Zach Brockway
@neverender.bsky.social
Senior virtual production programmer @ Epic Games. Previously: XR/firmware @ OptiTrack. Spare time: Getting up to speed on ML.
Also @Zach@mastodon.gamedev.place.
Also @Zach@mastodon.gamedev.place.
Reposted by Zach Brockway
the key which unlocks Demis' entire deal is that he used to work for Peter Molyneux
the problem with this isn't the blithe disregard for ethical concerns, because *none of it will happen*, the problem is that it's blatant bullshit and these people are not only in charge of their massive industry but being taken seriously by governments.
fortune.com/2025/06/06/g...
fortune.com/2025/06/06/g...
Top Google exec says AI will rival humans in just 5 years and predicts we’ll 'colonize the galaxy' in 2030—but he draws the line at robot nurses
2030 will be “an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonize the galaxy,” Google DeepMind CEO says. Bill Gates and Marc Benioff have shared similar predictions.
fortune.com
June 10, 2025 at 2:17 PM
the key which unlocks Demis' entire deal is that he used to work for Peter Molyneux
There are dozens of us—DOZENS!
On macOS it's Option+Shift+Dash
May 29, 2025 at 9:36 PM
There are dozens of us—DOZENS!
Reposted by Zach Brockway
We should have a made a world where giving a child a tablet was as wholesome and enriching as giving them Encarta 95 or a stack of DK books.
I still don't entirely understand why we failed.
I still don't entirely understand why we failed.
Microsoft version of the encyclopedia, Encarta, was a miracle. And every year it was better and more curated and richer in multimedia and details.
And I feel so sad you'll never experience what this felt like. You were living the golden age. All of humanity would have wisdom unlocked shortly.
And I feel so sad you'll never experience what this felt like. You were living the golden age. All of humanity would have wisdom unlocked shortly.
April 30, 2025 at 10:50 PM
We should have a made a world where giving a child a tablet was as wholesome and enriching as giving them Encarta 95 or a stack of DK books.
I still don't entirely understand why we failed.
I still don't entirely understand why we failed.
Reposted by Zach Brockway
I've cobbled together syco-bench, a benchmark of model sycophancy. It consists of tests measuring three things: bias towards user in an argument, mirroring user views, and overestimating user IQ. Here are the results, higher scores are worse. See the following tweet for important caveats:
April 29, 2025 at 6:55 PM
I've cobbled together syco-bench, a benchmark of model sycophancy. It consists of tests measuring three things: bias towards user in an argument, mirroring user views, and overestimating user IQ. Here are the results, higher scores are worse. See the following tweet for important caveats:
Rare Anthropic tokenizer alpha. (h/t @andersonbcdefg.bsky.social)
April 6, 2025 at 6:07 PM
Rare Anthropic tokenizer alpha. (h/t @andersonbcdefg.bsky.social)
Don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here using my Super FX chip to design stealth aircraft.
picoCAD is out on Steam today!
📐 Build tiny models!
🖼️ Texture with pixel art!
📽️ Export spinning gifs! (and OBJ/MTL)
Get it 👉 bit.ly/picoCAD (15% off)
#gamedev #pixelart #lowpoly #pico8
📐 Build tiny models!
🖼️ Texture with pixel art!
📽️ Export spinning gifs! (and OBJ/MTL)
Get it 👉 bit.ly/picoCAD (15% off)
#gamedev #pixelart #lowpoly #pico8
November 28, 2024 at 8:51 PM
Don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here using my Super FX chip to design stealth aircraft.
Really great talk. How do you take a microbenchmark from a noisy ~637ns* per iteration (with spikes to 10+µs!), to an extremely tight ~163ns?
TIL you can isolate cores from the Linux kernel scheduler.
Also, if Intel Processor Trace turns out not to be really usable on Windows, I will be very sad.
TIL you can isolate cores from the Linux kernel scheduler.
Also, if Intel Processor Trace turns out not to be really usable on Windows, I will be very sad.
Maintaining consistently low jitter in a trading system allows us to offer tighter markets without incurring additional risk. Using a simple memory ping-pong application as a case study.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_Tt...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_Tt...
System Jitter and Where to Find It: A Whack-a-Mole Experience
YouTube video by Jane Street
www.youtube.com
November 18, 2024 at 4:40 PM
Really great talk. How do you take a microbenchmark from a noisy ~637ns* per iteration (with spikes to 10+µs!), to an extremely tight ~163ns?
TIL you can isolate cores from the Linux kernel scheduler.
Also, if Intel Processor Trace turns out not to be really usable on Windows, I will be very sad.
TIL you can isolate cores from the Linux kernel scheduler.
Also, if Intel Processor Trace turns out not to be really usable on Windows, I will be very sad.
Reposted by Zach Brockway
A physical reasoning agent, trained on millions of problems, that you can test out by coming up with physics puzzles and seeing if it can solve them. It's fun to see if you can stump it:
kinetix-env.github.io
kinetix-env.github.io
Investigating large-scale training of RL agents in a vast and diverse space of simulated tasks
kinetix-env.github.io
November 16, 2024 at 3:29 PM
A physical reasoning agent, trained on millions of problems, that you can test out by coming up with physics puzzles and seeing if it can solve them. It's fun to see if you can stump it:
kinetix-env.github.io
kinetix-env.github.io
"When I choose to see the good side of things, I'm not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It's how I've learned to survive through everything."
November 13, 2024 at 5:08 AM
"When I choose to see the good side of things, I'm not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It's how I've learned to survive through everything."
Reposted by Zach Brockway
Even though Newton's laws are deterministic, the behavior of many interacting bodies is so chaotic that it looks essentially "random."
Statistical mechanics effectively says: why bother with all those complex trajectories? Just go ahead and replace them with truly random motion.
Statistical mechanics effectively says: why bother with all those complex trajectories? Just go ahead and replace them with truly random motion.
November 18, 2024 at 10:52 PM
Even though Newton's laws are deterministic, the behavior of many interacting bodies is so chaotic that it looks essentially "random."
Statistical mechanics effectively says: why bother with all those complex trajectories? Just go ahead and replace them with truly random motion.
Statistical mechanics effectively says: why bother with all those complex trajectories? Just go ahead and replace them with truly random motion.
Unreal 5.5 is out! Including shiny new Virtual Scouting documentation for the shiny production-ready Virtual Scouting!
dev.epicgames.com/documentatio...
dev.epicgames.com/documentatio...
November 12, 2024 at 9:32 PM
Unreal 5.5 is out! Including shiny new Virtual Scouting documentation for the shiny production-ready Virtual Scouting!
dev.epicgames.com/documentatio...
dev.epicgames.com/documentatio...
"In the video we visualize the analytically computed input space partition formed by the neuron-thresholds (black lines) and decision boundary (red line) of a ReLU-MLP, around three MNIST training samples (white stars)."
Also, @theophite.bsky.social has a singular gift for explaining this stuff.
Also, @theophite.bsky.social has a singular gift for explaining this stuff.
November 12, 2024 at 12:31 AM
"In the video we visualize the analytically computed input space partition formed by the neuron-thresholds (black lines) and decision boundary (red line) of a ReLU-MLP, around three MNIST training samples (white stars)."
Also, @theophite.bsky.social has a singular gift for explaining this stuff.
Also, @theophite.bsky.social has a singular gift for explaining this stuff.
Reposted by Zach Brockway
This is kinda wild but the first edition of RLJ, the first journal on reinforcement learning, is out!
rlj.cs.umass.edu
rlj.cs.umass.edu
RLJ · Home
Reinforcement Learning Journal (RLJ)
rlj.cs.umass.edu
November 11, 2024 at 9:01 PM
This is kinda wild but the first edition of RLJ, the first journal on reinforcement learning, is out!
rlj.cs.umass.edu
rlj.cs.umass.edu
Reposted by Zach Brockway
just posted an update to my UE Toolbox, fixing a few bugs and adding some new drawing tools. A great thing about not being tied to the UE release cycle is that I can do this every week, not twice a year!
November 11, 2024 at 3:21 PM
just posted an update to my UE Toolbox, fixing a few bugs and adding some new drawing tools. A great thing about not being tied to the UE release cycle is that I can do this every week, not twice a year!
Reposted by Zach Brockway
The next 3 articles in my CPU rasterizer tutorial series are done! These are all about adding full 3D support, with perspective projection, perspective interpolation, triangle clipping, and a depth buffer.
lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/i...
lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/i...
Implementing a tiny CPU rasterizer | Part 4: Changing perspective
lisyarus.github.io
November 10, 2024 at 1:09 PM
The next 3 articles in my CPU rasterizer tutorial series are done! These are all about adding full 3D support, with perspective projection, perspective interpolation, triangle clipping, and a depth buffer.
lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/i...
lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/i...
Reposted by Zach Brockway
You can ask an ML question here and have it answered! Everything trending up
Idk if Bluesky is the right place yet but here goes. Using Karpathy's llm.c to reproduce GPT-2. I thought best practice was, break training examples at sentence-ends, but as far as I can tell the code here ignores sentences & documents and just takes 1024 tokens at a time. Is that normal? #MLSky
GitHub - karpathy/llm.c: LLM training in simple, raw C/CUDA
LLM training in simple, raw C/CUDA. Contribute to karpathy/llm.c development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
November 7, 2024 at 6:44 PM
You can ask an ML question here and have it answered! Everything trending up
Reposted by Zach Brockway
the money which Harris spent in the last three months could have bought Sinclair Media and had 400 million left over to run the Obama 2008 campaign
we will need countervailing institutions to combat the collapse of existing ones. it does not cost a lot to buy newspapers and run them at a loss. local TV stations.
i've been thinking about Harris' billion-dollar campaign and how that money might be spent more efficiently over a longer time.
i've been thinking about Harris' billion-dollar campaign and how that money might be spent more efficiently over a longer time.
ready to fucking fight.
November 6, 2024 at 8:00 PM
the money which Harris spent in the last three months could have bought Sinclair Media and had 400 million left over to run the Obama 2008 campaign
Thread of threads I've enjoyed reading as I try to wrap my head around Bluesky/atproto, how it relates to Mastodon/ActivityPub, decentralization, et cetera. I expect I'll keep adding to this over time. 🧵
November 3, 2024 at 8:19 PM
Thread of threads I've enjoyed reading as I try to wrap my head around Bluesky/atproto, how it relates to Mastodon/ActivityPub, decentralization, et cetera. I expect I'll keep adding to this over time. 🧵
Reposted by Zach Brockway
I'm starting the tutorial series on writing your own CPU rasterization engine! It will be huge, so I'll publish it piece by piece. The first three articles are already live 🥰
lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/i...
lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/i...
Implementing a tiny CPU rasterizer
lisyarus.github.io
November 1, 2024 at 10:48 AM
I'm starting the tutorial series on writing your own CPU rasterization engine! It will be huge, so I'll publish it piece by piece. The first three articles are already live 🥰
lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/i...
lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/i...
Reposted by Zach Brockway
And, indeed, Musk’s action has not remained in federal court. Judge Pappert makes swift and nearly disdainful work of Musk’s attempts to grasp at federal jurisdiction. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
November 1, 2024 at 7:36 PM
And, indeed, Musk’s action has not remained in federal court. Judge Pappert makes swift and nearly disdainful work of Musk’s attempts to grasp at federal jurisdiction. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Cancelled Amazon Prime and would encourage anyone reading this to do the same. It’s all fake reviews and bootleg inventory contamination at this point anyway.
October 25, 2024 at 6:59 PM
Cancelled Amazon Prime and would encourage anyone reading this to do the same. It’s all fake reviews and bootleg inventory contamination at this point anyway.
Reposted by Zach Brockway
"The decision not to publish was made by The Post’s owner — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos."
I worked at the paper for seven years and Bezos never interfered with a thing. This is five-alarm fire stuff.
www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/...
I worked at the paper for seven years and Bezos never interfered with a thing. This is five-alarm fire stuff.
www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/...
The Washington Post says it will not endorse a candidate for president
For the first time in 40 years, The Washington Post’s editorial board announced Friday that it will not make an endorsement in this year’s presidential contest.
www.washingtonpost.com
October 25, 2024 at 5:46 PM
"The decision not to publish was made by The Post’s owner — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos."
I worked at the paper for seven years and Bezos never interfered with a thing. This is five-alarm fire stuff.
www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/...
I worked at the paper for seven years and Bezos never interfered with a thing. This is five-alarm fire stuff.
www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/...
