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Yizahi

4,625 karma · joined June 19, 2014

QA engineer on the QAM modulator and multiplexer project.
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Yizahi··on The sale of Electronic Arts has been finalized
Still EA. Had been boycotting them since like 2012 or so and will continue to do it. (no pirating or f2p stuff inclusive)
Yizahi··on Waymo in Dallas
I wouldn't dispute Dallas numbers and I may be wrong. But in general this feels wrong at a first approach. Denser low rise apartment blocks with more commercial square are per inhabitant and fewer expensive infrastructure per inhabitant (road area, length of water/sewers/electricity/data lines, amount of common things like lamp posts, signs, security (police/fire/medical etc.)) just logically should be better financially performing than single family home suburbs. In any part of the world at any age or local variation. And in fact in most countries that's true so far.
Yizahi··on Web Security is Too Hard
Ghostbusters!
Yizahi··on Waymo in Dallas
This is like building your business on the FAANG monster corpo's API and then getting shut down a few years down the line, but with your life and housing instead of the business. After Waymo will shut down or "do strategy shift and pivot" or just raises prices beyond your affordability, a homeowner in such a place will "suddenly" discover that he or she is completely stranded now and there are neither cars nor public transport available. Yay for our benevolent corporate overlords, I guess...
Yizahi··on Elon Musk says Grok will make 'historically accurate' Odyssey film by year-end
Ahaha, yeah. Just like the "hysterically accurate" versions of the several Ruzzian invasions in his Elonopedia. Let me guess, Odyssey in his slop-fiction will be a white evangelical with a harem of his white evangelical tradwifes, traveling on a golden hulled Trump battleship across Mediterranean and conquering unwashed barbarian hordes, is that about correct?

PS: the OP link and the whole discussion is about a known biased generator of automated lies and propaganda (grok), so it's only fair to mock it.

Yizahi··on OpenAI’s accidental attack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened
Nevertheless we collectively don't expect that road and car safety infrastructure should be limited to the front and back fenders on the cars themselves. And neither we even mention those as any notable safety equipment usually, despite each car carrying them. The main safety infrastructure in any industry is something external to the dangerous object. Car fender doesn't 100% protect a pedestrian from being hit and neither does a metal rail on the side of the road. But the effectiveness of both are "slightly" different.
Yizahi··on Tesla Balance Bike
1. Assuming there is a real proven age gap and balance bike allows a noticeably earlier start than a real bike with side wheels - what is the purpose of doing that in the first place? What will kid learn in the gap period specifically? Just balancing? Well, maybe that's beneficial.

I have googled and the quick search tells me that the gap is between 6 to 12 month.

2. I have never ever in my life seen even one balance bike with brakes. So as soon as a kid can "glide" on it, he is a danger to himself and to the people around.

Does learning balance a bit earlier outweigh the danger? I don't know.

As an adult I try to walk as far as possible from kids on these balance bikes, unless parent is holding their hand or handlebar. Getting hit at a significant speed in the leg is not fun.

Yizahi··on Tesla Balance Bike
Aren't so called "balance bikes" very dumb and also mildly harmful for kids? Why not just buy a proper bike with sidewheels, and after a few weeks just drop them and kid will learn to ride bicycles properly now? Instead of both not learning anything and endangering pedestrians and himself on the "balance bike"?
Yizahi··on LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps
Just to clarify - my LG TV is old (10 or maybe 11?), pre-OLED, and webOS on it was version 3.0. Maybe situation has improved with newer models, I don't know. The problem with TVs, is that they really work for a long time just fine and I see no reason to change it ahead of other more needed upgrades. It doesn't fall to the ground like phones, there is no degrading battery or degrading rubber/textile parts, TVs are really robust. So it would have been nice if the software for such long living hardware was also supported accordingly and that buyers would be informed about that in advance and that was my expectation for webOS/LG originally - since it is in C++, uses modern and maintained QT framework, snappy and LG is a bigcorpo, I expected it to keep up. But nope :( .
Yizahi··on LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps
I thought webOS was pretty decent initially. But LG never provided even a single major update to my TV in a decade, so that just about cancels any possible benefits from the faster code. I'm using Chromecast for several years now, bypassing and ignoring webOS completely. But the initial idea was nice, all those years ago.
Yizahi··on Is surveillance risk chilling your online speech?
No, not a government or corporate surveillance.

But a modern platform consolidation, zero tolerance practices and shitty spaghetti code written by a cheapest contractor - does.

Remember good old days of "forums"? Apart from some of the outliers on both ends (both cesspools and invite only elitists) a majority of the forums had this concept of warnings. So a user may have been rude or broke a rule or just got unlucky, he get a warning. Then maybe additional warnings. Or next there is "TEMPORARY" ban (absolutely alien concept nowadays), for a few days, then a few months, then a year. And it was actually possible to come back after a year long ban and see that the admins honored their own rules and did indeed unban you. I know a friend who was a frequent posted on a city automotive forum who served two year-long bans and he still posts there, soon it will be 3 decades or so :) . And the list of issuers, bans, dates and ban reason was usually public for all.

So all of that culture of being nice and polite is gone now. There are no warnings anymore (well, HN is tiny little exception, even then warnings are informal here, no automation like it was done in the previous century). Bans are instant and permanent, there are no temporary bans anywhere anymore, except for some deliberately gloating bans, like "you are banned until 2126, haha". And in case a discussion platform is owned by a corpo providing other services, they will ban user everywhere too. And mods are often using some crappy code to autoban users based on some primitive pattern matching. Write an ambiguously interpreted comment and poof, off you go. Some platforms even officially allow report abuse, like FB where a bot owner can take down any post, regardless of its content.

Ironically, the lack of niceness culture and extra harsh extra fast punishments didn't lead to the better talking spaces. Instead people are now using hundreds of throwaway twink accounts and now they don't moderate themselves. Why would they, the punishment to a rabid foaming at the mouth crazy user registered 1 day ago and to a old timer registered 15 years ago and who said some less radical comment in a latest political discourse or doubted some newest fad or whatever, maybe he was simply genuinely mistaken as happens to all - well, the punishment is the same. So why bother? Why write 4 paragraphs of reasoning to explain why entity A is bad in some specific way and the reasons for that, when user can just fire off a one liner hate message and get the same results? And so on.

As a weirdo who never uses twink accounts I'm in a minority and by old habits I still post as if I'm on some oldschool sane forums, but I do often stop and rewrite parts, to avoid being automodded into oblivion. And I certainly don't post on FB or Instagram or YT or other platforms anymore. The collateral damage over there would be catastrophic.

Yizahi··on Firefox 153.0 Beta
The problem with QWACs and eSTAZI is a saturation attack by govt. against people. If Mozilla will display that message it will need to do it on all connections with QWACs, and 99.99% will be safe, initially. So govt. can demand them to remove misleading message. And Mozilla can't detect when govt. will use their CA to do a MITM attack on their political opposition and display message only then.
Yizahi··on Firefox 153.0 Beta
So that's basically state legalized and enforced MITM and scamming framework (unless I'm mistaken about tech details)? Yay for progress, I guess... :(
Yizahi··on What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
In my opinion:

a) they choose a certain very specific ideal as a target, but utterly failed to convey that to a majority of site visitors;

b) their picked target and path visually and functionally matched by like 90% with a thing already existing for decades previously and very familiar to a majority of internet users - with a regular forum with sections and treads;

c) they make fundamental errors even inside the scope of their own ideal and vision - like for example apparently not taking into account that software with identical name can have different versions;

d) while they copied forum structure (failure B) they also failed to envision (or did a mistake in that) how the ideal target result would look like a long time in the future;

e) they failed to acknowledge all of the above, reflect on and fix own mistakes, instead they declared those mistakes "a culture" and persisted in deepening them;

Basically they picked a forum format, known at those times to literally everybody on the internet and decided to use it to make something vastly different, while failing both at communicating that intention and also failing at actually adapting UI and tools to better suit their target.

Yizahi··on What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
There can be a collaborative work site and there can be a chain of posts type of site (e.g. forum or reddit or HN here). But trying to mix these concepts without any control or organization procedures is, was and will always be considered ridiculous by a vast majority of humans in all spheres of life. If SO wished to be an iterative collab site, sure it may have done everything it did and allowed mods to pick and copy any answers and parts of answers into a new, better refined answer penned by them. But just allowing random edits of any posts by any author, just twisting what they said is absolutely idiotic and ask any internet user of any age, they will agree with me, not with SO policy.

Wikipedia is often brought into comparisons with SO either as something close or as something vastly different. But it doesn't matter atm. What I want to highlight is that SO allowed on it's site to essentially go to the Talks page of Wiki page and allow editing of all user comments to change their words in retrospect, and also allowing to go to the edit history allow edit that history too. This is what SO did, no wonder there are almost no humans who would approve this (after explicitly explained to them, SO is mostly banking of user's lack of full picture knowledge and ignorance).

Yizahi··on Guerrilla London bus ads mock Kylie Jenner’s Meta glasses campaign
The whole VR shtick they were hyping up for a decade now and even rebranded whole corporation for, only really works if everyone is wearing these cameras 24/7. They failed at advertising the experience itself, so while that is shelved they are exploring other paths. These glasses are intended to normalize widespread pervasive recording as a primary objective, and to collect vast amounts of data for the LLM "training" as a secondary.

PS: two of my friends found no issues with these, bought a pair each and excitedly recorded with many other people present. Like, the issue didn't even register. I foresee that a lot of people will follow, if the price will be accessible, and one day it will be.

Yizahi··on SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status
It had been though. Just search for Galt's Gulch, Chile 2012 :)
Yizahi··on Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning
Remember that IPCC's projection of 2.7C by 2100 is done by selectively ignoring a good quarter of the models which IPCC selected in the first place. So called "hot" models. So it's a very politically motivated number. I can totally see how a scientist not bound by pandering to the most insufferable crowd on the planet can project much worse future just by being unbiased.
Yizahi··on What did SFFA vs. Harvard reveal about admissions?
Honestly, the combination of extremely discriminatory, extremely corrupt, extremely predatory and then again discriminated differently by the fact if they are a sportsball player or not is rather amusing and at the same time baffling when observed from the other side of the globe.

Of course it is too late by now, by have Americans considered maybe abolishing all that and admitting students only based on the exam results, with preference given to the kids with better results (or no preference)? And replacing professional sportsball with a 1 lesson/week of general fitness? Maybe then they won't need to get so much debt to study too.

Yizahi··on What's slowing down the AI buildout
Sure there are lights. It will cost me somewhere around 3000$ (Eastern Europe btw) just for the work, wiring and meter. And I will need to get approval of the home owners, and I will need to pay out of pocket for the whole building complex insurance difference, because apparently it will increase from a default "all ICE parking" to a "shared ICE and EV parking" and the latter costs more. I didn't even ask yet, there are 200 parking spots in a contiguous space, I imagine costs would be prohibitive.

I'm actually considering EV as my next car, and due to some legal BS and my own mistakes I will likely need to quickly sell my ICE car at a loss next year and buy something in replacement, which I otherwise wouldn't do for at least five to ten more years, my car is just fine for me. But without ability to charge my car at home, EV is an absolute non-starter and out of the question, I will likely get a hybrid Corolla instead. Taking vacations at a gas station or walking for an hour there and back or paying for an expensive public transport twice for every charging is not my dream really.

Yizahi··on Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS
You can sandbox a software codebase, you can sandbox a directory with documents. You can't sandbox internet access for any real network task. You can't sandbox any shared or public service. You can't sandbox you actual accounts to non-local services.

Sure, for IT crowd containers are a no-brainer and due to existence of validation software like compilers, linters, interpreters, analyzers etc. using LLMs is efficient, safe and rational.

But the problem is that they are also advertised to the remaining 99% of population too. You can't sandbox a bank, a broker or an exchange. You can't sandbox your email, calendar and other such tools (you can, but not in any way that will be used by non-IT people in any real work conditions). You can't sandbox messengers, social networks etc. And the list goes on. These people will either use so called "agents" in production under root, so to speak, or they won't use "agents" at all. They have no safety option, and they aren't properly informed about that by the peddlers of the LLM rapture.

Yizahi··on Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS
LLMs are the first massively popular type of computer programs which actively trying to break half a century worth of human training, which basically distills to "computer programs are highly deterministic and if they work, they are outputting correct predictable results every time" (I'm talking about average population subconscious opinion here, no need to list exceptions). Average person still can't comprehend how LLM output is random all the time and how the identical query to the same program version will produce variable results again and again.

I wonder what will happen after our benevolent prophets St.Sam and St.Dario will succeed in re-training humanity and break this collective expectation of program correctness. I guess they didn't even think about that.

Yizahi··on What's slowing down the AI buildout
Both of these are fine. The problem is that a majority of people have neither option at all.
Yizahi··on What's slowing down the AI buildout
I still don't understand. So you do have an EV charger at home? Just a slow one? The issue with EVs is that a majority of people doesn't have any EV charger at home at all. These is almost no one who would willingly downgrade from a convenient car to a car which requires driving to some far away gas station and sit there for hours in a parking lot in a cold or in a heat, if it's even working in the first place which they often aren't.
Yizahi··on I Learned to Read Again
For a long time learning required a primary attention of a person. Usually a monopoly attention. You can't read printed text and do something else in parallel (fidgeting doesn't count). Radio and TV facilitated background viewing and listening but there weren't many options to personalize those. And then IT revolution happened and humanity discovered that they can do something as a primary attention task and "learn" in background by listening to a narrated educational media. And with the invention of speed-up, those people are now debating is x2 speed-up too slow, and just how fast can they go while still discerning words.

it's my personal hot-take, but I think that a majority of those background listeners are doing performative "learning" and aren't learning anything really. It's just to brag once a year that they have "read" 100+ books in a year and post a wall of covers or a number on their social network feed.

Basically, books aren't morally superior media than anything else really. But focused and monopoly attention dedicated to some media is morally superior to a performative background "learning". Books simply eliminate even a possibility of reading them in background.

Yizahi··on What's slowing down the AI buildout
> Why are people so convinced that we need an EV charger per car at every home?

> After a week of just running the 1.5 kw slow charger I realized that was fine.

Wait, did you tell that you were using EV charger at home actually? I'm confused by the wording.

Yizahi··on GPT-5.6 Sol, along with Terra and Luna, will launch publicly this Thursday
Perchance
Yizahi··on Is The Economist Always Wrong?
That obituary will be on the cover.
Yizahi··on GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
Maybe for a fantasy of legal liability of output produced. I haven't heard of any LLM corpo being held liable for any output they generate. Even NYT lawsuit is going nowhere for 3 years in courts already, despite being the most grounded.
Yizahi··on The AI Marketing Backlash: Why 'AI-First' Brands Are Starting to Fall Flat
LLMs are here to stay and I'm using them daily out of necessity and out of convenience too. I'm paying money for it too. It is a useful tech. Still, I hate it in general and the sociopaths promoting it in particular, and I foresee a great deal of issues for humanity because of that. Not catastrophic, just boringly bad. Like many humans going broke and jobless (booooring), or humans losing entire activities they actually liked to do to robots (booooring). It's sarcasm, if you didn't get it btw. I feel like I need to spell out a lot of things explicitly nowadays.

Like for example a lot of legitimate and useful companies are completely dependent on the advertisement, which is a net negative absolutely vile and disgusting invention. But we all collectively picked option to defect, and not because we are bad humans, and are paying for that decision collectively too.

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