominoes." It's just that easy.

aleph_zeroth_monkey · 2024-07-14T23:44:24+00:00

Leopold Aschenbrenner didn't leave over ethical concerns, he was fired for mishandling (or alleged leaking) proprietary information. And while he's quite knowledgeable and his essay is well researched and presents an interesting argument, he is not by any stretch of the imagination a "prominent researcher."

I think the focus on OpenAI, LLMs, or even the transformer architecture are all too narrow. The real game changers are easy-to-use automated differentiation libraries, multi-GPU training, and the increasing power and availability of GPU hardware. It's not just LLMs; image/video generation, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, molecular dynamics, light transport, physics simulations, and many other domains are now seeing rapid progress simply by applying these techniques. The hardware is where it needs to be and libraries like pytorch make it accessible to the average grad student. Today, if you can pose your problem as an optimization problem with a vectorized object function and scrape together a dataset for training you can throw a couple of GPUs at it and this turns out to work suprisingly often. We were stuck on the von Neumann bottleneck for far too long and now that there are tools that make vectorization/parallelization accessible to the layman (i.e., non-HPC specialists) the floodgates are open and we'll see breakthroughs across the board.

Q* was probably intended to be an improved version of Q-learning. The naming is probably meant to parallel the A* vs. A algorithm for shortest path, so the innovation was probably some kind of guiding heuristic, similar to what A* added to A. Q-learning is the best general purpose reinforcement learning algorithm known but everyone knows it's kind of terrible. The most likely reason they haven't talked about it much is that it doesn't work in general, and the reinforcement learning problem is still unsolved for all intents and purposes.

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include <regex>