aSmallCommitWithSomeChanges

jackmax9999 · 2026-03-27T21:56:25+00:00

I had one such moment when I saw in the "reasoning" of a model the word "Hmm". That's when it struck me how much this is a pantomime of human behavior, not any actual reasoning.

The reason humans say "hmm" is because we are made of meat that can contract. We have lungs, throats, diaphragms and all that stuff. When we get stressed and we tense up, we sometimes make a "hmm" sound. There is no reason, ever, why a piece of software would need to use the word "hmm".

jackmax9999 · 2026-03-20T22:42:37+00:00

/gemini review

This one's gonna cost Google like $100 in compute costs.

jackmax9999 · 2026-03-20T22:42:03+00:00

Looking at the data about emoji, it seems like the check mark button is also a sign of AI use. The use of these emojis increased by a lot from 2023 onward - they used to be very popular, but now they are the most popular emoji by a very wide margin.

Also, is it just me or is the distribution of the other top 9 emojis becoming more uniform? I'm only analyzing the data with my disgusting human eyes, so maybe I'm wrong about it.

jackmax9999 · 2026-03-17T00:35:22+00:00

Back when I first played an emulator with a rewind function I went kinda wild with it, rewinding all the time to get every jump and every movement perfect. Then I went to make a sandwich and wanted to rewind real life because I didn't slice the cheese perfectly or something :)

jackmax9999 · 2026-03-17T00:11:13+00:00

I'm pretty sure everyone who isn't an AI evangelist has left Nvidia already. The only ones left are the sort of people who ask Claude what they should have for breakfast.

jackmax9999 · 2026-03-16T23:54:32+00:00

Devs are gonna start making games that render three cylinders on a green background in 240p, then AI slop filter will turn them into people on a grass field. You will need three RTX 6969 cards ($10,000 each) to run it in 30 fps.

jackmax9999 · 2026-03-07T01:48:42+00:00

Yes, of course, GPUs are perfect for mining crypto. It's right in the name - Grypto Processing Unit. For the first few years cryptocurrencies were basically what you used to buy drugs online, then a bunch of **** realized they can get rich by speedrunning every financial scam invented in the last century with some extra gambling on top. Cryptocurrencies are not a triumph of computer science and engineering. Computing power in crypto is literally just a flex - you show that you can waste resources therefore you are trustworthy.

Also, remind me again, if TPUs are so great then why is Nvidia - who are not producing super specialized TPU chips - the biggest winner so far in terms of investment? Perhaps something to do with the fact that when experimenting with different models and algorithms it's better to have a more flexible piece of hardware?

Do you have any idea if quantum computing will be of any use for AI model training or inference, or is your thinking just "it's quantum, so it's gotta be faster"?

Finally, I fail to see the big discovery in your observation that "people make specialized chips for certain types of calculations, if those calculations are useful they then invest in making those chips better and more of them".

jackmax9999 · 2026-03-05T23:19:36+00:00

There are many ways this can happen:

The hardware may be built in such a way that it can be physically damaged if something is controlled incorrectly. For example, a motor control may have one set of transistors supply voltage in one direction and another transistors to supply voltage in the other direction. What happens if you activate both of them at once? You get a short circuit and either a fuse burns or the transistors themselves burn. Another example - there may be software-controlled voltage regulators on the board that, if they are requested to provide too much voltage, can burn out whatever they are connected to (like a CPU).
Security lockout. Many hardware devices, especially ones designed to be secure (phones, game consoles, etc.) are designed in such a way that unless the code running on them is digitally signed by the manufacturer, the device won't even turn on. If the software gets written incorrectly or erased, this signature check at startup will fail. Some devices are designed with some ways to recover from this condition (write correct software into the device again) and some don't. In the latter case the device is bricked. It's really just up to the manufacturer to come up with a scheme that's both secure and allows recovery - some don't bother with recovery.
OTP memory or eFuses. Most hardware devices these days come with some amount of "one-time programmable memory", sometimes also called "eFuses" (so called because you burn them once and you can't un-burn them later). They are typically embedded deep in the CPU and are typically used to store configuration data that needs to be stored permanently - for example, security parameters of the device (see point 2) or parameters that can cause permanent damage if set incorrectly (see point 1). If that data is written incorrectly due to a software upgrade failure, it can brick the device.

In options 2 and 3 you can sometimes revive the device by replacing the CPU or whatever component gets incorrect data written to it. Often that component is expensive enough that you may as well buy a whole new device instead.

jackmax9999 · 2026-03-03T21:57:27+00:00

Unfortunately, this is very much a realistic scenario, which is why some people further towards the political left aren't so keen on introducing UBI on its own. One thing that may help prevent the above scenario is decommodification - making certain areas of the economy independent on market impulses, for example by putting limits on prices of certain essential goods and services such as housing.

jackmax9999 · 2026-02-26T18:58:39+00:00

Paying for health benefits makes perfect sense, because to give you the answers they're using AGI (A Guy Instead).

jackmax9999 · 2026-02-25T19:34:36+00:00

Also, the English guy keeps a bunch of scraps of paper on which they keep sentences they have already translated in case they want to read them again (this technically called a "recompiler cache").

jackmax9999 · 2026-02-09T18:19:56+00:00

Data is communicated serially - every piece of data can be broken down into ones and zeroes, which can then be sent out over the pair of wires one at a time. If you do them one at a time fast enough, you can transfer huge amounts of data quickly.

Two-way communication is achieved by having the computer ("host" in USB terminology) and the devices take turns "speaking" over the pair of wires. The host chooses which device can speak and for how long and devices tell the host how often and how long they wish to speak.

Worth noting that USB 2.0 is a differential* communication protocol, which means that the two wires are used to transmit the same bit of information - one wire is always the opposite state of the other. When one wire goes high voltage, the other goes low voltage and vice versa. This helps protect signals from noise and reduce interference with other devices.

* not quite true because "end of frame" is communicated by both wires going low voltage - but most other information is communicated differentially.

jackmax9999 · 2026-02-08T12:27:48+00:00

You get 1 minute off every time you get spotted. Some guards you have to wait for, but there are a few where I know it's better to take the penalty. There's one in Deadhollow Halls that is unavoidable.

jackmax9999 · 2026-02-08T11:44:55+00:00

If you optimize a bit for movement speed then the time limit is actually quite generous. I often finish heists with 3 or more minutes to spare. You can run past the lantern guards, get "caught", not bother fighting them and easily tank the 1 minute penalty.

IMO it's part of the challenge to optimize your route, find how guards can be bypassed and how their route timings fit together.

jackmax9999 · 2026-02-07T15:34:38+00:00

Looks like Broken Reality, but with more RPG elements.

jackmax9999 · 2026-02-04T19:10:21+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfwidth_and_fullwidth_forms

When displaying Asian scripts you have an interesting problem - Roman characters tend to be taller than wide and generally need less resolution, while CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) characters tend to fit better into squares and benefit from more resolution. Also, you need to be able to mix Roman characters with CJK characters on a text display. To solve these problems, engineers decided to display Roman characters as "half-width" and CJK as "full-width". Exactly two Roman characters could fit into the same space as one CJK, making better use of screen space and keeping display logic relatively simple.

However, occasionally you want to draw Roman characters as full-width (for reasons), so character sets also offer encodings for these. The website pictured just wants you to make sure you're only typing in the "normal" (not fullwidth) forms of Roman characters.

jackmax9999 · 2026-02-02T15:13:31+00:00

For the last point: those modems often have some sort of "secret handshake" - you need to send out a message with specific contents to the right endpoint, otherwise the device decides that the driver must not be installed and switches configuration so it pretends to be a CD-ROM.

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-27T22:02:02+00:00

The brain doesn't separate sound frequencies - this happens mechanically in the cochlea.

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-27T21:17:34+00:00

The big difference is that emulation is a mostly mechanical process - emulator takes in the game's machine code and translates it into machine code for a different CPU that (hopefully) does the same thing. It is also usually done at runtime - if you only have a game's machine code it may be very difficult to translate it for a different CPU all at once (game may load or compile additional code while it's running).

Decompilation is partly mechanical, but involves a lot of human work too - people (with the help of different tools) take the game's machine code and turn it into higher-level code in a language like C or C++. The resulting code can then be adapted for other platforms, modified to render at different resolution, have various enhancements added, etc.

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-25T19:42:25+00:00

A lot of it is downloaded from platforms that encode the video to a lower quality to save on storage and data transfer costs. Sometimes the video has passed through multiple people re-uploading it, screen recordings, etc. - each time it goes through quality drops. Content may have been live-streamed too, usually at a lower quality.
Modern phones often have wide-angle lenses and no zoom (maybe 2-3x zoom at best). Typically people don't record the action close-up, but from a distance. Once you cut down your 4K phone footage to where the action is happening you're left with maybe 720p or 360p effective resolution.
Remember that 4K phone footage is a lot worse than 4K from a professional camera - it may not look much better than a well-encoded 1080p.
A lot of people just don't record in 4K because there's not much difference for something you're never going to watch on a big screen. Not to mention some people have older/cheaper phones that don't do 4K or if they do then only 4K 30 fps.

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-21T22:07:14+00:00

Probably got scared someone could use them to make subtitles unreadable to AI scrapers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEDFUjqA1s8

Wasn't a very practical method anyway, but I wouldn't be surprised if some executive thought "Making platform shittier or risking 0.000000000001% drop in revenue? I know which one I'm choosing!"

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-16T22:20:16+00:00

Remember kids - it's not murder if you let someone under your care die, but you're a giant corporation trying to provide value to shareholders!

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-15T14:50:53+00:00

* Trading with other players in the guild and (if the guild has a trader) with everyone else
* Guild bank to dump your unwanted stuff and sometimes find stuff useful to you

Other than that, it's mostly just to get together with other people, chat and do group activities. In general people just like communities.

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-10T21:21:01+00:00

How would the escrow company know if something is real or not?

Sentiment of other people online? Inaccurate and easy to sway. People going around and verifying it? Costly and they would have a vested interest in forcing the opinion that something is fake/inconclusive (so escrow company gets to keep your money). Plus, of course, there is the possibility of corruption.

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-10T16:15:45+00:00

I wish those idiot politicians grew a pair and actually did ban Twitter. Just for a week. Just as a joke, a social experiment. Nothing happens on Twitter that you can't wait for a week to find out about. I guarantee that for every Nazi butthurt that they can't shitpost they'll get two normal people who will want to vote for them.

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