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alex0015

78 karma · joined March 24, 2026

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alex0015··on On social reality in China
Great counterexamples! These are specifically part of the game, whereas in Chinese culture it seems to be more like "let's play a defined game with winner and loser, and in order to motivate you not to be the loser, we'll agree that the loser do something embarrassing." Like in the US when I would play recess games as a kid, if you lost, you just lost with nothing at stake. Also we're all in our thirties instead of kids playing truth or dare.
alex0015··on On social reality in China
I (an American with a lot of interest in China) was playing doudizhu with some Chinese friends recently. It was agreed that the losers would have to kowtow to the winner instead of paying money. I was on the losing side and it meant nothing to me, while even in a private, joking setting it was apparently a very uncomfortable thing to have to do for my teammate. See also the general cultural attitude toward doing something embarrassing as a "punishment" for losing a bet or game, something fairly unknown in the US.
alex0015··on 100 years of student radio history in the DLARC college radio collections
I worked in the university archives at Cal Poly more than a decade ago. They mostly had me digitizing and cleaning up scans and similar types of things, which was the best job imaginable at the time. I used a reel-to-reel tape recorder connected to an iMac and I'd just listen to hours and hours of 1970s campus radio in real time as it ran. It was all very high quality (in fidelity, if not production value) and the slow speed of the task gave me a lot of time to think about what life was like at the time the broadcasts had been done.
alex0015··on Transit rewards (Waymo pays you to take the train)
I have a clipper card and take VTA regularly but not enough to make a pass worth it. Commuting 3x a week, I may as well be paying with a Visa.
alex0015··on Attention is all you have
A friend of mine in high school (2012) was required to add to the notebook his parents kept in the car whenever he got gas. I wonder if his parents still do that kind of record keeping now that the car tells you its MPG, gas price historical data is easily accessible, and card purchases are tagged as "Gas" automatically in the banks that I use.

I do actually audit each transaction in my card statements each month to look briefly at the categories of spending I use most. Gas is a category, but that number doesn't really change my behavior. It's just a data point.

alex0015··on Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions
What ads do you see for channel membership? I run a channel and put some of my videos behind a membership gate. I mention the premium videos in some of my free videos but otherwise don't see options in the YouTube UI to actively promote my membership in any other way. Is it putting graphics or something inside the video to tell you to click the membership button?
alex0015··on macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review
I'm a mac user but not really a power user. Is there not some hidden system directory you can go delete yourself and be done with it?
alex0015··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
Me too. I was just thinking recently about updating from Sequoia, now I've got to take a while and reconsider everything.
alex0015··on GPT-6 Astra
Yes but I'd actually go even further than that. We've all had experiences where the model straight-up produces gibberish sometimes, right? It's happened to me with a badly configured harness on a local model, and even also on frontier models like when you used to ask them something innocuous about the seahorse emoji.

What I'm arguing is that yes, it's your fault if you misprompt the model and it does something catastrophic. It's also your fault if you prompt it correctly and it does something catastrophic anyway due to some other glitch beyond your control.

The whole discussion started with the point that OpenAI could be financially responsible for damages if their models cause problems for users. If my job is to design a system that works, and instead my system doesn't work, it's my fault regardless of whether I used no LLM, a local LLM, or OpenAI's LLM. Depending on whoever's in charge of doling out consequences, I might get away from it with zero, light, or heavy consequences. But at all levels, I can't reasonably expect to deflect blame onto the model itself.

alex0015··on GPT-6 Astra
It's not really a dream though? You can subscribe to their AI right now and complete many tasks for cheaper than it would cost to pay a human to do those tasks. Another person can do the same thing but also keep a human in the loop. You and the other person may compete in the market for whatever your product or service is, and you both might do very well or one of you might do better than the other because of a whole host of different reasons. Nothing in the process of developing and selling access to a more advanced LLM requires the customers to do away with human labor, nor does it require them to offer the LLM service with a guarantee that it will never make any mistakes. So far the LLMs have always made lots of mistakes and the companies sure keep making a lot of money.
alex0015··on GPT-6 Astra
In all of these cases, it's you. It would be the same if you downloaded an open model, ran it locally, and it happened to make the same catastrophic mistakes. The consequence to the provider is that if they offer a product that does these things, people don't buy the product.

In general, the person whose job it is to provide the company with a working, non-adult website and not hack into other websites is the one who would receive consequences for failing to meet those expectations.

alex0015··on GPT-6 Astra
What do you mean by bearing no real responsibility for its actions? If I use a model to accomplish a task and it fails, I use something else to try to accomplish the task. If it's my responsibility to complete the task, it can't be the model's responsibility unless I've agreed to some sort of guarantee from the provider.

If the provider says "the model will always be right or your money back" then the provider has got responsibility. If there's no guarantee, there's no responsibility on their part, just on the person whose job it is to try and solve a problem with the model.

alex0015··on Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone
The parent and thread seemed to be arguing that low cost housing was intentionally built in places that disadvantaged the people who lived there.
alex0015··on Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone
Developers build apartments where they can make money from them, in other words where they can rent them for enough that they'll make back their investment. It's very expensive to build housing, so the only way to make the investment back and have low rental prices is to try to make the building costs as low as possible. A big part of those costs is the price of land.
alex0015··on I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program
Isn't offering app-exclusive deals adjusting pricing for an individual? I feel like that's the whole point of the service. You download the app and get something for it.
alex0015··on I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program
I'm too young to remember this particular promotion (though I certainly ate a lot of fast food in 2004). Data grabbing can't be the only reason, though. It's so much more expensive now to pay a large staff at a restaurant that isn't busy most of the time. Raw materials are more expensive, labor and benefits are more expensive, and the result is a combination of higher prices and lower quality outcomes. If the outcomes were the same the prices would be quite a bit higher.

The only counterexample I can think of is In-N-Out, which is always packed with customers and always has a large and very busy kitchen staff.

alex0015··on DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731
What should we be running deepseek on besides opencode? I chose it because I heard good things. Also provider is directly through deepseek credits.
alex0015··on The lost civic life of movie rental stores
In my experience in white-collar and tech jobs since 2019, nobody I've ever worked with has been expected to be reachable after hours. Same goes for my wife, all tech jobs as well. If someone messages me and I'm online, I'll answer, and it's about 50/50 that they say "Oh you didn't need to respond this late, just work on this tomorrow!"

Sample size of six jobs total, three per person.

alex0015··on Advertise in ChatGPT
Unlike all the replies to you, this is why I'm very optimistic about the future of hobby blogs. I do a lot of ChatGPT-ing for several different hobbies, and I've found a lot of really interesting personal blogs from that. Way more than I was reading in the pre-AI era.

I'm very much not seeing the problems other people are assuming, like tons of LLM spam on Reddit being treated as fact by ChatGPT. Instead it really does seem, the more I use these tools, the better they are at surfacing real experiences written about by real people.

alex0015··on That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing
I'm right there with you for a lot of stuff. I ask a question and can be very confident that ChatGPT is citing sources, then sometimes I go read the sources. The more critical the information I'm looking for is, the more careful I am about this.

The other day though I was seeing how well it could pull details of its own conversations with me. It often does this pretty well for broad strokes of things - it remembers, largely, what cameras I have and use when I ask photography questions. It's never made things up here, but it does forget details, such as whether I've bought something or am just considering it. However, when I asked it for a specific interaction I thought I remembered, it gladly went along with my false memory and provided an affirmative answer. It was the first time I'd been caught in a serious hallucination with a frontier model (Sol High on the web chat interface) in a long time.

alex0015··on A Speed Limit for Computers
The article seems to be saying that lack of equity is worse than lack of innovation. Obviously we can strive for having both equity and innovation, but it really seems like the points made in the article are arguing that, for example, if there exists a discrepancy in what speeds are available to different people, this is worse than only the lowest speed being available to everyone.

The linked article from 1973 is very strange to read in 2026 and honestly it's hard to take seriously. It seems to actually argue that China and India should stop developing because development encourages dependence on energy. It says that machines are slaves that modern people are required to master?

The speed equity discussed in the linked paper has actually increased significantly as well. More people have cars, and more people can afford plane trips, and bicycle infrastructure is better all over the nation (the world, probably) compared to 1973. I agree with the general principle that cities should encourage diverse development so more people can choose not to use cars if they want, or if they don't have access to a car. In the paper, this would be achieved by somehow state limiting the amount of energy people would be able to consume per capita. I'm glad that world didn't come to pass.

Basically it sounds like the point of view of the article is that at some point the state should tell people they're not allowed to try to make a certain process more efficient in terms of time or resources, because that might drive demand for better productivity, which would be bad because it drives us further from nature and community. Some of the points intersect with beliefs I hold, but I strongly oppose this way of going about it.

alex0015··on A Speed Limit for Computers
There's a great deal of demand for compute. Data centers are a very efficient way of providing that compute in a single place with limited resources. If computers were restricted to being slower and less efficient than they are now, people would build even more, and larger, data centers.
alex0015··on Late Bronze Age Collapse
At that time distance from now, we're essentially all related to anyone who reproduced back then.

http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/Nature...

alex0015··on GPT-5.6
I was getting that regularly last week with regular 5.5 medium on the plus plan. I was doing benchmarking for a photo editor in Swift.
alex0015··on I Built the Only 2026 WWII Jeep
15 years or so ago when I was more into guns I spent a _lot_ of time on historical firearm sites looking for Martini-Henry rifles. There were still a trickle of them turning up straight from caches in Afghanistan (maybe other countries too). I never bought any because I was just a teenager, and now prices have more than doubled, of course.
alex0015··on Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again
That's a really interesting experience. Lots of people in language learning communities have this argument back and forth for years. Have you ever written a longer piece about your education, preparation for the exam, abilities of other test takers?

For reference I scored ~C1 in German years ago (testdaf 4/4/5/4) and at that level there's no question at all about the vast gulf between me and an educated native speaker.

alex0015··on Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply
https://github.com/facebookresearch

There's a lot of excellent projects here.

Also, people in your community probably own businesses that advertise or sell directly on a Meta platform. That's money affecting many things you interact with online and offline.

Also also, you describe yourself as an ordinary person but say you have no presence on any of the largest social media or messaging platforms. I think that's fairly far out of the ordinary.

alex0015··on CarPlay Is Additive
Oh, that's really cool. For about two years the car I drove and the phone I had lined up such that I could kind of wedge it in the front dash next to the speedometer, and that was for sure a better location than the dash mount I have now. I'd forgotten about that.
alex0015··on CarPlay Is Additive
It's a strange feeling reading these comments because not only have I never used carplay or android auto, I don't think I've ever noticed anyone else using it in a car someone's driven me in. Everyone I know just has their phone in a dash mount. I don't think it's that small a sample size either! I drive a 2014 Accord and it auto connects to my android with Bluetooth when I turn on the car. It's hard to really imagine the experience of maps or music being improved by seeing it on my dashboard screen compared to right next to it on the phone.

I imagine everyone who is fully involved with the carplay ecosystem feels equally as strongly in the other direction and has for a long time.

alex0015··on Why Carbon Capture Can't Conceivably Solve Climate Change
You don't need to own the land yourself, just contact the owner and organize permission for planting, tree sourcing, and labor. That's what https://www.forestunlimited.org/ does in Northern California.
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