I have long struggled with understanding what probability-generating functions are and how to intuit them. There were two pieces of the puzzle missing for me, and we’ll go through both in this article. I have long struggled with understanding what probability-generating functions are and how to intuit them. There were two pieces of the puzzle missing for me, and we’ll go through both in this article. There’s no real reason for anyone other than me to care about this, but if you’ve ever heard the term There’s no real reason for anyone other than me to care about this, but if you’ve ever heard the term pgfpgf or or characteristic functioncharacteristic function and you’re curious what it’s about, hop on for the ride! and you’re curious what it’s about, hop on for the ride!

My Plea to the W3C: Giving a semantic meaning to an "Obsolete" element. !--more-- I'll cut right to the chase, here's my proposal: span style="font-size-adjust:0.7;"The big element can be used to represent the "big idea" of a document or section, ie. text that should still be read when skimming through a document/span Rationale Why do we make...

Anil Dash: It feels like 2004 again.A generation ago, those of us in tech might talk to our friends or family and hear them say, "I think the ads in my Hotmail account are terrible, and I can’t send any attachments. And Yahoo search is getting

Michael Burkhardt writing for 9to5Mac: Meta Quest 3S review: Apple would never make thisThe reason why I say Apple would never make it is for one reason, and one reason only: it’s too low quality.Michael goes on to note the lower quality build of the Quest

you can see this on the CommonMark interactive dingus https://spec.commonmark.org/dingus/

TIL Markdown hyperlink and image syntax doesn’t support whitespace in targets (`href` or `src` HTML attributes, respectively).is rendered as:😭

an incredibly simple protocol for reliably and correctly downloading large immutable files. !--more-- (this is a follow-up and successor to my RTP proposal) Problem Statement Downloading large files is hard. Networks are messy, and while there are plenty of protocols that aim to abstract away this messiness, they all have their own problems....

I've had my eye on Setapp since it launched in 2017 but it's never been the right time for me to jump in...until this week. I really wanted to use Godspeed which is on Setapp (as well as having a standalone subscription) so I did some calculations to see if it was worth it. I started with things I knew I would definitely use: Godspeed - $48 a...

Bryan Braun has an interesting post about his experience with what he calls a “haunted domain”: He buys a domain that seems fine on the surface. When he begins using it, he notices some things aren’t right (organic search traffic, for example, is dead). After some investigation, he learns the domain was previously used to host pirated music. He...

We did it, Joe.

If you want to make a good RAG tool that uses your documentation, you should start by making a search engine over those documents that would be good enough for a human to use themselves. — Panda Smith Tags: search, ai, rag, llms

I hope everyone had a good weekend. I went on a hike. It was great. Statistics One of my great school regrets, next to “taking three years of business classes,” is taking less statistics than I did, which was basically the bare minimum. It was, in fact the bare minimum: one probability class and one statistics class. In my defense, my probability...

I hope everyone had a good weekend. I went on a hike. It was great. Statistics One of my great school regrets, next to “taking three years of business classes,” is taking less statistics than I did, which was basically the bare minimum. It was, in fact the bare minimum: one probability class and one statistics class. In my defense, my probability...

This post was meant to go out on the weekend, but I got sucked into video games, baking cookies, and, well, watching the Saints suck. I've mentioned this already I think, and I'm pretty sure I talked about it on my stream, but my anxiety which had taken a bit of a back seat for nearly a month has come raging back in. November is going to be kind...

helloworld.

Abstract: Michael Dummett, in a presentation to the Aristotelian Society 65 years ago (in 1959) inaugurated a long-running debate over semantic realism and anti-realism, and the issue of settling an appropriate logic as a necessary prolegomenon to fruitful discussion metaphysics. Dummett argued that the principles of intuitionistic logic are...

Linkwarden Linkwarden is a self-hosted, open-source collaborative bookmark manager to collect, organize and archive webpages. The objective is to organize useful webpages and articles you find across the web in one place, and since useful webpages can go away (see the inevitability of Link Rot), Linkwarden also saves a copy of each webpage as a...

why did it take an hour for someone to tell me I forgot the URL 😅🫠

Finding a server's BMC / IPMI IP address with ipmitool I test servers on a temporary basis a lot, and many enterprise servers don't have as user-friendly external port indications, or little OLED displays to provide useful information. They're no-frills because they don't need frills, you just deploy them and they run for years. I...

“Platform Strategy and Its Discontents” from @slightlyoff Yet another treatise on conflicting incentives hurting the web. Make sure to read the footnotes…https://infrequently.org/2024/10/platforms-are-competitions/

Closely watching Croissant 👀 https://mastodon.social/@BenRiceM/113385700599364899https://apps.apple.com/us/app/croissant-cross-posting/id6670288979(via @janl)

The tragedy of cross posting across multiple social networks is that most don’t bother to give proper attribution to the appropriate accounts on each network.It’s nice to use “Real Name” but it’s so much better and valuable to the author to use @​RealName.

I've been building lots of apps by using LLMs and Agents. I'm currently up to about 17 tools, utilities and demos over the duration of a couple of weeks. I build them for me and because tools like Replit have enabled me during my small spots of free time to build fully working sites and apps that solve the immediate problem that I have. I've felt...

Questioning a puzzling claim about mass surveillance. #attackers #governments #corporations #surveillance #cryptowars

The band-limited expansion of the function f(x) is given by where sinc(x) = sin(πx)/πx. This is also called the sinc expansion, or the Whittaker cardinal after its discoverer E. T. Whittaker [1]. This is called the band-limited expansion of f because each term in the infinite sum is band-limited, i.e. only has Fourier spectrum within […] The post...

I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, a 1-year subscription ($89.99) for ScreenCastsONLINE. I’ve learned so much from ScreenCastsONLINE. For tips, tricks, and in-depth how-tos on everything from OmniFocus to Obsidian, you can’t beat their informative and excellently-made videos. This 1-year subscription opens up a plethora of knowledge. From...

We recently hit an interesting case where planner picked wrong plan. Kinda. And figured it could be used to show how to deal with such cases. So, we have some databases on PostgreSQL 14 (yes, I know, we should upgrade, but it is LONG project to upgrade, so it's not really on the table now). … Continue reading "Case study: optimization of weirdly...

As I wrote in last year’s Coping With Loss, just before my wife gave birth to our daughter, my father-in-law passed away. Needless to say, last year has been very hard—and to a certain extend, this year as well. We’re nineteen months later now and the resulting grief still hits us when we least expect it to, as in a sudden wave that brutally...

Heading into my seventh decade, I ponder the things that happen to all of us with the advance of time.

A big thing you need to contend with when working on design systems is anticipating all the different ways someone may use a component. The idea here is that you then preemptively provide sensible behavior and safeguards to keep things working well. An example of this is a “Simple List” component I was helping to make. It’s a workhorse component,...

Hugging Face Hub: Configure progress bars This has been driving me a little bit spare. Every time I try and build anything against a library that uses huggingface_hub somewhere under the hood to access models (most recently trying out MLX-VLM) I inevitably get output like this every single time I execute the model: Fetching 11 files:...

python-imgcat I was investigating options for displaying images in a terminal window (for multi-modal logging output of LLM) and I found this neat Python library for displaying images using iTerm 2. It includes a CLI tool, which means you can run it without installation using uvx like this: uvx imgcat filename.png Via rich/discussions ...

Prompt GPT-4o audio A week and a half ago I built a tool for experimenting with OpenAI's new audio input. I just put together the other side of that, for experimenting with audio output. Once you've provided an API key (which is saved in localStorage) you can use this to prompt the gpt-4o-audio-preview model with a system and regular prompt and...

Understanding the security risks of localStorage and what to use instead for tokens, secrets, and user data

Lots of kind words poured in as a response to My approach to GTD and PKM, and one question was asked so frequently that I decided to write about it. Why is “Get mom a birthday present” a project and not a task? GTD is very orthodox in what a “project” is: it’s anything that: you think you’ll complete in the next year requires more than one step...

Lots of kind words poured in as a response to My approach to GTD and PKM, and one question was asked so frequently that I decided to write about it. Why is “Get mom a birthday present” a project and not a task? GTD is very orthodox in what a “project” is: it’s anything that: you think you’ll complete in the next year requires more than one step...

If you have a blog, you've probably gotten those emails that want to "collaborate" on a guest post—which often means "let us post sketchy links for SEO purposes." Recently, I got one which was a little different flavor than the usual spam, so I bit and replies. The end result was at the same time fascinating, unsurprising, and deeply...

Adding a Mastondon Author Tag to this site

In an age dominated by rapid technological advancements, it’s easy to forget the original purpose behind the creation of technology: to enhance human potential, address pressing societal challenges, and drive progress. As we forge ahead, however, there’s a growing concern that innovation is increasingly motivated by novelty rather than utility....

At some point in the night I awoke from a dream with a single word in my mind. Each and every time waking after this, when I’d normally try to remember any dreams to add later to my notes for therapy, instead I told myself to remember this name: Telemachus. I’m not a woo-woo guy. I don’t believe in divination, by dream or otherwise. I’m quite...

Back when I reviewed the Radxa X4, I went to some trouble to go over its thermal characteristics and how well that massive heatsink worked. At the time, I resorted to using my own thermal pad to get the best possible contact between the CPU and the heatsink, but apparently that was not enough, because the board still ran a bit hot under load....

Let’s try something else, in the form of a sort of “heard” directed at another blogger. Misu opens their latest with an observation: Recently I’ve noticed that we have a lot of RCA Victor records. Each time I pull one out I find myself looking at the dog. His name is Nipper, apparently. Indeed, that’s Nipper, and when I was younger my family...

llm-whisper-api I wanted to run an experiment through the OpenAI Whisper API this morning so I knocked up a very quick plugin for LLM that provides the following interface: llm install llm-whisper-api llm whisper-api myfile.mp3 It uses the API key that you previously configured using the llm keys set openai command. If you haven't configured one...

Platforms like Facebook and Twitter stopped promoting posts with links a few years ago. This forced users on those platforms to post content directly there instead of directing followers to external sites. I detest this behavior in social media platforms. Instagram in particular is the most frustrating of these platforms, since you functionally...

So the Macro extension and a bunch of smaller extensions were supposed to be it, but it’s so much fun to create these that whenever I get an idea for an extension I can’t help making it. This time I wanted to keep track of how many times I’m calling certain functions in my code. That’s quite a niche requirement so I made a more general purpose...

Finding the right tool for something important to you can have a major impact on your life.

I’ve been having problems for the last 3 years or so where Mess With DNS periodically runs out of memory and gets OOM killed. This hasn’t been a big priority for me: usually it just goes down for a few minutes while it restarts, and it only happens once a day at most, so I’ve just been ignoring. But last week it started actually causing a problem...

llm-jq is a brand new plugin for LLM which lets you pipe JSON directly into the llm jq command along with a human-language description of how you'd like to manipulate that JSON and have a jq program generated and executed for you on the fly. Thomas Ptacek on Twitter: The JQ CLI should just BE a ChatGPT client, so there's no pretense of actually...

Look at and label your data, build and evaluate your LLM-evaluator, and optimize it against your labels.

Agile methodology, lauded for its adaptability and responsiveness, has revolutionized the way software development teams operate. However, beneath the surface of its acclaimed flexibility lies a paradox: the very principles that enable Agile’s success can also give rise to chaos when not properly managed. This article delves into the limitations...

This is an announcement for zizmor, a new tool for finding security issues in GitHub Actions setups. You can run it on one or more workflow definitions1, and it’ll emit cargo-style diagnostics, SARIF, or JSON as you please. Support for custom actions (e.g. action.yml within actions/checkout or similar) is planned, but not implemented yet. ↩

Grasp JavaScript's type coercion with practical examples and avoid common pitfalls

This post is an edited and expanded version of a now-mangled Mastodon thread. Platforms Are Competitions ...and We're Losing Win Condition You Do It To Yourself, And That's What Really Hurts Groundhog Day Reboot Some in the JavaScript community imagine that I harbour an irrational dislike of their tools when, in fact, I want nothing more than to...

kqueue is a BSD/MacOS alternative over poll. In most ways, kqueue is similar to the Linux-specific epoll, which itself is important, but important, incremental upgrade to poll. Because kqueue has a single function it superficially looks like poll. But, as we'll soon see, that single function can behave in two different ways, making its API and...

As an independent writer and publisher, I am the legal team. I am the fact-checking department. I am the editorial staff. I am the one responsible for triple-checking every single statement I make in the type of original reporting that I know carries a serious risk of baseless but ruinously expensive litigation regularly used to silence...

When I asked the question, “what made the NES so interesting”, my answer was to describe the memory mappers used by the console. But what’s interesting is that the very first cartridge to feature a memory mapper was not from Nintendo themselves; they were late to the game of expansion hardware on cartridges, since their plan to expand the console...

Apparently there are surgeons who are getting tons of value from the Vision Pro. That’s great, but is it evidence that the Vision Pro is a great success, or is it just that surgeons use literally every headset that comes out regardless of if those headsets are successes or failures?

Mastodon discussion about sandboxing SVG data I asked this on Mastodon and got some really useful replies: How hard is it to process untrusted SVG data to strip out any potentially harmful tags or attributes (like stuff that might execute JavaScript)? The winner for me turned out to be the humble tag. SVG images that are rendered in an image...

LLM Pictionary Inspired by my SVG pelicans on a bicycle, Paul Calcraft built this brilliant system where different vision LLMs can play Pictionary with each other, taking it in turns to progressively draw SVGs while the other models see if they can guess what the image represents. Tags: vision-llms, svg, generative-ai, ai,...

Formulating optimization models inside traditional programming languages such as Python is very popular. The main tool the developers use to make this possible is operator overloading. There are cases, where we can write code that looks somewhat reasonable, is accepted and processed without any warning or error messages, but is total nonsense. In...