I was thinking about an approval-style voting system that could end with a large number of ties, and ran into the problem of how to break ties in a provably-fair way that doesn't depend on candidates trusting each other and won't make voters' eyes glaze over.
I think I found …
I recently moved near Seattle, where traffic is terrible but there are surprisingly many bike lanes. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of hills. For a while, I would occasionally bike to work, but the hills were intimidating and I had to re-motivate myself every morning. Around a year …
I've been working remotely since before it was cool, and one thing I wish more people paid attention to is meeting equipment. It's annoyingly common to join a remote meeting with someone on flaky WiFi, with a barely-understandable microphone, and a camera where they show up as a shadowy blob …
I deal with a lot of servers at work, and one thing everyone wants to know about their servers is how close they are to being at max utilization. It should be easy, right? Just pull up top or another system monitor tool, look at network, memory and CPU utilization …
There's an LLM training optimization which keeps surprising me. It makes loss look unrealistically good during training, especially when training reasoning models with SGD. I'm also starting to think it's the reason LLMs have trouble fixing their mistakes and take their own outputs too canonically.
The optimization—called teacher forcing …
