thmt's comments

thmt | 2 years ago | on: In two moves, AlphaGo and Lee Sedol redefined the future (2016)

Nit: KataGo does train on handicap games up to 5 handicap stones. In the KataGo write-up "Accelerating Self-Play Learning in Go" from 2020, Appendix D says that KataGo trains on handicap games with up to 3 handicap stones. Looking at the current version of the KataGo code, nowadays it trains with handicap up to 5.

thmt | 3 years ago | on: Crypto is the first question on IRS Form 1040 in 2022 [pdf]

For those who don't see the cryptocurrency question, it's section "Digital Assets": "At any time during 2022, did you: (a) receive (as a reward, award, or payment for property or services); or (b) sell, exchange, gift, or otherwise dispose of a digital asset (or a financial interest in a digital asset)? (See instructions.)"

The IRS describes the term "digital assets" here: https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i1040gi#en_US_2022_publink1...

thmt | 3 years ago | on: NYT reporters had a top-down directive that tech coverage should be critical

From former journalist Matt Yglesias on Twitter:

a few years ago the New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage. Instead of covering the industry with a business press lens or a consumer lens they started covering it with a very tough investigative lens — highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair. Almost never curious about technology or in awe of progress and potential. This was a very deliberate top-down decision. They decided tech was a major power center that needed scrutiny and needed to be taken down a peg, and this style of coverage became very widespread and prominent in the industry.

From journalist Kelsey Piper on Twitter in response:

People might think Matt is overstating this but I literally heard it from NYT reporters at the time. There was a top-down decision that tech could not be covered positively, even when there was a true, newsworthy and positive story. I'd never heard anything like it.

It's shocking to me that the NYTimes would make such an editorial decision, and it's disappointing to hear this about one of the newspapers that I trust the most. Certainly there are many aspects of the tech sector that ought to be criticized and exposed to the public, but I don't think it's good for truth-seeking to take an editorial stance that tech should generally be covered negatively.

thmt | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: What browser extensions are a must-have in 2021?

Video Speed Controller lets you speed up any HTML5 video. No more sitting through videos at 1x speed!

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/videospeed/

Even for a site like YouTube that has built-in speed control settings, it's still useful since (1) you can make the speed exceed 2x and (2) you can use keyboard shortcuts to tune the speed easily.

thmt | 5 years ago | on: An Introduction to Lock-Free Programming (2012)

Alistarh et al. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.3200) show that assuming we have a kinder, non-malicious scheduler, the situation looks even better: lock-free (some process can make progress) algorithms have a stronger progress property of being wait-free (every process can make progress).

As omazurov mentioned as a top-level comment, threads can also die, which is rather like never being scheduled. In practice, I suspect that you're right that it's often too extreme of a model—many programs use locks and don't worry too much about this issue.

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