HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Devasta

1,630 karma · joined July 4, 2016

submissionscomments
Devasta··on Let's make quality the norm again
Why would planned obsolescence not be to their benefit in a world where things are rented?

You still renting the old Xbox? Try renting this new Xbox instead, the verification cans come in additional flavors!

Devasta··on Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
Anything that doesn't have Zuckerberg and the rest of the top brass in a gulag the rest of their lives doesn't go far enough.
Devasta··on New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
If I were to get one of these, realistically what is the most advanced AI model I could run locally?
Devasta··on Oceans hit highest temperature on record
> How about we give the US credit for this?

If it weren't for the huge efforts put into it by china to make solar and batteries so cheap and capable we wouldn't be nearly as far along in the solar transition as we are. Solar is growing in spite of US policy, not because of it.

Devasta··on Online forum Reddit will join the S&P 500 index
How their leadership are able to be so incompetent to mismanage their site constantly yet still have the aptitude to corral a legion of mods to spend their days working for free for a multi-billion dollar corporation is beyond me.

I can get volunteering to mod for a small fan site and the like, but no site deserves your effort less than reddit.

Devasta··on Trump's flight switch indicates severity of assassination threat by Iran
Why would Iran want Trump dead in such a foolhardy way? If you assassinate him you galvanize the US in its resolve while removing the bozo at the top?

The US has lost, Iran controls the strait now and forever; the longer Trump is in the greater the loss will be.

Devasta··on 5th Heat Dome Expands Across Europe: 40°C+ Target Western and Central Europe
Enjoy it while it lasts; it'll never be this cool again.
Devasta··on US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
If they want to pay me to not build wind farms, I'll not build them for half that.
Devasta··on I won't read LLM authored fiction
Someone who likes Shakespeare is going to be able to talk about what they like about Shakespeare, his impact on language, his works, and so on.

Someone who likes Austen is going to be able to talk about the themes of the books, how funny Pride and Prejudice is, maybe how Jane Austen's position in society informed her works, etc.

How is anyone going to be able to do the same for an AI generated book? "Reading book 894 from batch 60 of the Booktron V2.46.01 collection was formitive for me, it was very reminiscent of the early works from the Automatic Grammatizator." Is this really a discussion we expect will be had in schools, or in any art discussion? Absolutely not.

Devasta··on I won't read LLM authored fiction
... Is that so difficult to imagine?
Devasta··on I won't read LLM authored fiction
> There will come a time, very soon, where you wont be able to tell the difference, and what then?

We'll stop buying new books, sticking to things written before 2022.

Devasta··on I won't read LLM authored fiction
> I hated the question of teachers asking: What does the author wanted to tell us with this story." Because -> The author never wrote that down. And deriving their intentions from a fictional text felt just like making shit up.

Then why does anyone write anything? Why did Orwell write 1984 instead of just making a 2 page bulleted list about how authoritarian regimes are bad?

Sure, an author can write something that is interpreted totally differently from what they meant, but that doesn't detract from the fact that they did have some intention behind what they wrote and it's worth exploring that.

Devasta··on I won't read LLM authored fiction
English teachers around the world have loathed that "The curtains were blue" meme, and are absolutely right to do so, but what happens when you ask what an author meant by the blue curtains and the answer is a fairly definitive "it's just the probabilistic output of the model the author used, it doesn't mean anything"?

Sure some people are just piggies lining up at the trough to consume content like it's the custard machine from tellitubbies, but the greatest works will be human written, and I don't see that changing. What will change is the discovery mechanism for a book or any art is shot to bits right now, I could see curation of books and reviews becoming much more important.

Devasta··on Unions Can Save Tech Workers and Tech Work
Unionization of the industry is long long overdue, if for no other reason than professional ethics.

A small town lawyer can fuck up paperwork badly enough that they lose their ability to practice law. A software engineer can fry the brains of hundreds of thousands of people and it's all ok so long as they managed to get a few of them to click ads.

It should have the same requirements for personal liability like other professions do.

Devasta··on Future euro banknote design proposals
They really shouldn't be people. Birds are fine, but I like the bridges, why are the moving away from those?
Devasta··on Spain Orders Blacklist of Palantir from Public and Private Companies
Anything short of declaring them a proscribed organization is insufficient.
Devasta··on We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society
I think back to the first covid lockdowns. All of society was reorganized in a matter of weeks! Oil is worth negative money if they don't make us consume it! Work from home became mainstream, it turns out all those people with anxiety disorders or pain management issues could in fact participate in society! Generous payments were made for people who couldn't work, with no concern about who will pay for it!

The harsh reality is that all governments could solve most problems easily, they just couldn't be bothered.

Devasta··on Kim Dotcom Loses Court of Appeal Bid to Block Extradition to the U.S.
His crime was allowing media be distributed to the masses. Had he done the same to create LLM training sets he'd be worshipped.
Devasta··on European digital ID wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple
Its simply unreal that the EU is pushing that in order to participate in society that I must accept the TOS of Google or Apple.

God help you if you need to try and fix a serious problem. Sorry, you loaded a video of the first dance of your wedding to YouTube and now have a copyright strike, now you can't file taxes.

Hopefully you are famous enough on Twitter to get someone in Google to fix this.

Devasta··on PlayStation Is Deleting 551 Movies from Customers' Accounts
By not teaching the younger generations the virtues of piracy, millennials have failed them.

It'll be all the more critical in years to come when we get more and more AI remastered versions of stuff so even stuff pre-2020 is slop.

Devasta··on The Coming Loop
> I feel uneasy, and I do not enjoy the work I deliver using LLMs.

I have basically stopped writing code in my spare time since the advent of AI. Before I felt like I was working on a classic car. Was it a practical use of my time? No. I could go out and download software that did what I wanted. Did I have fun doing it? Yes, the act of working on it was important, I felt I was still learning and improving as I did.

Nowadays I see people doing far more in a month than I could in a year and I feel like its all a waste, like I just spent the past few years transcribing a phonebook while standing next to a photocopier.

I don't know if that'll ever change. I can't even pretend I was doing something prestigious and artisan like watchmaking because I wasn't a good programmer beforehand.

Devasta··on Burnout is real for open source maintainers
This is unironically why the AGPL3 is the best license. No need to worry about "virality" or derivative works or any of that, just set it and forget it. On top of that, corporations will avoid you like the plague, ensuring that your audience is other AGPL3 users.
Devasta··on Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?
A lot simply wouldn't be able to.

You could be a senior dev with over a decades experience at this stage doing nothing but chucking react slop over the fence, performance may have never once come up as a consideration in that time.

Devasta··on UK set to announce social media ban for under-16s
If they were really concerned, they'd be doing something about the algorithmic feeds pumping right wing vitreol into everything and Elon constantly begging for race wars to start.

It's very obviously not about the children.

Devasta··on Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension
Clamping down on adblocking was always the plan and anyone who suggested differently was knowingly lying.
Devasta··on The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games
That's fine if "gamers" are my age, but 3 years for a 12 year old is an eternity. This isn't a thing which can be handled like the cookie consent popups.
Devasta··on Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health
Oh yeah, my mental health is only improved by sitting in commuter traffic.
Devasta··on UK media fails to disclose defence sector links in nearly 60% of cases
The Guardians role in modern UK society is to launder right wing talking points through a few layers of progressive sounding rhetoric so that the average person on the street can say "Well if even The Guardian agrees, maybe there is something to it."

A worthless rag of a paper.

Devasta··on Morningstar values SpaceX at $780B, half its IPO target
Doesn't matter, as soon as they can they'll shove it into the indexes, meaning pension funds all over the world will be let holding the bag.
Devasta··on What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
I have been working since 2008, in that time the only periods my manager has been within a hundred miles of me has been between 2010-2013 and 2015-2017.

Even if I pretend for a moment that a generation that is younger than Google is somehow unable to collaborate online, remote work has been the mode of operation of most people even before COVID, the only question is whether they are sitting in traffic or not first.

Page 1 of 18Next →