andrew mascioli

such is life

"we know the risk of the outcome is very low" sounds like prior information to me - are Bayesian approaches on the table?

If not, I imagine some penalty could give similar results? But in either case, if getting more data is a reasonable ask, that'd likely be better regardless?

bleak house does, in fact, have the juice, i fear

if there are no chameleon plant haters in the world then I am dead

The TLDR is that I set up a process on a server I have (that has a Bluetooth adapter) to listen for my controller scanning for a connection and waking the gaming PC via Wake-on-LAN. Pretty happy with it.

Remotely waking a "SteamOS" gaming PC with a Bluetooth controller | amas.sh In this post, I show how I made it possible to remotely power on my living room Linux gaming PC from a Bluetooth controller. While technical, this elevates my "SteamOS" couch gaming to the full ergono...

As a long-time Linux gamer, I'm super jazzed that I finally have a working solution for turning on my "SteamOS" couch gaming PC simply by turning on my controller!

Details in this blog post: www.amas.sh/wake-steamos...

affiliate marketing is the will of god

Practical Hilbert space approximate Bayesian Gaussian processes for probabilistic programming - Statistics and Computing Gaussian processes are powerful non-parametric probabilistic models for stochastic functions. However, the direct implementation entails a complexity that is computationally intractable when the numbe...

I'm a couple years late to the party, but if you like statistics (and could use a distraction from the dumpster fire that is the US right now) this is a cool paper from @paulbuerkner.com, @avehtari.bsky.social and others. #statsky

The results for my ThinkPad are that each percent increase in screen brightness increases power by about 22 mW. Some ballpark calculations show a decrease in total battery life by about 10 minutes for every 4% increase in brightness.

Fun little experiment to quantify something I've wondered about!

Graph of power readings versus brightness showing a strong linear trend.

I fit a very simple Bayesian model in Stan to infer the direct effect of screen brightness on power draw

Measuring the impact of screen brightness on laptop battery life | amas.sh Screen brightness impacts laptop battery life, but how much is unclear. This post describes an experiment to measure the direct effect of screen brightness on battery power draw to infer battery life ...

New post where I describe a simple experiment I ran to measure precisely how much power my laptop screen uses at varying brightness levels.

www.amas.sh/backlight-po...

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Computing avg power draw via change in energy / change in time still works! But importantly, on my machine at least, the energy readings have much lower fidelity over short time scales than power!

It does mean that if one were to try to perform any experimentation that used power observations from the battery as estimates of real-time power draw, it would be thrown off unless the experiments were run over long time scale.

I'm sure this behavior is well-known to some, but it was new to me (and I haven't been able to find any references to this smoothing process, I assume its hardware specific?).

In retrospect, it's sensible that smoothing is applied given the common use case of estimating remaining battery time.

Thanks to the simple form of the exponential smoothing applied here, I can invert the smoothing to recover the latent true power readings and get a much more realistic looking profile:

In the post, I show that the observed readings are highly consistent with an exponential smoothing process being applied to latent "true" readings. By assuming that the latent power profile is a step function, I find a smoothing parameter that maps the idealized latent power to the observations.

By taking readings from the battery while applying a step-function artificial load, I observed that the reported power decayed toward near-constant values in a manner that appeared exponential

Recovering real-time battery power readings on Linux | amas.sh An exploration into battery power readings on Linux. Showing how on my laptop, the power readings are smoothed and that, by learning the smoothing function, true power readings can be recovered.

I've finally put in the effort to start blogging and the first post is a dive into my efforts to get reliable real-time power readings on my laptop running Linux.

The main thing I show is that my laptop seems to report _smoothed_ power readings instead of true values.

www.amas.sh/power-readin...

Screenshot from Parable of the Sower showing a portion that takes place in March 2025.

Highlighted text from Parable of the Spwer that reads: "In New York and New Jersey, a measles epidemic is killing people. Measles!"

you win this round, Octavia Butler

A red kite, perhaps?

being a longtime python user, my perception of julia is that I can see myself really liking it, and I appreciate many of it's ideas, but python has never really given me a strong enough reason to switch. especially when it feels like python is making progress at improving itself

ah yes, the 'decent into madness' phase of becoming a Bayesian

I think I've been to that show. kicked ass

me: "ok but what if the reader isn't very good"

A gentle reminder that if you find it concerning to see the people in charge of MacOS and Windows cozying up to politicians you disagree with while existing guardrails are dismantled, 2025 is truly an excellent year to be a Linux user

dc has never been known as a fashionable city, but good lord, the average dropped off a cliff this weekend

Like the only way to read this is that a guy who is not the President said “you may break the law for a while and I won’t punish you when I become President” and everyone said, sure, good enough

Also, assuaging the liability concerns of all in the chain is not at all guaranteed, short of passing a new law. If Trump claims non-enforcement or tries a retroactive 90 day extension, it's not obvious that Apple/Google/Oracle legal teams will buy that as legally sound

Many people struggling to understand that TikTok being available in the US is not at the discretion of a single company! Any one of a number of firms that run critical technical infrastructure could "shut it down" out of liability concerns. Makes any attempts to bring it back more complicated!