physix's comments

physix | 8 months ago | on: In praise of “normal” engineers

It's a good article, but does it go without saying that when one says "engineers", it's about "software engineers"?

One reason I clicked on this one is that I was hoping to learn stuff about engineers beyond just software.

But it's a good read nevertheless. Thanks for that!

physix | 9 months ago | on: Finding Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data

I love it, it's crazy!

It would be cool to start with a random ROM image and then use a Monte Carlo technique (simulated annealing), making a set of random changes to the image by flipping bits, use the change in the "composite score" for the decision step in the MC iteration, and have your image "evolve" into something.

Repeat until one finds a game that is new!

Should only take a few ages of the universe. :-)

physix | 9 months ago | on: Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole

I think this is a great summary. It's quite intuitive and elegant. Does anyone have any information about what the author's peers think of this model?

I'd love the idea that we are living inside a black hole, which is inside a black hole, which is inside a ...

physix | 9 months ago | on: Highly diverse flower strips promote natural enemies more in annual field crops

Not being in agriculture, it took me a bit to understand that "natural enemies" refers to the natural enemies of pests threatening crops. Not the natural enemies of the crops themselves.

Good to know that diversity promotes growth!

physix | 9 months ago | on: Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers

I read them to get an idea of the quality that the AI produces, but mostly ignore the content after reading and click on to find actual sources, since I don't yet trust that content.

I was thinking that the drop in traffic to news sites is due to AI summaries, which might have the effect of filtering out people who are happy with a snippet. And was postulating that it would have two effects: improving the relevance of those who go to the news site (good) and feeding people with poor quality AI generated information (bad).

But then I tested out various news- ish search terms and never got an AI summary from Google. So I think the primary cause for a drop in traffic to news sites is probably not the AI summary itself.

physix | 9 months ago | on: It's the end of observability as we know it (and I feel fine)

I'd like to see the long list of companies that are in the process of being le cooked.

physix | 9 months ago | on: The Gentle Singularity

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-much-energy-does-it-take-...

:-)

physix | 9 months ago | on: The Gentle Singularity

I started quickly reading the article without reading who actually wrote it. As I scanned over the things being said, I started to ask myself: Who wrote this? It's probably some AI proponent, someone who has a vested interest. I had to smile when I saw who it was.

physix | 9 months ago | on: Cloud Run GPUs, now GA, makes running AI workloads easier for everyone

Just a thought: Maybe if they had some kind of opt-in insurance against overuse until the circuit breaker can kick in?

But, looking from the outside, the lack of protection is effectively a win for them. They don't need to invest in building that out, and their revenue is increased by not having it (if you ignore the effect of throttling adoption). So I have always assumed that there is simply no business case for that, so why bother?

physix | 9 months ago | on: How can AI researchers save energy? By going backward

Thanks for that and the preceding comments. I was thinking about the possible paradox of getting a reset for free. But, the cost invariably comes at some point, e.g. when you restart and need to reset your state.

physix | 9 months ago | on: How can AI researchers save energy? By going backward

I'm wondering... What happens when I do a reversible computation where no information is lost, does cutting the power on the unit create heat?

physix | 9 months ago | on: HTAP is Dead

> You cannot say HTAP is dead when the alternative is so much complexity and so many moving parts. Most enterprises are burning huge amounts of resources literally just shuffling data around for zero business value.

We built an HTAP platform as a layer over Cassandra for precisely that reason round about when Gartner invented the term.

In finance and fintech, there are ample use cases where the need for transactional consistency and horizontal scalability to process and report on large volumes come together, and where the banks really struggle to meet requirements.

I dug out an old description of our platform, updated it a bit, and put it on Medium, in case anyone is interested: https://medium.com/@paul_42036/a-technical-description-of-th...

physix | 9 months ago | on: HTAP is Dead

My takeaway about all this is that nobody really cares much about consistency or the cost to build and run lambda-like architectures.

physix | 9 months ago | on: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

I use Augment Code as a plugin in IntelliJ and PyCharm. It's quite good, but I only use it for narrow, targeted objectives, agent mode or not.

I haven't seen any mentions of Augment code yet in comment threads on HN. Does anyone else use Augment Code?

physix | 9 months ago | on: AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

That is what I think is most interesting about it. You get repeatable efficiency gains rather than burning GPU time in data centres.

physix | 10 months ago | on: University of Texas-led team solves a big problem for fusion energy

I'd love to see some references on those three claims. None of them make sense to me.

paul-schleger | 10 months ago | on: Science, Promise and Peril in the Age of AI

As an ex-scientist, I really like the stuff on Quanta Magazine. But sometimes, the narrative and style feels a bit repetitive. The quality of the writing in this series on AI, however, is really very good. It's a great read.