@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

waltman

@waltman@hachyderm.io

I'm a recovering recovering ivory tower computer scientist. I work in Columbia’s Radiology Dept. looking for better imaging biomarkers for breast and lung cancer.

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nixCraft, (edited ) to cscareerquestions
@nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

Poll: Can generative AI solve computer science's greatest unsolved "Does P = NP" problem? Please boost for reach.

waltman,
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

@nixCraft I don’t even understand the basis of the question. What makes you think it could?

janellecshane, to random
@janellecshane@wandering.shop avatar

Chatbots like GPT-4 and Bard will "retrieve" an explanation of a meme even if it doesn't exist.

https://www.aiweirdness.com/trolling-chatbots-with-made-up-memes/

waltman,
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

@tsubtext @janellecshane @stavvers Exactly this! Calling it a “hallucination" presupposes it has the the cognitive ability to determine the correct answer vs just coming up with a plausible probable next word or phrase.

arstechnica, to random
@arstechnica@mastodon.social avatar

Rolling in style: The Priority E-Coast beach cruiser

Ride around town in style on this $1,999 beach cruiser.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/09/rolling-in-style-the-priority-e-coast-beach-cruiser/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

waltman,
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

@arstechnica I don't see the use case for this bike. If you want an ugly bike for cruising around the beach that doesn't go very fast and can't carry much cargo, why would you pay $2k for this instead of a couple of hundred bucks for a regular bike?

josh, (edited ) to random
@josh@fediscience.org avatar

🤤?

waltman,
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

@josh I never heard of La Tur cheese before. I voted for mozzarella because pizza.

waltman,
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

@josh Agree. They're all good cheese!

gruber, to random
@gruber@mastodon.social avatar

One thing I forget, attending post-2020 Apple keynote events in person, is that everyone watching at home (or watching after the fact) has no idea what garnered applause and what did not. The USB-C announcement got raucous applause from the media section.

waltman,
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

@gruber Interesting. And these were the same folks who then turned around and wrote articles about how the average iPhone user was going to hate having to buy new cables?

gedeonm, (edited ) to random
@gedeonm@mastodon.social avatar

How often do you use cash to pay for goods and services?

waltman,
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

@gedeonm I just paid cash at two different stands at a farmers market this morning!

waltman,
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

@glennf @Edent @Meyerweb @gedeonm That’s a surprising “of course” for me, since Slovakia has been on the euro since 2009.

waltman, to apple
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

The reaction of pundits to yesterday's announcement that they're ditching the lightning port on the new iPhones fall into two broad categories:

  • “Typical greedy Apple making us buy all new cables!"

  • "I can't wait to replace my perfectly good Airpods just so I can ditch my perfectly good lightning cables and replace them with USB-C!”

waltman,
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

@pdcawley Why do you need to replace the Airpods too?

waltman,
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

@wordshaper @pdcawley I'd think you'd start having issues with the battery in the pods before the case. Aside from that, I don't see any reason to switch. What's so bad about continuing to use the old case with a lightning cable? I just bought new Airpods Pro 2 last month because my old Airpods were starting to die. I plan to keep using them with old lightning cables until they die.

waltman,
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

@wordshaper @pdcawley Lightning cables are inexpensive and light, and I've already got a bunch. As long as there are no other technical differences, I've got no problem at all carrying 2 cables around instead of one.

bigzaphod, to random
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

I know UUID collisions are supposed to be astronomically rare, but I have to wonder how many subtle (and potentially catastrophic) bugs exist out there due to an assumption that there will never be a collision.

waltman,
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

@bigzaphod I trust the math. What I worry about is poorly implemented libraries, RNG’s not being reseeded after a fork, things like that.

waltman, to random
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

Whenever somebody describes an LLM getting something factually but convincingly wrong as “hallucinations”, I would like the ability to send them a painful electric shock. That should be doable, right? ⚡️ ⚡️ ⚡️

waltman, to random
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

I hope everyone enjoys their Labor Day cookouts this weekend!

waltman, to random
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

There’s a nice article about @hhorstall and @fastmail in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer! https://www.inquirer.com/business/email-privacy-protonmail-fastmail-gmail-alternative-20230829.html

nixCraft, to random
@nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

BM built a new, state-of-the-art generative AI code model to transform legacy COBOL programs to enterprise Java with a high degree of naturalness in the generated code https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/22/ibm-taps-ai-to-translate-cobol-code-to-java/ There goes high paying COBOL dev jobs to /dev/null.

waltman,
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

@nixCraft Honestly if they're going to apply generative AI to any area of programming, this seems ideal. There's tons of repetitive code out there, it's all formatted in pseudo-English, most of the folks who know how to maintain it are retiring, and they're having trouble finding new devs to take their place. Let's let ChatGPT maintain COBOL code while the humans create art and poetry!

gutenberg_org, to books
@gutenberg_org@mastodon.social avatar

"Art may make a suit of clothes; but nature must produce a man."
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-2; 1748)

David Hume died in 1776. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. He argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. @wikipedia

Books by David Hume at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1440

Title page of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume which is available at PG: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9662

waltman,
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

@gutenberg_org @wikipedia I wonder if Hume got his headgear the same place as Leonhard Euler, or if this was just the fashion in the early 1750s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler

cschrader, to random
@cschrader@jawns.club avatar

another resident of my house quickly lost interest while I was trying to explain my exciting find from the free little library, so I'll share with you all instead

waltman,
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

@cschrader Well, I’m excited for you!

mike_k, to hamradio
@mike_k@mstdn.social avatar

…aaand I’m licensed.

VK1OMG

The world needs more vanity callsigns.

waltman,
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

@davealvarado @mike_k Congrats from Walt, KC3WHU. Clearly the FCC's computer has a sense of humor and thinks I'm a West Ham United fan. :)

waltman, to random
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

The old flipboard at 30th St Station might not have been perfect, but it never had this particular problem!

WGAvanDijk, to random
@WGAvanDijk@mastodon.social avatar

What did children in the 1950s have that we do longer have?
(an Amrican friend started a discussion about that on FB)

Smog.
Lack of safety belts (and airbags and crinkle zone) in cars.
Corporal punishment in school (and at home and at sports).
Policies to take children away from indigenous peoples (both in USA and Canada).
Institutionalised racism and segregation.
Smoking parents (family, neighbours, teachers, sports coaches, bus & taxi drivers), even during pregnancy.
Hardly any food laws.

waltman,
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

@wordshaper @WGAvanDijk Also most people still alive who remember the 1950s were kids then. Most people think things were better when they were kids, since they didn’t have any responsibilities and were largely ignorant of most of the things you listed.

That said, you’re going to get comments about there not being rock and roll in the 50s. Here in the US we still had a functional national train system and the top tax bracket was close to 90%. Otherwise, gimme the 2020s!

waltman, to random
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

How to get people's attention in a Perl conference hackathon room:

"Hmm, maybe I should rewrite these examples in Perl instead of Python…:

waltman,
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

@kellogh I originally wrote it for a general audience, and Python's a better language for a general audience these days. Plus it's just a heck of a log better at doing math, which is what the talk's about.

I ported the smaller examples. There were a few cases where I decided to keep them as Python because there was a good reason to keep them that way.

kellogh, to random
@kellogh@hachyderm.io avatar

has anyone witnessed "fully justified" code format? i've worked with data scientists that format their code so there's a very neat left margin, and the lines are mostly the same length, but the line breaks happen at arbitrary places, syntactically based on how long the line is

waltman,
@waltman@hachyderm.io avatar

@kellogh I once put an example in a talk of how to do a regular expression search in Objective C using Cocoa. It was roughly four 80-character lines, so it might be a good candidate for this!

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