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anon7000

2,280 karma · joined October 3, 2024

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anon7000··on DoorDash Spent $1.4M Trying to Stop Mamdani from Becoming Mayor. Now We Know Why
Generally, they inflate prices (or take some % from the restaurant, so the restaurant has to increase prices).

And have a small delivery fee.

And have a small “city wants DoorDash to pay its workers fairly, so it’ll charge you an arbitrary amount extra” fee

And a bag fee.

And sales tax.

And a tip

Oh and don’t forget the service fee.

I’m not kidding, this is from a recent receipt. There are 6 fees PLUS the cost of the actual food.

Other delivery platforms are similar

anon7000··on The GitHub wiki is an anti-pattern (2022)
Agreed, but I think the review & CI system should ideally be able to ignore markdown changes. Easier said than done.

But I think the biggest benefit, which we shouldn’t overstate, is that agents will just update docs as they find them. Including for big picture systems. Keeping docs updated is a PITA.

Writing style of AI often sucks. But I’ve found it pretty easy to rectify. And having some correct context is better than nothing or outdated docs in a lot of cases.

anon7000··on Transit rewards
I mean my own PERSONAL per mile cost for a car is around $1/mi/yr, and it has a low interest rate loan and well below average monthly payment. Accounting for car insurance, gas, and maintenance.

And that’s not even counting for however much I’m subsidized on the highway and road systems I don’t pay anything to use.

Public transit is definitely expensive, but the alternative is also very costly and also regressive. The goal with public transit is to provide a low-cost, high-density way to move people around the city. It’s a public service, it shouldn’t be making profit. Car ownership is more expensive in total and very space-inefficient. Cities don’t have room for space inefficiency.

anon7000··on Stanford R&DE Uses AI to Race Swap Students for Advertising
Isn’t it obvious? Integrity is about honesty. They showed a picture claiming the school is one way, but the picture was a fabrication. It’d be the same if they were staging food in the cafeteria for marketing, but that food isn’t available to students.

You can make what you have look as good as it can, and I’m sure everyone does that.

But AI fabrications are crossing the line to outright lies, which is by definition violating integrity.

anon7000··on Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy
Didn’t Jobs frequently lose his shit when he did work at Apple?
anon7000··on I turned Jev into a (lousy) chatbot
> I suppose the appeal of Jev is how cheap and fast it is

Ok, so you do understand the hype. I mean cost & speed are reaaaaally big issues for normal LLMs. If you can fill a specific use case way cheaper and way faster, that’s a fantastic development. We need more niche tooling that’s more efficient and better for niche use cases. Not everything has to be general purpose.

Not clear to me that playing games is the point of jev. This post is just a random fun experiment someone did because they wanted to.

anon7000··on What happened to the Snowden archive
I don’t understand. He’s absolutely guilty of violating the US government and probably a handful of laws. I will respect him forever for doing that. But I completely agree that any trial he’d participate in is A) not going to be fair, because why would you trust the government on an issue like this, and B) not really necessary, because he didn’t do anything wrong, even if it was illegal.

The only reason to NOT flee is if the government didn’t care about whistleblowers and has amazing protections for them, even in the context of national security. Does it?

Maybe you think what he did was morally wrong. Who fucking cares, what the government was and is hiding is even more morally wrong.

anon7000··on Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
> People claim AI companies are "stealing" human labor but that's not true. They're saving (in their databases) the fruits of human labor and other bots/software. Then they're using that data to train AI models.

And profiting on it on a scale that’s hard to fathom. Someone who spent effort creating a great resource or doing some research and maybe got some income via donations, ads, whatever. Now that information from their resource is distilled into a big model. The original author is screwed, the model provider makes money through the effort of everyone else. It worked well for everyone before, because there was recognition, prestige, a sense of doing good for people, even a chance for some income. That’s completely eliminated with AI.

anon7000··on Tests of the New AI Siri
Actually think that’s a good thing for Apple. Compare how much money companies have absolutely shoved into the AI race, and how much circular investment is happening. Apple is one of the few massive players which hasn’t massively extended themselves and taken on a ton of financial risk. How do you make money on frontier models? By selling it to software companies, I guess.

Apple just needs a capable personal AI that respects privacy. They could eventually get that by self-hosting open model inference on their private cloud compute. They don’t need to light billions upon billions of dollars on fire to build data centers and do training to make a frontier model that’s nearly already a commodity. If they’re not selling tokens (and why would I want them to), that approach seems financially stupid and risky.

anon7000··on Everybody's Lost Their Minds
The bigger challenge is that the mechanics of the day to day work have entirely changed. Mechanically, using C is similar to using JS. You’re tying and compiling and checking results, whatever. With an Agent what you actually do is completely different. Even as technologies have changed in the past and people have learned more, your mechanical day to day work would look similar, just with different tools. Not so with AI.

So it should be utterly unsurprising that many people are going through a bit of an existential crisis around this. Because what you actually sat down and enjoyed doing, what motivated you, may be entirely gone now.

And on top of that, there’s an extreme amount of pressure to do more in less time, which is by definition stressful. And do much more context switching.

anon7000··on Everybody's Lost Their Minds
But that’s such a niche part of the industry. AI is in everything.
anon7000··on A warning about 'model welfare'
An eagle isn’t having a conversation with an eagle on the other side of the world about whether it should eat its prey because it’s sentient. It just eats it. I think that speaks to a moral superiority, in some ways.

I’m not claiming humans are morally superior in sum (there is a lot of evil as well as good.) But it’s pretty obvious that humans are the superior species evolutionarily in that we’ve essentially dominated the planet. And on some level, are beating evolution itself (by fixing genetic issues and helping the “least fit” to survive and reproduce.) And are also the only species which has doctors for other species.

All I’m trying to say: I can easily accept other species are intelligent and emotional. The fact that I can know that and accept that, to me, speaks to human “superiority.”

Does superiority matter? Not most of the time. What about when it comes down to life and death? If the choice was to keep one human alive or one theoretically more perfect AI alive? (Boil down utilitarianism into its essence.) doing the “most good” is by definition a human construct. Maybe an agent could have one. But if you don’t accept human superiority on some level, would you accept that a more perfect AI deserves to live more than you? To me, that’s the implication.

anon7000··on A warning about 'model welfare'
Why?

People have created machines that can, at their core, regurgitate human knowledge. They do not have long-term memory, self-direction, self-improvement, emotion, etc. At their very best, we have harnesses that can bootstrap short-lived artificial intelligences that can perform tasks and do knowledge work.

At best, we have artificial, short-lived, simulated consciousness. Human consciousness at its heart has a lot to do with emotion and experiences. An AI does a task today and goes away. The simulated consciousness hasn’t experienced or learned anything, even if can improve its environment (harness). Any expressed emotion is simply a ghost of the fact it was trained on the works of an emotional species, or RL to make it more approachable to humans.

I think there should be a lot more burden on folks trying to argue that (effectively), machines should be considered morally equivalent to humans.

Yes, having massive implications on society is a fucking fair and reasonable thing for a human being to be concerned about. Anything related to survival of the species is biologically reasonable to be concerned about.

The fact that we’re even considering this concept is an indication that human consciousness is special. Do other apex predators decide not to eat meat because it’s conscious? Despite some level of animal intelligence, they have no sense of morality. (See e.g. Orcas playing with their food.)

Other species simply do what it takes to stay alive, and that’s what this truly boils down to. If giving AI rights would lead to the destruction of humanity, yes, we should be be concerned.

For example, utilitarians might think of the greatest good for conscious species (simulated or not). Well, it’s trivial to have billions of AIs, and not so trivial to have billions of humans. Whose greatest good wins?

anon7000··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
And fixed the dumb sidebar design
anon7000··on I fixed a tractor using John Deere's self-repair service. Farmers aren't sold
I would not say $1-$2k/mo extra income counts as a huge amount richer. It’s like 58th percentile by family income. I don’t really think it makes sense to call solidly middle class income rich in any sense…
anon7000··on Real-SWE: Benchmarking AI models on private, real-world, enterprise codebases
This is why I like to really interrogate Claude on what it’s planning to do, what the implementation will look like etc before writing code. Without enough direction and time thinking about it, it can definitely go in an unintended direction
anon7000··on Will There Be a 7G?
On 5g, I’ll say this. I’m on a Verizon MVNO with a fairly recent iPhone Pro model in a major metro area.

I frequently have to disable 5g and switch data to LTE to get any actual service, even when I have full bars of service. It’s highly annoying phones don’t do this by default

anon7000··on No Atlantic hurricanes by Sept. 12 breaks a 60-year record
The problem with practically every climate denier out there is you only see things from a very narrow local perspective. Skipping horrible weather in one area doesn’t mean the rest of the world is ok.

Climate scientists, in fact, predicted that there would be fewer hurricanes than normal this year because of El Niño. (https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/how-does-el-nino-impact-atlantic-h...)

I think it would be fucking foolish to look at a system as complicated as the climate on planet earth and think “hm, I think warming by a couple degrees has barely any impact on the weather.” In fact, El Niño is an amazing example that localized warmth in one specific area can completely halt the hurricane season.

But while that’s great, for now, it’d be extremely short sighted to think that a system which can do that is always going to act in your favor.

In fact, a complete lack of weather systems at all is a bad thing if it means your region doesn’t get rain anymore. Which is currently happening in Indonesia, because of El Niño, and is devastating (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/el-nino-fuels-wil...).

anon7000··on LG says we're fake news [video]
Don’t you worry, mid/high end TVs cost thousands of bucks and have all the same spyware
anon7000··on The UN challenges five centuries of cartography
I mean even for marine navigation, you use digital solutions now. But paper charts people would use before aren’t exactly zoomed out to show the whole world. So I feel like this whole world Mercator projection hasn’t been very relevant for a long time, even for navigation
anon7000··on iPhone Duo
> But at a $2K starting price, plus likely another $200 for the storage size they really expect people to purchase

Idk why I’d need a lot of storage on the phone. Photos/videos get backed up elsewhere. The only thing that eats storage like that is downloading a lot of offline movies, or taking lots of videos. But this doesn’t have the same camera chops as the iPhone pro.

anon7000··on Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
> it is easy to buy a cable and have it delivered to your home in 24 hours

* for now, in certain locations, from certain retailers

anon7000··on I resigned from Anthropic today
As someone who has a lot of experience with both… no. You don’t need to be smart to assembly furniture, you just need to follow directions very closely and get shit done.
anon7000··on Trump promises $5k payout to U.S. adults if Republicans win election
It’s a stain precisely because it proves Americans don’t learn from those past stains
anon7000··on iPhone Duo
You should probably wait to comment until iPhone duo sales come back.
anon7000··on iPhone Duo
And yet Apple is doing exceptionally well financially, the MacBooks with M series chips are clearly the pinnacle of Mac laptop engineering, and most of the devices are more reliable and more durable than they ever have been. (As someone who was repairing iPhone 4/5 screens multiple times a year for friends and family.)

What you’re noticing is consumers being desensitized to tech. It transformed from bulky computers to slick hand-helds. It’s not like Apple made the first product in all those categories, they just made a decent ones that were easy to use.

Comments like this I think are just missing that Apple is actually doing extremely well without Jobs.

anon7000··on iPhone Duo
This is how Apple works, it’s weird people complain about it at this point. It’s extremely successful
anon7000··on Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent
Just redirects to chatgpt.com
anon7000··on 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
How about this? LG builds many other home appliances like washers and driers. Some have apps and wifi.

Why wouldn’t LG allow their devices to talk to each other locally, without needing to join a network? With private SSID or something like that? Only one appliance would need internet access.

This shit already exists. Like Amazon Sidewalk: https://ring.com/amazon-sidewalk

Now, I’m not saying LG is doing it, but this is not a far fetched technical concept. The only reason they’re potentially not going that far is because most people probably just connect it to the internet so why bother about the few who don’t.

The devices are already scanning the network for any devices and software they can find, and mapping your phone to your TV viewing habits for example. The LG execs are on record bragging about it. So I don’t see why it’s absurd

anon7000··on 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
> A new display plant costs multiple billions

To be fair, most TVs on the market are buying panels from the same few manufacturers. For example, Hisense sources panels from part of LG. I think Samsung is another manufacturer.

So a new company could theoretically access these panels to make a privacy friendly TV without as much capital.

But like you say, it wouldn’t be able to compete on price, because the ad tech lets other companies sell at a loss.

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