ipsi | 1 month ago | on: Arizona Bill Requires Age Verification for All Apps
ipsi's comments
ipsi | 2 months ago | on: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great
ipsi | 3 months ago | on: Patterns for Defensive Programming in Rust
1. It tells you which variable is null. While I think modern Java will include that detail in the exception, that's fairly new. So if you had `a.foo(b.getBar(), c.getBaz())`, was a, b, or c null? Who knows!
2. Putting it in the constructor meant you'd get a stack trace telling you where the null value came from, while waiting until it was used made it a lot harder to track down the source.
Not applicable to all situations, but it could be genuinely helpful, and has been to me.
ipsi | 4 months ago | on: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages
ipsi | 4 months ago | on: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages
EDIT: It's worth noting that this is mostly a spoken thing, AIUI - most formal/semi-formal writing would be in Hochdetusch rather than a local dialect.
ipsi | 10 months ago | on: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
Turns out that under certain conditions, such as severe exhaustion, that "sus filter" just... doesn't turn on quickly enough. The aim of passkeys is to ensure that it _cannot_ happen, no matter how exhausted/stressed/etc someone is. I'm not familiar enough with passkeys to pass judgement on them, but I do think there's a real problem they're trying to solve.
ipsi | 1 year ago | on: BYD has already produced its first solid-state cells
If I could rely on every Rasthof having multiple functional EV chargers, I think range anxiety would be far, far less of an issue for me, but as of now it's something that I do think about for longer trips, and do have to plan for.
ipsi | 1 year ago | on: Why GitHub won
ipsi | 1 year ago | on: Ask HN: Where are the part-time remote coding jobs?
* In the big cities, increased rents will almost immediately eat up the extra income from the UBI, and there won't be any meaningful change in the status quo for anyone who rents — which I imagine includes the majority of the people who do the important but undesirable jobs.
* Anywhere that the people doing these jobs either can afford houses (smaller American towns, e.g.), or where there's enough rental supply that rent won't immediately go up by the same amount as the UBI, will have to start paying people more to do these jobs. As far as I understand it, jobs like trash collection are already relatively well-paid given the training and qualifications required, so they might not even have to pay that much more.
ipsi | 1 year ago | on: Dungeons and Dragons taught me how to write alt text
If you're playing sessions with a lot of RP, DW will have a much better balance of rules:session-time, it's much easier to prep for, and given how rules-lite D&D really is outside combat, will probably have about the same amount of narrative input. Note that it's not necessarily the "group debating if the player survived", but typically the GM giving the player a choice when they fail to climb the wall, like "you fall and take a little damage, or you slip a little, cursing loudly and alerting the enemies at the top to you".
Done well, it gives the players a lot more agency, and much better buy-in for the story as they're now shaping it, instead of just being along for the ride. I would also say that pre-written narratives aren't really a thing for DW (at least, as far as I know!), so it's really down to what the DM sees as an appropriate penalty or choice, often phrased as "you succeed, but <thing>".
It's not really better or worse than D&D overall, I'd just say that it's much better suited for certain play-styles. If you enjoy tactical gameplay and using miniatures, then D&D (or maybe Pathfinder) are much better options. If the thought of yet another fight makes you want to gouge your eyes out, I'd recommend giving DW a try.
ipsi | 1 year ago | on: Txtai: Open-source vector search and RAG for minimalists
ipsi | 1 year ago | on: Txtai: Open-source vector search and RAG for minimalists
ipsi | 1 year ago | on: Txtai: Open-source vector search and RAG for minimalists
ipsi | 1 year ago | on: Txtai: Open-source vector search and RAG for minimalists
An example of how I might provide references with page numbers or chapter names would be great (even if this means a more complex text-extraction pipeline). As would examples showing anything I can do to indicate differences that are obvious to me but that an LLM would be unlikely to pick up, such as the previously mentioned in-character vs out-of-character distinction. This is mostly relevant for asking questions about the setting, where in-character information might be suspect ("unreliable narrator"), while out-of-character information is generally fully accurate.
Tangentially, is this something that I could reasonably experiment with without a GPU? While I do have a 4090, it's in my Windows gaming machine, which isn't really set up for AI/LLM/etc development.
ipsi | 1 year ago | on: Txtai: Open-source vector search and RAG for minimalists
Basically, I'd like to be able to take PDFs of, say, D&D books, extract that data (this step is, at least, something I can already do), and load it into an LLM to be able to ask questions like:
* What does the feat "Sentinel" do?
* Who is Elminster?
* Which God(s) do Elves worship in Faerûn?
* Where I can I find the spell "Crusader's Mantle"?
And so on. Given this data is all under copyright, I'd probably have to stick to using a local LLM to avoid problems. And, while I wouldn't expect it to have good answers to all (or possibly any!) of those questions, I'd nevertheless love to be able to give it a try.
I'm just not sure where to start - I think I'd want to fine-tune an existing model since this is all natural language content, but I get a bit lost after that. Do I need to pre-process the content to add extra information that I can't fetch relatively automatically. e.g., page numbers are simple to add in, but would I need to mark out things like chapter/section headings, or in-character vs out-of-character text? Do I need to add all the content in as a series of questions and answers, like "What information is on page 52 of the Player's Handbook? => <text of page>"?
ipsi | 1 year ago | on: A dev's thoughts on developer productivity (2022)
So to that extent, I think there's quite a lot in common between engineering and management tracks after a certain point, both because there's a genuine need for that, and because direct code contributions just don't scale in the same way that helping others does.
ipsi | 1 year ago | on: Roman Roads (2017)
ipsi | 1 year ago | on: A deep dive into email deliverability in 2024
ipsi | 2 years ago | on: A 2024 plea for lean software
ipsi | 2 years ago | on: LinguaCafe: Self-hosted software for language learners to read foreign languages
I definitely wouldn't expect it to be high on the list of priorities, but I do appreciate that it's under consideration at the very least.