avalys

No wonder it is organized by a professor of marketing who has been building a personal brand of hating the tech companies for a decade.

Boycott this performative nonsense.

Sitting up straight at my desk, chair locked, perfect posture? I’m doing nothing, maybe looking through System Preferences to change the system highlight color.

Sliding down in my chair like jelly, with my shoulders where my butt should be and my head resting on the lumbar support? I’m building the next iPhone and it’ll be done by 2 AM.

The premise is, the general population is too stupid to do the right thing themselves and need to be reminded of the drought by being inconvenienced by completely ineffective performative policies.

All this actually does in practice is diminish trust in authorities to make good decisions. If the drought policies are bogus, which other ones are too? Fuel economy standards? Air quality? OSHA?

Instead of this nonsense - just allow the market to set the price of water based on what’s available.

Of course, the answer there is usually “Oh but there are special interests that need to be able to consume as much water as they want without paying more for it, even in a drought!” And thus as usual the problem is not the personal conduct of individual citizens but corrupt and spineless politicians who are not actually interested in solving any problems.

Previously the blue background made the ad result look more highlighted and more prominent.

Now it is just like the other results - not special or better.

Yes, the HN audience knows the visual convention indicates that the blue background represents an ad. Does your everyday user know that or do they assume the blue results are better?

This doesn’t indicate that there has been a recent undisclosed accident or other newsworthy event as you might be imagining.

"Expire current versions" means that the object will be automatically deleted after some period.

"Permanently delete non-current versions" means that old revisions will be permanently removed after some period.

I asked ChatGPT for advice on configuring a bucket. Within a long list of other instructions, it said "Expire noncurrent versions after X days". In this case, such a setting does not exist, and the very similar "expire current versions" is exactly the wrong behavior. "Permanently delete noncurrent versions" is the option needed.

The prompt I used has other information in it that I don't want to share.

Legal questions, question about AWS services, products I want to buy, the history a specific field, so many things.

It gives answers that do a really good job of simulating what a person who knows the topic would say. But details are wrong everywhere, often in ways that completely change the relevant conclusion.

As regards metric/A* paper sizes, it seems like just a coincidence that this scheme resulted in a standard size that is useful for everyday documents, since it only works for powers of 2 and starts with the definition of 1 square meter. If a meter were 1.5x smaller or larger, then I don’t think there would be a standard size that works so well.

EDIT: Being curious about this, I did some more reading, and discovered there is a “B” series of paper sizes that maintain the same ratio relationship, but are exactly in between all the A sizes! That’s useful.

What a lot of people actually want from an LLM, is for the LLM to have an opinion about the question being asked. The cool thing about LLMs is that they appear capable of doing this - rather than a machine that just regurgitates black-and-white facts, they seem to be capable of dealing with nuance and gray areas, providing insight, and using logic to reach a conclusion from ambiguous data.

But this is the biggest misconception and flaw of LLMs. LLMs do not have opinions. That is not how they work. At best, they simulate what a reasonable answer from a person capable of having an opinion might be - without any consistency around what that opinion is, because it is simply a manifestation of sampling a probability distribution, not the result of logic.

And what most people call sycophancy is that, as a result of this statistical construction, the LLM tends to reinforce the opinions, biases, or even factual errors, that it picks up on in the prompt or conversation history.

Personally I find GPT 5.2 to be nearly useless for my use case (which is not coding).

The simple evidence for this is that everyone who has invested the same resources in AI has produced roughly the same result. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Deepseek, etc. There's no evidence of a technological moat or a competitive advantage in any of these companies.

The conclusion? AI is a world-changing technology, just like the railroads were, and it is going to soon explode in a huge bubble - just like the railroads did. That doesn't mean AI is going to go away, or that it won't change the world - railroads are still here and they did change the world - but from a venture investment perspective, get ready for a massive downturn.

His manager was used to this and sort of enjoyed the mystique of this monk-like expert that he was responsible for.

I once was in a meeting where we had to talk to the great expert on the phone. Let's just say his name was Otto. Of course, he worked remote quite often, in the days before Zoom. His manager calls him and puts the phone on speakerphone for the room to hear.

Manager: Otto, we need your input on <long technical problem>.

<60 seconds of silence>

Otto: Yes, I think that might work, but you'll run into <other problems>.

Manager: Well, yes, we've considered that, but <explanation>

A few minutes of reasonably normal conversation ensues between the assembled group and Otto. Then:

Manager: Well, I think then that this is a pretty good solution, as long as Otto agrees.

Manager looks around the table, clearly waiting for Otto's concurrence

<60 seconds of silence>

<90 seconds of silence>

<120 seconds of silence>

People are starting to get uncomfortable. The manager makes a reassuring face. This is normal for those of us that work closely with the great expert, do not lose faith.

<240 seconds of silence>

Manager briefly lets slip a concerned look, then quickly hides it

<360 seconds of silence>

Manager: Um, Otto?

Otto: Oh, I thought I was waiting for you.

Tim Ferris is known for somewhat hyperbolic self-help content. He talks about the millions of people who follow him or consume his content regularly.

I’d suggest that the audience for people who obsessively consume this kind of self-help content is probably self-selected for a high proportion of crazy people.

So, his experience is probably well outside the norm.