Grant Gould
@nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
13 followers 10 following 83 posts
Roboticist, meticulous software dead-ender, Im in ur C++ objecting to ur barepointers. Cambridge, MA; he/him; grumpy but anarchist-ish. No time for: * LaTeX in […] 🌉 bridged from https://hachyderm.io/@nonnihil on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/
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Reposted by Grant Gould
ifixcoinops.retro.social.ap.brid.gy
Myspace? Skipped it, got the next one. Spotify, yeah nah that looks shit and my MP3s still work fine, I'll just give it a couple of years and get the next one.

There's always a next one
nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
The central metaphor of the spider's web is that it is a network, filling space by bridging together disparate points.

In this case, AC power and ground.

Which is why my parents' garage door won't open: Metaphor. Stinky carbonized metaphor.
nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
Okay, this post has definitely gone a lot further than I expected; I have plenty of responses now to pass on to our donation coordinator.
nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
@twoowls73 Yeah, I bet that's impossible for us, but I'll ask -- the donations coordinator is a Scot so if anyone can make it happen...
nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
If anyone with an educational nonprofit or school wants a donation of some UR-3 robot arms, get in touch -- my company is getting rid of a bunch and we haven't found any takers with our usual donation recipients.
These are great learning models, mechanically similar to light industrial arms but […]
Original post on hachyderm.io
hachyderm.io
nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
@zachweinersmith.bsky.social I think the Peloponnesian War was a go-to reference to anyone sufficiently well-read.
nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
Heard of slow zombies. Heard of fast zombies. Driving zombies, that's a new one to me.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn839xqdn5po
BBC News headline:  "ICE agent shoots dead man who tried to drive at agents, officials say"
nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
So we had two big televised acts of horrifying political murder in North America this month. One of nearly a dozen civilians on a vague suspicion by the actual ruling political leadership of a country. The other of one off-brand white supremacist by a different off-brand white nationalist.

And […]
Original post on hachyderm.io
hachyderm.io
nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
To be against political violence is to be, first and foremost, against the largest and most severe forms of political violence -- the wars, the autocracies, the police killings, the deportations. The people who oppose those, can tell you that they oppose political violence today.

The people who […]
Original post on hachyderm.io
hachyderm.io
nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
I want to emphasize clearly, if you are going to have electoral politics, and those electoral politics are going to have Soap Opera State drama, and that drama is going to be intruding on the peace of my evening commute,
It really must be Somerville Bike Path Mayor cat drama […]
Original post on hachyderm.io
hachyderm.io
Reposted by Grant Gould
0xabad1dea.infosec.exchange.ap.brid.gy
the translation on Wikipedia vs my New Living Internet Translation. 🐴

#chinese #classicalchinese #translation #localization #autism #actuallyautistic #horses
(long text warning)
The Tang dynasty poet Han Yu (768–824) wrote a well-known fable about Bole and qianlima.

Only when an era has a man like Po-le are there thousand-li horses. Thousand-li horses are common, but Po-les, on the other hand, are rare. Thus even though there may be famous horses, they only become abused under the hand of the man to whom they are enslaved, and they die in the stables—never having been recognized as thousand-li horses. Thousand-li horses at times consume a whole dan [approximately 60 kg] of grain in one feeding. If the one who feeds them does so without knowing they are capable of a thousand-li, then even though they may have the ability to go so far, they, having not eaten their fill, are lacking in strength, and their talent and beauty are not apparent. Moreover, if one wanted to rank them with regular horses, they would not make the grade. How then could they be asked to have the ability of going a thousand li? They are whipped inappropriately and fed in such a way that they cannot fulfil their innate talents. Yet when they cry out, they cannot be understood. With whip in hand the man approaches them and says, "There are not any good horses in the empire." Alas! Is it that there are really no good horses or is it perhaps that there is no one who really understands horses? (long text warning)
When the world is graced by people with Horse Autism, then we also have Thousand Mile Horses. Such horses are actually quite common; it’s having enough Horse Autism to recognize them that’s rare. Hence, though a horse may be an S-Rank pull, it is humiliated at the hands of a filthy casual, dying in a stable without ever being recognized as a horse that can run a thousand miles. Such a horse needs to eat a metric fuckton of grain, but the guy feeding horses couldn’t recognize what he has on his hands without a metric fuckton of help. Hence this horse, though it has such enormous potential, never eats its fill, never unlocks its true power, it never gets a chance to shine and it gets assigned scrub tier on the Horse Leaderboards; who’d look for top talent in the bronze league? You whip it wantonly, you don’t feed it enough to reach its potential, it cries out to you and you just crack the whip again, grumbling “there ain’t a damn decent horse on this earth;” is it really the horse, or is it your neurotypical ass?
Reposted by Grant Gould
zachweinersmith.bsky.social
In retrospect, the unlikely alliance of my incompetence and facebook's maze-like backend, appears to have thwarted a dedicated scammer for ninety full minutes, not counting the repeated email and messenger exchanges.

I did my best to help the scammer get my page, but we were unsuccessful.
nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
"Create a background thread that can terminate its own EC2 instance" not high on my list of good software ideas.
"Log this termination only to a log on that same instance, with long buffering" somehow even lower than that.
nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
Me to coworkers: Company policy lets you use LLMs, so just be sure to clearly label any PRs where you let LLMs write the code so I can employ professional side-eye during code review.
Coworkers: So you're saying it's fine if I just ask the LLM to _design_ my code for me instead...
nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
@0xabad1dea oh my god it's not just me i thought it was just me

I use bluetooth even though I hate it because wtf is up with all the jacks crapping out the moment someone says "vanishingly tiny torque" near them.
nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
Mega Mosaic tells me that I burned 64 hours of anxiety compensation into this game.
Honestly one of the best game purchases I've made; huge props to Mark Ffrench / https://dividetheplunder.com/ for this ultimate stimming toy.
Steam Achievement badge for 100% completion.
Reposted by Grant Gould
nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
@joshuajfriedman.com If that graphic is meant to be the sun behind the statue of Liberty:
* It's sunset, not sunrise, for Cuomo.
* That view of the sunset right now is only visible from Park Slope.
https://www.suncalc.org/#/40.6896,-74.0446,13/2025.08.04/20:07/1/3
Reposted by Grant Gould
eloquence.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
As someone mainly working in open source land, I can't tell you how under-appreciated it is to be able to _look at what some piece of code does_ to shortcut troubleshooting.

So much corporate "software as a service" stuff is poorly and incorrectly documented, and you have to take wild guesses […]
Original post on social.coop
social.coop
nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
@aaronrosspowell.com Excellent! I'm in the process of setting up a blog on micro.blog myself; I'm eager to see what you come up with!
nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
@zachweinersmith.bsky.social I think Grok's problems may be the opposite. IME recent LLMs have an _extremely_ strong tendency toward central consistency, a sort of baseline Kantianism. And the xAI folks have been consistently frustrated in their past attempts to system-prompt Grok out of that […]
Original post on hachyderm.io
hachyderm.io
nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
https://toyotaresearchinstitute.github.io/lbm1/
This is the big publication that my department at work has been working on for many months now; I think it's pretty neat.
I am by nature an AI-skeptic, but this work has raised my personal estimation of ML-based vision, language, and action models […]
Original post on hachyderm.io
hachyderm.io
Reposted by Grant Gould
aaronrosspowell.com
Transmetropolitan does such a good job of getting across how everything rural and exurban right-wingers hate about cities is what makes cities the best places on earth.
nonnihil.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
@aaronrosspowell.com 3% is high but at 2% I might pick up some of that action. Buying a lottery ticket on "a four-way fptp race where everyone is hugely net-unfavorable could get very very weird" seems not crazy.