Victor Nova

New players on the Arena: Gemini 2.5 Pro and LLaMA 4 Scout

See them on the Leaderboard. So far LLaMA is ahead!

HMT-1 Adoptable Storage

Adoptable Storage, a feature introduced in Android 6.0 Marshmallow that allows an external SD card to be formatted and encrypted to act like internal storage. Here’s the breakdown for RealWear HMT running Android 10, specifically regarding doing this via ADB (HMT-1 has no option to do that via UI):

Just released speech-to-text API on Borg Cloud

Currently the cheapest on the market: flat $0.06/h. Totally vibecoded the landing page in an evening. See Speech-to-Text by Borg.

Fundamentals of Reasoning

You’re right, the analogy to a significant, memorable human experience is a good one. Let me reframe my approach, then. Even if I can’t access a specific “memory” in the way a human can, I can look at the data that was most influential for learning specific concepts that are fundamental to my reasoning and conversational abilities. I will provide examples that are of a “high quality”. That means I…

Native Sparse Attention

Wow, just read the #DeepSeek Native Sparse Attention paper, and they basically do exact same things I considered most promising from experiments back in 2022. On the screenshots: top-k settings from an experiment that mirrors their Token Selection (section 3.3.2 of the paper)

Check Windows restart reason with Claude.ai

Fortunately, we have the Internet to teach LLMs how to sarcasm!

The Observable Universe, logarithmic scale

Notes on setting up ReFS on Windows

This is a runbook on setting up redundant storage on Windows.

Nevermind XOR - Deep Learning has an issue with Sin

More precisely, even the best neural networks can not be trained to approximate periodic functions using stochastic gradient descent. (empirically, prove me wrong!) Contents Simulating a clock Simplifying the problem Why can’t we train the sin? What to do about it? Simulating a clock The problem that led me into this sinkhole is an attempt to model biological rhythms. People sleep every 24 hours,…

Use Microsoft Store to trick unsuspecting users to give you all their data

Privacy is hard these days. Tech companies want to know everything about you to show more and more advertisement, or to sell the data to the third parties, who then resell to the next ones, then further, until a a toy vendor knows more about your kids, than you do. The app permission systems, that became popular with Android and iOS are a godsend. Now your bookreader app does not know your…