Benji Smith

I love the Numberphile videos where it's like "I spent 11 years proving Bupkis vectors are always non-zero, and only 7 people in the world have read the paper beyond the abstract. Now I have 20 minutes to explain my research to 100 thousand people with a high-school maths education"

Turns out, kataifi is actually pretty nice on ice cream
shred it, toast it in some ghee/powdered sugar, and sprinkle it over ice cream for some textural variety

woah!

By this definition, I (a software engineer making a very comfortable salary) am working class

Although no matter how many notes I take, I know that some time a year from now I'll be like "oh what was that one quote" and have no way of going back

Library-borrowed books having a fixed duration is actually a good thing: if I bought the book, it'd probably just sit on my shelf for years. But now I have to actually read it in the time limit. Deadline-driven productivity

"I don't know how many people to order pizza for" Then order way too much and have leftovers, why is this seen as a problem

If I could make one lasting change to language it would be this: if your program runs out of stack frames, that's not a stack overflow, it's a stack exhaustion. Stack overflow would mean a buffer overflow on the stack
I always do a double take, since one is mostly innocuous and one is a security bug

I will grant that even on a mid-tier GPU like the 2080, local whisper is fast: at least 10x realtime, depending on settings. You can churn through hundreds of hours of audio a day, if you were doing bulk stuff
Hell, I think even on the CPU it is ~1x realtime w/ enough cores

This is not my experience with a local Whisper (small or medium, I don't see much difference): it struggles with proper nouns, and even homophones. Esp. if you don't talk and enunciate very clearly
I haven't tested proprietary ASR, but I'd wager there's still a lot of room to improve the last 1%

True girl? You mean Laura? *ducks*

*Floral Shoppe plays*

"I've trapped this abstract non-corporeal entity inside my mindscape, and for every day it can stay there, I'll be giving it 10,000 dollars in cash"

wtf, Columbus and Boise, but not Boston? Not even our haters can remember we exist 😞

you can get more with a kind word and a gun, than a gun alone

Wrote up a blog post around a #math #puzzle I thought of recently involving graph theory, and a bunch of prisoners forced to do math

benjins.com/blog/graph_p...

"we updated their prompt instructing them to not send unsolicited emails"
complete abdication of responsibility. Acting like the computer program running their code on their machines is some independent entity. They could update whatever 'send email' tool they have to actually block this instead

guess they're a railfan

Turns out, this is an area of study, and complete bipartite graphs are another example of these "randomly traceable" graphs
Here, there's an article that describes them as "will depth-first search of a graph always find a Hamiltonian path"
11011110.github.io/blog/2022/12...

I usually saw it done on a grid, but I started playing around with it on simple graphs. I noticed that it seemed possible to "get stuck" on most graphs, except cycles, or complete graphs. That is, you can find at least one such path (there are plenty of non-stuck ones too)

Was idly thinking about graph theory (as one does), and read about Self-Avoiding Random Walks: that is, given a starting point, randomly move to one of your neighbors that you haven't been to yet. If there are none, it's over

5 quince fruits arranged in a quincunx pattern

quince-cunx

www.justice.gov/epstein
Seems to work fine, even w/o the space (625 results)

Peers:63
Seeders:405
It's like the bat signal went out for millennials who grew up on napster and limewire

Would make sense: it's a bit ambiguous to me watching it if there's supposed to be more after it cuts to commercial

Is there a full version? This one is ~14 minutes out of what seems like it should be ~41

The general switch from absolute numbers (80% success on benchmark for New Model vs 55% success for Old Model) to relative numbers ("win rate" or "ELO") does strike me as trying to gussy up announcements of more underwhelming and incremental results

Random coding project: combining Tracery (a grammar-based PCG tool) and Strudel (a live-coding music language) to make randomly-generated music
Someone who is good at music tell me if it's bad or very bad, I can't tell
benjins.com/experiments/...

Some of the tests I did the worst on were ones I turned in early. The problem wasn't that I ran out of time, it's that I didn't know the material

I was trying to remove an old version of ninja shadowing the one I wanted to use: `which ninja` was giving the correct one, but running `ninja` kept complaining about the old one being missing
Used `hash -d ninja` to fix it by busting the cache