Bayesist

Couple of photos from the solar eclipse that occurred today. Taken from our back deck with a Nikon DSLR through a 10-stop ND filter (which isn’t actually enough to be safe for solar photography, but I took a couple of quick snaps anyway).

I recently decided to upgrade my home office setup. My desk was functional, but a little cramped, and I’d been eyeing sit-stand desks anyway just to try and get some variation in the amount of time I spend just sitting. After some research, I decided on Uplift as a generally well-regarded choice. Purchasing I ordered an 80x30 Birch Butcher Block on the white standard V2 “C” Frame. I chose the option for one brushed metal grommet and one pop-up power grommet and the white “Advanced Comfort Flush Keypad”.

I’ve spent a lot of time over several years arguing with architects. It got me a job once – the stated goal of the position during the interview was “I need someone to go argue with the architecture group whenever they want us to do something stupid”. The general argument was always the same. Someone thinks that every three line for loop needed to become eleven classes with names like “FizzBuzzOutputGenerationContextVisitorFactory”.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I gravitate towards certain languages and revulse from others. Or as I put it on Mastodon, “I reject languages that are almost exactly to my taste because some relatively small thing I don’t like becomes an unbearable affront to my sense of good taste, and so I return to C++, a language I can find almost no redeeming value in.” That’s overstating it a bit, but there is some truth there.

GPT-3 and Programming A lot has been made of GPT-3/ChatGPT and how impressive it is, not just at dealing with natural language, but also at dealing with source code. See this for one example that got my attention recently, but it’s been a fertile area of experimentation for a lot of people. I wanted to do my own experiments, but rather than aiming for a complete program like a simple game, I picked a domain I’m extremely familiar with and wanted to see how deep I could go.

It’s commonly known, to a certain kind of person at least, that the normal QWERTY keyboard layout is not particularly well suited to typing English prose. The usual story is that it was designed to intentionally slow typists down so that the physical hammer mechanism used by early typewriters would have time to clear between key punches so as to not jam. Probably, that’s a bit suspect. But certainly the design was affected by the implementation on these typewriters to some degree.

Pulling some content out of the old site that felt like it should live on, and these make the cut. For context, I had moved to Iceland in late 2010, spoke no (or very little) Icelandic, and was more or less wholly dependent on Google Translate to help navigate daily life. Things like …finding an apartment. This was an apartment listing in Reykjavik from late 2010, as rendered by the best machine translation models that Post-2008-Collapse money could buy.