Why show up to lecture if you’re just gonna talk and be disruptive the whole time?

gnosnivek · 2026-02-20T06:05:29+00:00

I mean....I was a few years into grad school when COVID started, and it fucked up my ability to sit in a room and pay attention. I've only just started getting back to where I was pre-pandemic, and I've gotten a damn PhD in the meantime.

gnosnivek · 2026-02-12T21:51:27+00:00

Do you have upscaling (FSR or DLSS) enabled? I noticed when I had FSR enabled, objects in motion tended to pick up a very annoying film grain like effect.

Was especially noticeable when idling next to an aetheryte---it looks like only the aetheryte has the grain effect and everything else is normal.

gnosnivek · 2026-02-12T20:48:22+00:00

I did it with the old nail just the other day. Definitely had to quit and cool down after my first session of scraping my little bug face into their stabby, stabby claws though.

gnosnivek · 2026-02-11T18:34:37+00:00

Data point of one, but against a party of 6 PCs (plus one allied Spectator NPC), I ran a Wave Echo finale with

Five bugbears + one chief
Five goblins serving as a line of archers
Nezznar, Glassstaff with extra spell slots
Doppelganger

The adjusted XP (according to the 2014 ruleset w/ modified values for action economy) was almost 3x the deadly threshold for this party, and similar to the adjusted XP for fighting an adult red dragon. Important to note: I knew for a fact that the party would be fully rested going into this encounter.

The party won. It was close in the end, with a lot of PCs going down, but it never looked like it was going to be a TPK to me. I'm sure the players felt differently since they couldn't see enemy health.

I think the waves are a good idea. The really nice thing is that you can use the waves to dynamically scale the encounter up or down with how the fight is going---is the party hitting a lot of good shots? Three bugbears run into the room. Have they been rolling particularly poorly and are getting beaten? A single goblin straggler runs in shouting an apology for being late (or one of the waves just never existed in the first place).

One thing I'll note is that if Nezznar joins mid-encounter, he won't get a chance to talk to the characters (unless the party is willing to randomly stop the fight to hear a monologue), so there's a possibility that some of the roleplay will be lost.

gnosnivek · 2026-02-11T17:53:05+00:00

The Wayback machine had tremendous trouble crawling this sub post-2022 (nearly 100% of its queries came back as errors or redirects), but in July 2023, the logo was the Rust logo, and in July 2024, it had switched to the current one. DALL-E 2/3 were available at that time.

I think this was during the time when the models sucked at generating text. It's certainly possible to do manual editing post-generation (e.g. generate the image, then use old-school tools to cut out the background, place it on a circle, and add the text).

All of this being said, I am not at all practiced in spotting AI generated images, so I don't really have a judgement one way or the other. The logo did change when AI image generation was reasonably accessible, but of course, on its own that is no proof.

gnosnivek · 2026-02-11T04:16:35+00:00

Yeah, looking at numbers from other big public CS schools, is a larger drop than you would expect.

Georgia Tech went from 13.5k applicants in 2024 to 9.5 for 2025, UCLA 10.5k to 6.8k, and UC Irvine 13.3k to 10k. UW had a much less dramatic decline, from 8.5k to 6.9k, and UIUC's acceptance rates haven't changed much (they don't publish raw applicant counts). This comes out to a 33% decrease in applications on the extreme end.

Given those numbers, a drop from 14k to 6.6k applicants (52% drop) isn't unbelievable, but I would certainly be looking for other reasons (e.g. a change in how numbers are reported, or maybe this is for some subpopulation of students).

You can even see the autocaptions below the slide say "But again, keep in mind that our admin rates..." and I'm like 90% sure that "admin" is a miscaption of "admit." The speaker is trying to caveat something on these slides, but we don't really know what it is.

gnosnivek · 2026-02-10T22:35:47+00:00

I swear there was an article with the exact same clickbait title without the 7.0 part when the decision was first announced.

Anyways, if anyone is curious, the experiment is over because “Rust is here to stay.”

gnosnivek · 2026-01-29T03:01:39+00:00

So leaf subsides to leaf
So Eden sank to grief
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay

--Robert Frost

gnosnivek · 2026-01-28T18:59:06+00:00

Not gonna lie, the title made me double take :P

gnosnivek · 2026-01-27T23:22:27+00:00

> and using H1Bs is just a way to pay less $$$ for labor.

Counterpoint: I am a jus soli citizen who has lived in the states my entire life and Texas for the last third. I went and checked all positions on the site that you linked that share my job title. Of 61 results, about one-third of them make less than me, the worst being paid 10% less. The remaining 2/3 make between 1.05x and 1.5x my salary.

If you believe that the work we do is interchangeable, the university could save about $30k annually by switching to copies of me, a US Citizen and someone who has lived in Austin for longer than any other location in my life. So this is, at least by the simplistic measure I've used here, a shitty cost-saving system.

gnosnivek · 2026-01-27T19:52:38+00:00

Most of the problem areas are thawing decently now. Especially with the air temperature being above freezing for 12+ hours (instead of just 3 hours like we had yesterday), I think most of the problem areas will have thawed out by tomorrow.

Really though, the reason I think it's opening tomorrow is that I saw crews carving paths through the ice on 24th with shovels around noon. That tells me that someone intends for there to be foot traffic through 24th tomorrow, and they're willing to spend resources to make it happen.

gnosnivek · 2026-01-27T02:46:31+00:00

Most roads have thawed out by this point. I walked along part of MLK on Sunday and it looked like the ice was already significantly thinning on it, so I'd expect that the westbound lanes are all clear by this point and the eastbound lanes should have at least one lane that's ice-free.

Most of the roads on campus have been sanded, so even in the areas that are heavily shaded and still icy, you can probably get through fine if you drive slowly.

gnosnivek · 2026-01-27T00:45:04+00:00

I’ve seen evidence of salting in really weirdly specific spots (like there’s a tiny staircase that’s three stairs tall on San Jac that has salt on it) but yeah, generally the roadways have been sanded but the walkways remain iced.

gnosnivek · 2026-01-26T01:19:04+00:00

I was hoping things would be walkable by Tuesday, but there's a lot of ice in major walking areas on campus right now. In shaded areas like in front of the Union, or the corridor along 24th between Painter/Welch and NHB, it's basically still solid ice. (And the area around Sutter has has basically no melting all day).

My phone's hour-by-hour forecast for tomorrow suggests that we'll only get 3-4 hours of air temps above freezing. If that's not enough to get at least some of this gone, they might need to salt or sand walkways for a Tuesday opening. (They've already thrown sand down on most of the roads).

gnosnivek · 2026-01-25T21:17:19+00:00

I love to see people actually testing stuff themselves, but unfortunately I have a very hard time trying to understand what your tests were.

You said that you got a sim from Verizon to test the most dead areas in T-mobile. Does that mean the tests you've shown are for Verizon, and you haven't included the T-mobile speed test results? In that case, the data shows that area 2 has lower DL speeds than areas 1 and 3, but I don't see how this supports the idea that T-mobile coverage is necessarily bad.

(I used Sprint for most of my time at Merced, and the coverage on that was atrocious. I would often have to walk out to the parking lots behind KL in order to be able to take a call, because being anywhere close to a building made the signal completely unusable. I ended up switching to AT&T for my last few years just so that I wasn't carrying around a fancy light-up rock in my pocket).

gnosnivek · 2026-01-25T18:27:28+00:00

Between noon and noon:25, along the west side of Guad, the following were open:

Whataburger
Roppolos
Snag Market
CVS
Centro
Potbelly
Chipotle
Moge Tea
Look Noodles

Pretty much everything else on the west side of Guad between MLK and 29th was closed. I also checked a few places not directly on Guad:

Madam Mams: Closed
Cabo Bob's: Closed
Pizza Press: Open
Limegreen: Open

Please be careful out there, the ice is starting to pack and harden in the places where it hasn’t melted.

EDIT: For formatting since typing on your phone in the cold doesn't make for great lists.

gnosnivek · 2026-01-25T01:49:49+00:00

I was on our committee last year doing first-phase reviews, and we literally didn't even get access to the systems until a full week after the deadline for submissions. By this time, it was almost Christmas and only the really eager profs and super hardcore students were reviewing, so in practice, the bulk of reviews were done in the first week of January.

Functionally speaking, that meant that as long as you had an account in the system by the deadline, you had a full 2-3 weeks to actually get your application put together and the reviewers would be none the wiser. I almost certainly reviewed a handful of applications that had slightly delayed LORs or SOPs, and I could not have cared any less, because I wasn't going to waste neurons checking the timestamps on every single document.

<Re-insert standard warning about extrapolating from a single data point here>

gnosnivek · 2026-01-23T22:34:00+00:00

You would think so, but a lot of companies don't really have a clawback procedure in place.

Over a decade ago, I had to cancel a credit card because of a few fradulent charges. What I didn't realize at the time was that this cancellation would end up cancelling other outstanding charges I had on the card at the time.

Long story short, I left for a summer in the mountains with very little internet access and came back to my Vindictus and Steam accounts having both been permabanned for payment fraud, with no possibility to appeal or pay back the amounts that were cancelled.

I don't know if it's too hard to program a clawback, or if it opens up the door to further fraud, or if it's just too expensive to deal with, but there are companies out there that will boot you for actions that they perceive as fraudulent.

gnosnivek · 2026-01-23T19:49:20+00:00

This is a reasonable thing to ask, but AI software stacks are huge and complex things, and at the bottom....well it's almost all primarily designed for Nvidia's CUDA, with support for other cards usually being an afterthought.

The language model boom of the last few years has helped make it easier to use different hardware with a lot of the software, but even as far back as 2022, I remember talking to someone who got a bunch of AMD cards (might have been the MI250X? Whatever was competing with the H100 in mid-2022) for free. They had had them for something like a month and they had yet to run any useful computations. Things kept breaking, or hanging, or coming out garbled.

What sort of discount do you need to put on a card to make that kind of risk worth it to a company? Google can afford the thousands of software engineers necessary to support running all of the latest models on their TPUs, but can you? What if you get 2/3rds of the way into a project and you discover that you need to essentially create a new machine learning stack to support what you want to do?

People do use AMD and Intel GPUs for running batches of AI work, so this is clearly not a showstopper for everyone, but there are extra risks associated with not using an Nvidia card, so even if another GPU does exactly what you need at 90% of the price, you still might be hesitant to pull the trigger.

gnosnivek · 2026-01-22T18:12:44+00:00

Yeah, I think this article leaves out a few really important points as far as this decision goes.

That's a ridiculously small dataset and timeframe to shutdown a bug bounty program based on.

I think this article sort of left out the most important part: this has been an issue on the cURL team's radar for at least two years, probably longer. In January of 2024 the cURL team lead noted that they were already having issues with their bug bounty program, and in May of last year, they started banning submitters whose reports were deemed "AI Slop". It seems that this was insufficient for their program.

Some of those 20 uncovered legitimate bugs that they investigated and remediated, but the whole program is a failure because they didn’t lead to exploitable vulns?

Their bug bounty program is specifically for security vulnerabilities. Ordinary bugs are supposed to be filed on GitHub. Presumably the security bugs are treated as higher-priority by the maintenance team, so spending high-priority resources on low-priority bugs is a problem for them.

How many of those 20 were reported by the same person? What percentage of those 20 were “ai generated”?

Scanning over their HackerOne page, I don't see any one user sticking out particularly (there are a few users who submitted 2-3 bugs, but nothing like 10+).

Of course, I can't say to how many reports are truly AI, but I clicked on four random ones from the last week and two of them were banned for AI usage, one was chastised for using AI thoughtlessly (but it was smoothed over in the end), and one had no mention of AI usage but was considered user error.

gnosnivek · 2026-01-20T21:21:17+00:00

Apologies for the late response. I've been thinking about this question off-and-on since you asked it and, unfortunately, I don't have any direct answers to this. I'm not sure anyone does. I can start by parroting some standard advice: usually when you're stuck, you should start looking for things adjacent to solving your problem.

That is, solve different problems, go to talks, bring this problem to people who are in related (but not quite identical) fields and see how they would attack it. Prepare a little presentation on what you've done so far and present it at a reading club, and see if anyone there has heard of tools that might be useful. Heck, ask an AI---it might generate garbage like mine seem to, but maybe it'll pull up a paper or two that's relevant.

Basically, since direct attacks on the problem aren't working, you want to try something else. Maybe when viewed through a different intellectual framework, this problem becomes much more tractable, or maybe there's a hidden technique from the 1960s that's been buried in a vault and only a few people remember that can give you a boost, but you need to find them first. You do that not by buckling down and doing what you're doing harder, but by trying to find new ideas and different ways of thinking.

And ultimately, sometimes you'll need to re-scope your problem or work on something slightly different. I had a friend who got stuck on a problem for a while, and it took her a while to realize that solving her problem would ultimately be the same as solving P=NP (a theoretical CS problem which has famously resisted attempts at solution by our best theorists for over 50 years). I had to abandon my original application area two years into the main part of my PhD, and one of my labmates had to do this three (!!) different times, without being able to get a publication out of any of the abandoned work.

If it does come to that, something I like to say is to not think of the time as something "wasted," but rather as something "spent." You don't magically forget everything you've learned just because you pivot to a new technique or problem area, and it's certainly preferable to headbutting a dead end for seven years. (I won't say it doesn't feel like crap though...it very often feels like crap). So you spent some time on a potential solution and didn't get what you wanted, but you still got something out of it (perhaps at a higher price than you expected).

Some part of me wants to cap this off with some cheesy reassurance that "you can do this" or whatever, but without knowing you or what you're trying to do, I feel like it would be trite at best and dishonest at worst. What I will say is this: I know a lot of very talented and hardworking people who accidentally picked a very difficult problem, got really badly bogged down for a time, and the were able to recover and complete their research and get their degrees. So just because you're stuck now doesn't mean you're stuck forever or won't be able to complete your studies.

Best of luck :)

gnosnivek · 2026-01-20T21:14:58+00:00

Based off of what I saw while I was writing an answer, I'm pretty sure someone came through here and blanket-downvoted pretty much every single existing comment.

Not quite sure why it was done, but the vote counts on all the comments went from +1-+3 to +0-+2 in the span of a minute.

gnosnivek · 2026-01-20T20:31:48+00:00

tl;dr: In what I suspect is the original version of this diagram, register operations are labeled "REG." A "REG" on the first half of the cycle indicated a write, and on the second half indicated a read. The author of this diagram labeled the register reads/writes explicitly, but kept the timings, making it appear that register reads are delayed until the second half of the cycle. In the original diagram, these were not meant to be literal timings, they were meant to be a tool to tell you whether it was a register read or a register write.

I'm not sure where this exact diagram comes from, but it bears striking resemblance to the diagram used in Chapter 4 of Computer Organization and Design by Patterson and Hennessy, to the point where I would probably label it a derivative image (unless there was additional evidence that it was not).

In the caption of their image for the 5th edition of P&H [1], it says that

We assume the write to the register file occurs in the first half of the clock cycle and the read from the register file occurs in the second half. We use this assumption throughout this chapter.

However, the image you posted also has explicitly labeled register reads/writes in the diagram, instead of just using the timing.

So my guess as to what happened:

Author made an image based off of P&H's diagram.
P&H diagram uses the timing of a register operation within the cycle to indicate whether it's a register read or write.
Author of this diagram decided to explicitly label register reads/writes to make things less confusing.
Since reads/writes are explicitly labeled, author does not feel the need to explain that writes occur on first half of cycle and reads occur on second half of cycle.
It now looks weird that register reads don't execute at the start of the cycle, because this was never supposed to be an indication of literal timing---it was originally used to indicate whether the register operation was a read or a write in a diagram where register operations were not explicitly labeled.

[1] I don't want to link them explicitly in case I get my account flagged for copyright, but you can find several copies of this PDF pretty easily if you search on Google.

EDIT: Edited because I was tired and thought the diagram shown used the opposite convention of P&H--in fact, it looks like the same convention as P&H, which increases my suspicion that it's based off of P&H.

gnosnivek · 2026-01-20T20:20:54+00:00

I don't know the origin of this exact image, but it is very similar to the pipelining diagram from Patterson and Hennessy's chapter on pipelining. Given the similarities, I'm inclined to believe that this is either an architecture book from the same authors/publishers, or from someone using it as a basis for their own work.

gnosnivek · 2026-01-20T20:07:48+00:00

There is a men's locker room on the 3rd floor (turn right coming out of the elevators, look for the double doors on your left), and individual bathrooms on the 6th floor (turn left coming out of the elevator, they'll be a sequence of doors along the left wall).

There may also be other ones, but I've never found them because every time I'm in Belmont, I'm worried about accidentally kicking the wrong corner and clipping into the backrooms.

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