skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on The web is more than enough in ~tech
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The web is more than enough
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Comment on Why parents love a school with bogus numbers in ~life
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Alpha says that its students show “2x growth” if they meet certain criteria on an adaptive standardized test called MAP Growth. Alpha projects each student’s expected growth in the next testing period — for example, a third grader who is a 50th-percentile reader might be expected to grow 7 points from fall to winter. That number is a median; of all the third graders who are 50th percentile readers, half will grow more than 7 points, and half will grow less. If a student grows 14 points, Alpha calls this 2x growth.
The school offers students huge prizes, payouts, and incentives to perform well on those tests. That the resulting scores are higher than at other schools isn’t shocking and doesn’t say much.
But this can produce extremely odd results, particularly in high school, where term-to-term academic growth, as measured by the MAP tests, is far slower than in the early years; the expected gains for high schoolers on the MAP growth tests are close to nil as a result. For example, a ninth-grade student who is a 90th-percentile reader is expected to gain only 0.23 points on the reading MAP test from fall to spring. But this means that a ninth grader gaining two points, which is within normal random variation, would count as 9x growth!
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One other obstacle to evaluating Alpha’s claims is the difficulty of disentangling them from selection effects: In general, the overwhelming majority of the differences between schools in student performance are driven by the self-selection of involved parents and motivated students. It stands to reason that a school serving the children of people who can afford to pay $75,000 a year is going to have better outcomes than any school that doesn’t, even if instructional quality is no better or worse.
Because Arizona’s Unbound Academy is a free public charter school based around the Alpha online platform, that particular school’s performance promises a window into the method’s effectiveness that is less distorted by selection bias.
The first year of results from Unbound, which came out earlier this month, are not encouraging on that front. Alpha had told the state of Arizona that it hoped to get 65% of the school’s students proficient in English language arts and 60% proficient in math. (The statewide averages are 42% and 34%, respectively.)
Instead, after one year, just 28% were proficient in English language arts and 10% in math.
Now, that doesn’t mean that Unbound failed to teach its students anything. The student body seems to have arrived at Alpha performing well below average to begin with. If you run Alpha’s usual MAP Growth analysis, the school can report 1.8x growth.
I don’t really find it plausible that these students in any meaningful sense “learned at 1.8x” in their year at Unbound. If Alpha really had taken a bunch of incredibly low-performing students and were helping them improve, then this would be a success story — but it seems far more likely that it took a bunch of weak students who almost entirely remained weak students. They improved their standardized MAP test scores a bit more than expected because Alpha teaches to the MAP test so directly. Overall this is obviously a failure on Alpha’s own terms.
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Alpha, insofar as it has gotten results, has done so by hosting kids in an environment where they actually reliably use the edtech. That is the true magic.
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It makes more sense to think of Alpha schools as the incentive system and environment that gets the kids to use the Timeback package properly — meaning, if there is an effective intervention, it is not Timeback itself. Just by getting kids to actually do the practice that the apps offer, Alpha seems to have made some real achievements, if not the miraculous numbers they claim.
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But one of the most interesting things to me, as I’ve reported on Alpha School, is the program’s enduring appeal among parents who are well aware that the headline numbers are kind of meaningless.
“I love the school,” Naimoli wrote in a review that I would otherwise be inclined to call a scathing debunking of Alpha. “Alpha kids are increasing their MAP scores faster than kids at traditional schools, but the number is not 2.6 times faster. 2.6 is an erroneously computed and meaningless number.”
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Toward that end, one of my favorite Alpha critiques is from the education writer Michael Pershan, who wrote: “I just watched like three dozen promotional videos from Alpha School. I saw young kids fencing, knitting, rock climbing, biking, jogging, petting a horse, talking to Dr. Phil, golfing, painting, training with Navy SEALs, playing piano, playing guitar, doing pullups, squatting, giving TED talks, kayaking, lighting stuff on fire, baking, running in a parking lot, and recording a podcast. But I struggled to find footage of a student reading a book.”
Alpha, he pointed out, has a very specific viewpoint on the purpose of education: They are trying to minimize time spent on core instruction while maximizing performance. This is simply not something that most schools — especially not most fancy private schools that serve the kinds of kids who can afford Alpha — are trying to do. Most schools will tell you that they are trying to build holistic thinkers and citizens or foster a love of learning. Alpha is trying to get school out of the way as fast as possible.
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Why parents love a school with bogus numbers
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Comment on YouTube mobile app has deeply hidden the subscription feed in ~tech
skybrian LinkWhatever UI change happened on iPhones doesn't seem to have reached my iPad yet. Subscriptions are still there in a button in the bottom toolbar.Whatever UI change happened on iPhones doesn't seem to have reached my iPad yet. Subscriptions are still there in a button in the bottom toolbar.
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Comment on A room-sized robot crane in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...]From the article:
In robotics, price is basically actuator count. Stringman reaches an entire room with four motors, hanging its gripper from lines anchored in the ceiling corners. Working from above, it reaches floors too cluttered for any wheeled or legged robot. And since the lifting force is shared by all motors, payload capacity scales with their combined torque instead of a single actuator's, peaking near the center of the room where the lines share the load most evenly.
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Stringman is open source and OSHWA certified. The mechanical CAD, the PCBs, and the control software are all published.
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A room-sized robot crane
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Comment on 2026 United States midterm elections megathread in ~society
skybrian Link ParentIt would take more than five minutes to do the research, though.It would take more than five minutes to do the research, though.
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Comment on 2026 United States midterm elections megathread in ~society
skybrian Link ParentIf there's better research out there, I'm willing to read it. I don't think a web search is going to cut it.If there's better research out there, I'm willing to read it. I don't think a web search is going to cut it.
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Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
skybrian LinkMy mother is staying with us again for the winter and I was a bit embarrassed that I couldn't really explain how to use the TV so she would understand it. We inherited a Bose surround sound system...My mother is staying with us again for the winter and I was a bit embarrassed that I couldn't really explain how to use the TV so she would understand it. We inherited a Bose surround sound system from the previous owners and added a Google TV streamer, so there are three remotes. It's complicated. But my wife and I rarely watch TV, so we didn't do anything about it before.
So, I'm on a quest to build a simple, old-fashioned TV user interface that only requires a single remote. I'm calling it MomTV and you can try out the web version here. The UI is inspired by Channel Surfer and cable TV user interfaces in general. On the upside, there are no ads, thanks to YouTube premium. The downside is that it can only play YouTube videos and live feeds that allow embedding. But I think I can find enough content. (Some channels are placeholders and I'll be improving them.)
It turns out that building an Android TV app is not difficult with AI assistance. There is a Tailscale app for Android TV that can be used to set up a private network connection to a Linux VM in the cloud. (In this case, running on exe.dev.) The AI installed the Android command-line tools and walked me through setting it up. I can ask for features and it will build them and reinstall the app on Google TV.
Also, I haven't tried this yet, but it looks like Google TV will support a kiosk mode so I can replace the entire UI with my own app. I was disappointed with Google TV when I first tried it, because the default UI is an ad-ridden monstrosity, unlike the original Chromecast device. But it does seem to be a decent platform to build your own TV user interface.
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Comment on 2026 United States midterm elections megathread in ~society
skybrian (edited )Link ParentEvaporative cooling is common for data centers and really does "consume" water. (Although it will come back somewhere as rainfall.) They could run air conditioning instead but it uses more power...Evaporative cooling is common for data centers and really does "consume" water. (Although it will come back somewhere as rainfall.)
They could run air conditioning instead but it uses more power so it's a tradeoff.
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Comment on 2026 United States midterm elections megathread in ~society
skybrian (edited )Link ParentIt's a side point, but this got me wondering how water usage compares between farmland and data centers. Apparently about half the farmland in Illinois is irrigated and there's certainly a lot...It's a side point, but this got me wondering how water usage compares between farmland and data centers. Apparently about half the farmland in Illinois is irrigated and there's certainly a lot more of it. But for farmland that depends on rainfall, they wouldn't be competing at all.
It gets complicated fast because water withdrawal and consumption are different. Power plants withdraw lots of water for cooling but also put much of it back, somewhat warmer. And the numbers aren't all available for Illinois, so after a while I abandoned my ChatGPT analysis.
I'm not sure facts matter much for anti-datacenter vibes, though. If it weren't water usage, it would be something else. (Generally true of NIMBY activism.)
For the local election here, a candidate was trying to make data centers an issue even though nobody is going to build data centers here. California land and electricity are too expensive. He tried to make something of a permit approval process for what turned out to be a warehouse when I looked into it. Pretty brazen.
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Comment on How malware and a bogus job interview let attackers nab $6.3B from Binance in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
In September, a software engineer for the cryptocurrency exchange Binance got an interview offer for a new opportunity.
The first interview, live by video, seemed above board. So did the second, conducted on a popular social chat app, where the Binance engineer spoke with his prospective new employer’s purported CEO. Then came time for a test — a standard feature in technical interviews — where the engineer was asked to download code onto his work computer.
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That code, Binance said Tuesday, included malware that wormed its way into the exchange’s systems, evaded its security tools and eventually led to a record-breaking $6.3 billion hack last week that sent the exchange scrambling to cover users’ losses.
Binance released the first concrete details of how hackers breached its systems Tuesday after several days of investigation, describing the bogus job interview as one of several components.
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The job interview technique has been used by North Korean hackers in the past. In September, the FBI and government agencies in Japan, Germany and Australia issued an advisory that North Korean actors were targeting software developers and IT professionals and had infected at least 30,000 devices in more than 100 countries.
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How malware and a bogus job interview let attackers nab $6.3B from Binance
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Comment on fxgl/steamac: Valve's official ARM64 SteamOS in a lightweight VM on Apple Silicon in ~games
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Comment on LLMs can natively read and write neural network weights in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]- Exemplary
From the article:
We find that frontier LLMs are surprisingly good at natively reading and writing neural network weights, well past what we’d expect from humans or conventional algorithms. This might be a big deal for both optimization and interpretability.
Just by looking at the raw weights, GPT-6 Astra can tell what a network was trained to do. And without any environment feedback, it has no trouble writing, from scratch, small game-playing networks that outplay networks trained with PPO for 100 million steps.
Likewise, asked to make Qwen3.5-0.8B better at math without gradients, Astra identifies an issue in its weights causing reasoning loops that Qwen’s own model card warns about, and fixes this by natively editing 0.016% of the weights. With the same sampling settings, this weight correction raises MATH-500 from 7.9% to 48.1% and generalizes out of the box to instruction following, raising IFEval by 3x.
All of this is possible without allowing Astra to write training loops. It uses its reasoning to figure out what each part of a neural network computes, or should compute, and changes the weights accordingly. We call this Weight-Space Programming.
Throughout the history of deep learning, we encoded our simplistic inductive biases into tiny symbolic optimizers like Adam or Muon. This is changing: our neural network weights will soon be natively optimized by LLMs that deliberately reason about their weights.
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We are currently building a benchmark and a harness for LLMs’ capability on Weight-Space Programming. We believe this will provide a standardized evaluation to measure and accelerate progress in Weight-Space Programming, turning what currently seems like black magic into a rigorous, reproducible engineering discipline.
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We release the complete logs of every experiment in this post at github.com/RikiyaT/lm_understand-logs. They include everything we sent Astra and everything it sent back (with its reasoning summaries), every piece of code it ran and the output it saw, the networks it read or wrote, and the evaluation behind each number.
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LLMs can natively read and write neural network weights
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Comment on The American suburbs are better than you think in ~life
skybrian Link ParentDo urban neighborhoods count as suburbs, though? I guess it depends. We would have to drive to BART or the local downtown, but our neighborhood is still quite nice, with several restaurants in...Do urban neighborhoods count as suburbs, though? I guess it depends. We would have to drive to BART or the local downtown, but our neighborhood is still quite nice, with several restaurants in walking distance.
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A website for comparing endorsements in California elections
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Comment on Mystery of sixty-second fluctuations in power grids solved in ~science
skybrian Link ParentYep, pretty much. Wait a random amount of time before starting the loop, and also don’t wait exactly 60 seconds between checks.Yep, pretty much. Wait a random amount of time before starting the loop, and also don’t wait exactly 60 seconds between checks.
From the article: