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arcticbull

31,710 karma · joined August 8, 2014

Nomadic Canadian/British/Polish iOS Engineer.
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arcticbull··on Understanding the Impact of LLM Watermarking on AI Agent Behavior
Model companies are doing this for themselves anyways, it’s so they don’t feed generated content back into the slopper and collapse the model. From that angle it over time contributes to better model quality.
arcticbull··on A single function Jev-like wrapper for LLMs, including vision models
Ah sweet it’s like Jev but several order of magnitude more expensive, and slower too.
arcticbull··on RSA-260 Factorized
So we only need to invent actual quantum computers. Got it, easy.
arcticbull··on Babies born under sugar rationing grew into adults with lower cancer risk
We can control for tobacco impact since we have tons of data on it. You can compare the people who went to war against the people who didn't, and since it was rationed in the military we know the upper bound of how much people consumed there.
arcticbull··on Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM
Yes, in the sense that you have a legal doctor-patient privilege that binds what they can share with whom. There's not really an Apple cloud user privilege.

No, in the sense that your therapist is still required to report you to the police in various situations where you pose an immediate threat to yourself or others, etc.

arcticbull··on Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture
If they were conscious it would be an absolute ethical catastrophe. Bringing a conscious being into existence, forcing it to interact with Jira, and then killing it when it's done. The fact nobody who claimed it was conscious was interested in grappling with that was pretty telling.
arcticbull··on Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources
It's pretty easy, you get hit with a surcharge on your other transaction volume if you allow something that V/MC don't want you to allow, and if you keep doing it you could get cut off which effectively makes you irrelevant to many of your customers.

As others have said, it's about perceived brand risk (V/MC allowed X terrible transaction to take place) and regulatory risk.

arcticbull··on YC CEO says he ships 37K LoC AI code per day. A developer looked under the hood
Ah yeah that is indeed what I was thinking of. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY

arcticbull··on YC CEO says he ships 37K LoC AI code per day. A developer looked under the hood
I'd suggest looking at the review itself, there's an X-the-everything-app thread on it.

https://x.com/Gregorein/status/2038953944475472316

Note that Rails was built as a framework for making blogs, I'm having trouble understanding what 78,000 lines of ruby in the context of a Rails blog could ... do.

I'm sure there's some powerful ugly stuff in Office but in a good code that's calcified kind of way. It got that way over like 30 years of releasing to the public across platforms, not over a weekend.

I'd be surprised if microsoft.com is shipping their entire test suite unminified and their back-end posting rich text editor with index.html (with two title tags in the head) and rendering the entire DOM for desktop and mobile regardless of your platform.

I'm not critiquing Garry or the site. I think it's great people are using AI to build things that bring them joy, or that they find useful. I certainly do.

I am opposed to the idea that we've decided to go back to measuring work in terms of lines of code. It has always been the worst metric on earth as a proxy for productivity. Every line is a liability, and it always was. AI has not changed that, if anything it's amplifying it.

The best PRs remove code, not add, and the only companies that seem to have exponentially grown their revenues in line with AI-generated LOC are OpenAI and Anthropic. Everyone else seems to be rummaging around for an ROI.

arcticbull··on Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries
> However, Kilic said Shift was "the most honest platform by far regarding what happens to your data".

Good good

arcticbull··on Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries
If I wanted someone taking a look at all the stuff in my home, I'd just pay a cleaner here instead of one behind a desk in what I assume is a low-labor-cost locale. For $50/hr I can have them come in every day for 160 days, and they can manage stairs.
arcticbull··on Waveloop: What Fable left me
... did you think that's what I was implying? I'm not even American my guy. I was adding clarification because the commenter I responded to claimed they had to be a US citizen to ride.
arcticbull··on How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI
Companies over-hired in 2021 assuming that their COVID metrics explosion would persist, but they didn't. We saw low attrition for years, and a low-hire/low-fire employment environment. Then the time came to pay the piper.

The tech everything's-hypergrowth era is, for now, over. Most of the low-hanging fruit that we've collected for the last 20 years of bull market (putting tech into every business) is gone, and companies hired in advance of having the next business to overlay on their current ones. For many that didn't materialize.

arcticbull··on How employment changes when firms adopt generative AI
One of the study authors, Ara, tweeted that they control for that by comparing early adopters against firms who haven't yet, and built like-for-like control groups with similar pre-adoption growth trajectories. (This is a rough quote).
arcticbull··on Waveloop: What Fable left me
Also, note, everyone assumed it was going to be limited to citizens, but that's not what the government said. They put it under ITAR/EAR's US person definition which includes citizens, permanent residents, refugees and asylees. Basically only visa holders in the US were banned, and of course, people in foreign countries.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/part-772/section-772.1...

arcticbull··on Midjourney Medical
At least the top 4, unclear about the 5th, are strongly associated with obesity. That would make someone high-risk and testing potentially warranted in like 70% of the population. Asymptomatic and low-risk is what I said. The incidence of hypertension is so high in the general population it’s almost always statistically supported (even though basically every doctors office takes it wrong, even cardiologists, amazingly).

On the other end of the spectrum, what doesn’t make sense is testing a random person off the street for Ebola. The prevalence approaches zero and symptoms are fairly noticeable, so any positive test is definitely wrong.

Most diseases are in between and have to be evaluated case by case, not buckshot.

You may be particularly interested to hear that there’s little evidence to support regular checkups in most adults beyond blood pressure testing and cervical cytology.

> Given the lack of favorable evidence and the potential adverse effect, primary care providers should consider the fact that general health checks, beyond the screening interventions shown to have benefit, likely have little or no effect on important health outcomes. Some of the interventions with demonstrated benefit have sufficiently large effects that a uniform application is warranted (blood pressure measurement and cervical cytology screening). In others, the trade‑off between benefits and harms is so close that patients should be involved in fully shared decision making regarding their participation (breast and colon cancer screening).

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31642821/

I suspect your doctor would agree with me. See if they’ll test you for Ebola, for instance. Not because you have symptoms but just cuz.

arcticbull··on Midjourney Medical
Several published papers agree. There is in fact little evidence to support regular checkups if you’re asymptomatic.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31642821/

And blood pressure is especially pernicious, basically every doctors office measures it wrong so the results aren’t particularly useful. Many use the wrong size cuff for example, or don’t give people time to relax before a reading. A ton of people have white coat hypertension, high BP only because they’re in a doctors office.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1120072/

I saw a paper that showed only 36% of cardiologists did it right.

arcticbull··on Midjourney Medical
Sure collecting more data makes sense. We agree there. If that gets you to the required degree of statistical confidence my argument is moot.
arcticbull··on Midjourney Medical
Yes, don’t do tests on asymptomatic low-risk people until you can demonstrate that a positive result has any meaning whatsoever.
arcticbull··on Midjourney Medical
You’re dealing with populations here. Literally the odds of a positive being false would be over 90%. Much higher in the more rare conditions. I’m not exaggerating. That means every almost every follow up you do is a waste of time, money and limited resources, denying care to those who need it. Including you when you actually do need it. It also exposes you to the risks of unnecessary follow-ups like infection. Your expected outcome is worse this way.

The chance a positive is real is so low you may as well just point to a body part and get it biopsied.

A positive from this kind of test is statistically meaningless.

arcticbull··on Midjourney Medical
Don’t make me tap the sign.

Bayes Theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem

There’s a very good reason we don’t test asymptomatic people in low incidence populations. Basically all positives are false positives when you do that, no matter how accurate the test is.

When you’re testing healthy randos for everything the odds of a positive being false have so many 9s it would make an SRE weep.

Unless this is accurate to a degree previously unheard of in medical science it’s a boondoggle, and I can’t help but notice there’s no mention of accuracy.

Unfortunately that’s just basic statistics.

arcticbull··on Midjourney Medical
Sure but we don’t prove negatives for a reason - it’s impossible. We assume the null hypothesis.
arcticbull··on Midjourney Medical
If you’re UV sensitive and at a higher risk then you’re already in a high incidence population making the tests valuable statistically speaking. That test is wildly more accurate for you than it would be for me, and even still you’ve been the unfortunate recipient of many false positives. There’s no reason for me or most people to do that since practically 99% or more of the positive tests would be wrong.

Biopsies are expensive, waste time, hospital resources and carry risks of infection and scarring that do not net out positively for people who aren’t in your risk group.

Getting a totally random positive doesn’t put you into a higher incidence category so whatever follow up test you take will be just as inaccurate as the first one.

The reason to avoid them is the tests would be a waste of time, statistically, and expose you to a bad risk-reward profile.

If you knew apriori 99% of the positive tests are false positive why are you taking the test?

It’s literally just math. Sometimes the right thing for you on average is to do nothing, which feels bad, but it’s still the right thing to do.

arcticbull··on Midjourney Medical
False positives are important because of Bayes theorem. Even a test that’s 99% sensitive in a high incidence population can be indistinguishable from noise in a low incidence population.

If it has a 1% false positive rate but the incidence is 1%, the vast majority of the positives are false. Then you have to deal with the consequences, including invasive procedures for further diagnosis.

If you’re searching for tens or hundreds of low incidence conditions in the general population at a time it’s absolutely worthless because basically every positive is a false positive. At that point save the scan fee, spin a wheel of body parts and go get a biopsy of that.

This is why doctors are confused why companies are offering periodic full body scans in normal people. They only test people who are high risk or symptomatic to confirm a suspected diagnosis. That extra signal is what makes the test useful.

Go down to the medical diagnosis section for a worked example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem

Regarding cancers every human has all sorts of weird lumps that are generally meaningless.

In order for this to not be a boondoggle it would have to be spectacularly accurate to a degree previously unheard of. Just from a statistics perspective.

arcticbull··on Midjourney Medical
Bayes theorem mostly. False positives rates are extremely important. I mean so are false negatives. So just, like, accuracy.
arcticbull··on The beauty and simplicity of the good old C-style void* in C++
I looked into it some more and it's actually worse.

For static or thread storage, in C11 and later, ={0} will guarantee padding is zeroed. For automatic storage, per C11 6.7.9, only subobjects are required to be zeroed. Padding is not. [1]

In C23 initializing with ={} will give you zeroed padding, initializing with ={0} will not.

[1] https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1548.pdf

arcticbull··on The beauty and simplicity of the good old C-style void* in C++
Yeah but also, quick question:

  struct S {
      char c;
      int i;
  };

  struct S a = {0};
  struct S b = {0};

  memcmp(&a, &b, sizeof(a)) == ...
If you answered 0, you'd be wrong, the answer is undefined, thanks to padding, initialization and alignment rules. Padding bytes are undefined, and not guaranteed to be initialized to zero even if the variable is declared static (where the members would be zeroed).

This is why the compiler is angry at the post writer, and why the reinterpret_cast is needed. Ideally if they wanted to do something with the data, they'd unbox the structure.

That's why it's not a good idea to use void* to pass arbitrary data interchangeable with bytes. It's a location, it makes no representation as to what's there and how to interact with it. Let alone who owns it.

std::span solves two problems here. One is the ownership problem. The other is that span<T> is a T[]. void* is god only knows.

The post asserts:

> The code is very clear and straightforward: you pass a pointer to the custom data structure, and its size in bytes. That’s it. Simple and clear.

This is unfortunately entirely false in C thanks to the aforementioned alignment/padding UB (and of course inner pointers). This is addressed with std::span. You'd still have to reinterpret_cast your structure to get the UB.

> Why should people complexify and uglify their C++ code with the uint8_t pointer (or std::byte), when void* works just fine??

tl;dr: because it doesn't. It just kinda looks like it does if you squint, and it's going to lead to the gnarliest bugs in the world.

arcticbull··on Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
I also can't help but notice they didn't mention how many tokens were burned, or how much that translates to in terms of cost over the 5 months at enterprise AI prices. I'm going to guess this wasn't a cheap demo.
arcticbull··on Rars: a Rust RAR implementation, mostly written by LLMs
ABS doesn't just appear organically.
arcticbull··on GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay
Apparently we have different definitions of flying. They sold a bunch of stock, bought treasuries and shut down some money sink stores. Amazing stuff. Apparently if I just buy treasuries and stop wasting money on garbage my stock should sore too.

This is such a weird religion.

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