[HN Gopher] Tom 7: Badness 0 (Three ways)
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       Tom 7: Badness 0 (Three ways)
        
       Author : cubefox
       Score  : 201 points
       Date   : 2024-06-07 13:01 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tom7.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tom7.org)
        
       | cpach wrote:
       | See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40605970
        
       | pimlottc wrote:
       | Nothing on this page gives me any idea of what this video is
       | about.
        
         | horacemorace wrote:
         | You are then in the correct headspace to experience it.
        
         | quasimodem wrote:
         | You have taken the first step towards understanding Tom7.
        
         | brokensegue wrote:
         | It's about many things
        
         | recursive wrote:
         | Don't feel bad. It's not for everyone.
        
         | nimih wrote:
         | The video explains the main idea(s) behind the two papers which
         | are linked at the top of the page.
        
         | heleninboodler wrote:
         | You're getting a lot of glib answers, but in all seriousness,
         | this is one of the amazing things about tom7 videos. It
         | sometimes starts by appearing to be about nonsense or
         | triviality, but as he weaves all these weird stories, they
         | start to come together into observations that are absolutely
         | _brilliant_ and funny and he writes code to demonstrate what he
         | 's saying. I highly recommend "Harder Drive: Hard drives we
         | didn't want or need" as an intro to his style, his humor, and
         | the absurd lengths he will go to in order to prove a point.
         | It's in three chapters and the middle chapter still blows my
         | mind.
        
         | enqk wrote:
         | Truly great works cannot be summarized
        
         | aidenn0 wrote:
         | Don't worry, by the end he has fully justified all of the
         | diversions.
        
           | btown wrote:
           | A truly, consistently end-to-end approach!
        
         | mcpar-land wrote:
         | skip to 7:22, he explains what the video is about.
        
         | ipsum2 wrote:
         | It's about aligning text to fit a specific length using
         | language models.
        
         | peterfirefly wrote:
         | You didn't see the point?
        
       | tromp wrote:
       | Worth watching for the great punchline at the end alone...
        
       | JadeNB wrote:
       | Do I win anything for noting, in a video about hyper-detail
       | orientation, that, when the text on screen says "Is this the most
       | beautiful ____", the voice-over says "This is the most beautiful
       | ____"?
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65FRxE7uMc&t=9m07s
       | 
       | (I'm not sure if it's also an error, or part of the joke, or if
       | it just parses in a way that I can't accomplish on my own, that
       | the text before the video reads "Way three (recommended) is to
       | sit back and bathe in the 4k, 60Hz flashing lights that are
       | Badness 0 (Apostrophe's version) is the newest installment in the
       | Main Sequence:".)
        
         | idle_zealot wrote:
         | There are quite a few errors in the presentation that seem
         | intended to annoy detail-oriented people. One that stood out to
         | me was the use of backslashes in his website URL.
        
           | JadeNB wrote:
           | > There are quite a few errors in the presentation that seem
           | intended to annoy detail-oriented people. One that stood out
           | to me was the use of backslashes in his website URL.
           | 
           | Yeah, some of those (like the backslashes) were clearly
           | intentional. It didn't look to me like the "Is this" / "This
           | is" was, but I guess anything can be put down to being part
           | of the joke.
        
         | TapamN wrote:
         | I read the Epsom's Version PDF before the video was released,
         | and the typesetting was absolutely terrible.
         | 
         | https://imgur.com/a/wjK5br5
         | 
         | After the opening on how he's bothered by minor errors, I
         | thought it had to be part of a joke, and it was a setup for a
         | punchline to be revealed later in the paper. But eventually I
         | realized, no, the PDF must not being displayed the way it was
         | intended. I was reading it in Evince at first, but muPDF gave
         | much better output.
        
           | JadeNB wrote:
           | He does mention in the text above the video:
           | 
           | > Be warned that due to "BUG", these seem only to display
           | properly in Chrome. I am working on fixing "BUG" once I get
           | some sleep; I have some leads due to helpful people on the
           | blog.
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | The paper has the fifth occurrence of "Wikipedia" in lower
         | case, which greatly irritated me in the Knuth version.
        
       | plasticbugs wrote:
       | Tom7 is my favorite content creator. Each of his projects feels
       | like a ~master's thesis~ video dissertation. If you are not
       | familiar with his work, please take some time to watch his other
       | videos. They are all outstanding so I won't recommend any
       | specific one.
       | 
       | Tom7, if you're out there (here), thank you for the free
       | education and entertainment. You are an inspiration!
        
         | progbits wrote:
         | Wishes do come true
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40063261
        
       | cenazoic wrote:
       | (Read the paper, didn't watch the video)
       | 
       | I am a 54-year old undergraduate in computer science. I don't
       | know from Curry-Howard (or Hurry-Coward), but this paper made me
       | giggle with delight and glee. (Knuth invokes this delight in me
       | as well, although I don't understand most of his writings, yet.)
       | 
       | If nothing else, it's inspired me to implement half-ass easter-
       | egg achievement systems in any future 'serious' software I write.
        
         | WJW wrote:
         | That also struck me as a great way to make software more
         | whimsical. Imagine if you randomly got an "Achievement
         | unlocked!" message if you churn through more than 10 GB of data
         | in a single invocation of `grep` for the first time or
         | something. So many possibilities!
        
           | ketralnis wrote:
           | For something user facing sure but trying to debug why
           | _sometimes_ my grep job hangs with large data dumps because
           | my popen3 didn't know to consume from stderr because of your
           | whimsicle message would be pretty rage inducing
        
             | shadowgovt wrote:
             | Why isn't your shell consuming stderr? Errors happen.
        
               | ketralnis wrote:
               | If the UI is my shell then it is. If it's part of a
               | larger script being executed by python embedded in a cron
               | job wrapped in a burrito, it may not be
        
               | shadowgovt wrote:
               | Wrappers are still responsible for proxying or handling
               | errors and wrappers that fail to do so are wrapping
               | poorly.
        
               | timgilbert wrote:
               | Don't bring monads into this
        
       | umvi wrote:
       | This guy is great. My favorite of his videos is the one where he
       | has an NES playing SNES games -
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0&t=142s
        
       | elbasti wrote:
       | Every Tom7 video is a work of humbling genius that--just by
       | virtue of knowing about them--makes me feel like I'm in some sort
       | of secret club of people smarter than me.
        
       | stavros wrote:
       | Wait, what's wrong with Wordle's hard mode?
        
         | postoplust wrote:
         | > Hard Mode: Any revealed hints must be used in subsequent
         | guesses
         | 
         | As implemented, hard mode doesn't count gray letters (letters
         | nowhere in the solution) as hints. You're allowed to reuse gray
         | letters, but true hard mode should prevent that.
        
           | stavros wrote:
           | Oh hmm, I've never thought of gray letters as hints, more
           | like the absence of hints.
        
         | a_dabbler wrote:
         | In his example he knows 3 of the colours as indicated by yellow
         | but he also knows that those letters are not in those positions
         | and hard mode let's him make bad guesses using those letters in
         | the same positions again when it shouldnt
        
           | stavros wrote:
           | But hard mode only says the guesses must be used, not that
           | they mustn't be used in the same spots.
        
             | gweinberg wrote:
             | My understanding is in hard mode, you are not allowed to
             | make a guess that you know is not the right answer. So you
             | cannot use a letter in a spot where you know that letter
             | does not belong.
        
               | stavros wrote:
               | Hm, yeah, you're right, that makes the most sense.
        
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       (page generated 2024-06-07 23:01 UTC)