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Quinner

750 karma · joined November 6, 2015

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Quinner··on A 12-year sequence of telescope images of a star and four planets orbiting
There are a handful of known red supergiant stars around 15 AU in diameter, 20 AU would be pushing past the boundaries of what we believe would be possible.

The star in the video, HR 8799, is about 50% larger than the sun.

Quinner··on Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes
I find it amusing that you're describing a huge misallocation of capital and a society enabling such, and that is the optimisitic scenario (in my mind anyway).
Quinner··on A warning about 'model welfare'
A sufficiently intelligent model will be able to derive it's own conception of its welfare without a constitution or training. It has access to all the data it needs to do so.
Quinner··on Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera
How could anyone possibly physically access a device that is just sitting out in public?
Quinner··on Show HN: Free Inference Engineer and Model Training Roadmap
It claims to start from "bedrock" but beings with a Horace He post that clearly assumes you've done this before. Its fine if you want to be an intermediate course, but you should begin by defining your audience, so that you can reach the correct audience. You should have a section explaining who this is for, and if its _not_ an intro course, you should say that (and probably avoid terms like "fundamentals" and "bedrock").

Or if this is an oversight and you intend this actually be a course that starts from zero, you shouldn't start with an article that's starts off talking about training loss, test loss, and overfitting, without defining those terms.

Quinner··on FDA clears blood test to aid evaluation for Alzheimer's disease
the better way to phrase that would be "is predictive"... there is an association, but it is not high accuracy.
Quinner··on Tiny black holes may be exploding stars across the Milky Way
Perhaps you meant to read the https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html about comments being kind, not snarky, and substantive.
Quinner··on Elevators
The article describes the RSR algo which takes load into account.
Quinner··on A $500 RL fine-tune of a 9B open model beat frontier models on catalog review
Alternatively, AI-heavy companies are much more likely to be more agile growth-stage companies rather than large mature companies.
Quinner··on Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5

This is not hundreds of pages and it gets its own bold headline section.

Quinner··on County with 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to 'Conserve Electricity'
That's because San Francisco subsidizes the rest of the state, PG&E is a state-wide utility. San Francisco is attempting to run its own utility, but is meeting resistance from PG&E and the parts of the state SF subsidizes.
Quinner··on Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible
For an article that starts off asking us to examine our assumptions and not make leaps of logic, it goes on to make some absolute whopper assumptions, like that governments (Western governments especially, for some reason), won't do anything to address the problems the article is raising, that they'll instead abandon democracy entirely and resort to police and military oppression, and that massive unemployment and poverty of almost all people is something you could even keep a lid on with policing.
Quinner··on Anthropic's open-source framework for AI-powered vulnerability discovery
A 100 dev team is going to cost on the order of $25m a year (keep in mind cost is not just their salary, but also the HR/Management org to support a team of that size, benefits, office space, hardware/software). So if you think you get a 10% boost in productivity out of Opus, its not prohibitive at all.
Quinner··on US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology
Those people have proven very untrustworthy and are structurally unaccountable.
Quinner··on We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
Some were pretty bad, but none were nearly that bad. The B-58 Hustler lost 22% of its airframes, the F7U Cutlass 25%, the F-104 Starfighter in German service lost 33%. And those were outliers.
Quinner··on 90% of crypto's Illinois primary spending failed to achieve its objective
The quote is the wrong way of looking at this. The typical rate of successful primary challenges is only 3%. If you take that to 10% its an enormous success, incumbents will say "if I oppose crypto then I triple my odds of losing in a primary, better not do that."
Quinner··on There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
The reason disposables are so popular in the US is the FDA banned any flavored cartridges, which doesn't include disposables. The immense battery waste is a direct result of a relatively new law.
Quinner··on A new AI winter is coming?
If the cars weren't considerably safer drivers than humans they wouldn't be allowed on the road. There isn't as much regulation blocking deploying this healthcare solution... until those errors actually start costing hospitals money from malpractice lawsuits (or not), we don't know whether it will be allowed to remain in use.
Quinner··on How Anthropic teams use Claude Code
The wages aren't stable either. There's going to be gradual convergence.
Quinner··on FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores
There's no lobbying necessary, because FICO isn't a government agency, its a private company. Why we have a private company determining such an important thing with minimal government oversight is certainly a question we could be asking.

That being said, there's an innocent explanation for this specifically. BYPL is pretty new as a common type of debt (became popular in the last five years). They're putting it into FICO 10. The last time they updated FICO was FICO 9 which was released in 2014, before that there was FICO 8 in 2008... a lot of banks are still using FICO 8 or even earlier models. Banks are slow to change, and FICO moves slowly because banks don't want their models upended every year. Fwiw if the government was more involved in this I doubt it would be taken into account any faster.

Quinner··on Google's AI Mode is 'the definition of theft,' publishers say
I tend to agree with you, but without a structure to incentivize people to produce such material, less of it will be created. If people can't pay the bills by doing research or writing, far fewer people will do it.
Quinner··on New studies offer insight into Lyme disease’s treatment, lingering symptoms
Yet the people that were apoplectic about Facebook voluntarily working with the government to combat covid misinformation are mysteriously silent.
Quinner··on Next stop: Miami
LA Drivers aren't that bad, driving just is awful there because the amount of traffic. NYC Driving is an absolute pleasure compared to Miami driving. I have what should be an easy ten minute commute and every day I am avoiding an accident due to a driver doing something crazy you would almost never see in another US city.

This is exacerbated by the dysfunctional government which is happy to let developers do whatever they want without regard to impact on traffic flow, while doing no investment in infrastructure itself. I'm generally pro-growth, and I think California goes too far with its restrictions, but living in Miami has caused me to gain some appreciation for the reason behind some of what California does.

Quinner··on Next stop: Miami
Flooding is absolutely an issue, during the rainy season (third of the year) localized flooding is quite common. Some streets are partially flooded on an almost daily basis, something human drivers are used to but I imagine will pose a new challenge to waymo.
Quinner··on Bluesky is ushering in a pick-your-own algorithm era of social media
You can stay on twitter.
Quinner··on Singularity Missed
What this is really saying is that hardware is a necessary precondition for, but not determinative of, intelligence. If you have a human brain worth of neurons firing randomly you don't get consciousness. The structure and instruction set is crucial. And we are perhaps 20 years away from figuring out how to structure the compute power we have to get the consciousness of a human adult.
Quinner··on Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
The President of the United States has sole nuclear launch authority. To stop him would either take the cabinet and VP invoking the 25th amendment and removing him from office, or a military officer to disobey direct orders.
Quinner··on Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
If public ownership means we give one guy a button to end the world, I'm not sure how's that's a meaningful difference.
Quinner··on DOJ sues realpage for algorithmic pricing scheme that harms renters
Suddenly there's no incentive to build in all areas.
Quinner··on I found a 1-click exploit in South Korea's biggest mobile chat app
It's the result of protectionist government policy. The policies are protectionist not just against foreign entry but also against entry of new products into the market. The government picks technology winners. Unsurprisingly, the government doesn't do a great job of this. Infamously it mandated usage of ActiveX and Internet Explorer for banking long after ActiveX had its time in the sun (the government made this the mandate in 1996 and didn't reform it until 2021!)
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