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bad_username

979 karma · joined February 3, 2021

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bad_username··on Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over
> unpaid household management jobs

Such a drab, dystopian, ultra-capitalist, and essentially dishonest description of the homemaker role.

bad_username··on Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests
Actions like yours are why I left Reddit many years ago, and generally why we can't have nice things.
bad_username··on I don't want to read what you didn't write
Have you seen the episode "Darmok" of Star Trek The New Generation series? It is about a people with an impenetrable language aimed at packing as much information as possible by using references and metaphors, not descriptions. I guess this is where LLM language output is heading.
bad_username··on Attention is all you have
Same. I don't think I remember the last time I came across actually "FAR right propaganda" recommended by an algorithm. Could be that the author and I differ in what "far right" means.
bad_username··on Is the phrase "master bedroom" harmful? A new psychology study says no
Not according to my observations...
bad_username··on Is the phrase "master bedroom" harmful? A new psychology study says no
Peoole who score high on moral elitism and a need for recognition need to give me back my master branch (and my blacklist too, preferably).
bad_username··on Most people prefer traditional architecture
> Why would someone invest in an elaborate and expensive design when they could simply throw up a slab of brutalist concrete and punch some windows into it?

But why do the students of architecture prefer brutalism? I don't believe they factor the financials in when they choose which picture they like better.

bad_username··on How to write an effective software design document
> Your perfectly drafted plan could easily be derailed by technical limitations, customer request or company reorg.

These are not guaranteed to happen. But if you don't have a plan, you will be derailed very soon and practically inevitably.

bad_username··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
"Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences", as some people like to say
bad_username··on Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
Every time I bring this phenomenon up, I hear from HN commenters that it used to be like that, but today it is solved by modern powerful models, harnesses.and workflows. I don't know. At work I still direct and review everything LLMs generate, because if HN are wrong and I am right, I am in huge huge trouble.
bad_username··on Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
Not sure about that. Writing detailed specs you deal just with the inherent domain complexity. Writing code you also get accidental complexity that has nothing to do with the business, whuch not only piles on top, but tend to interact vexingly with the detais of the domain.

Where you would have a point is if you'd say we have excellent tooling for wrangling code, but less tooling and tradition to write and manage specs.

bad_username··on I resigned from Anthropic today
AI is a computer program. It calculates numbers from other numbers. By itself it does not "want" to do anything and "cannot" do anything. Before it becomes an agent in the universe (in the classical meaning), it requires being supplied by an execution environment, energy, initiative (agentic loop, specific instructions), and modality (readonly and mutating connections to real world). It is like a game of chess - it does not exist just by itself: someone must play it, having the board and the energy to do so. With the huggingface incident the AI was supplied with all of these components by humans before it broke out. So unless humans are actively involved, I so far cannot see how AI can become truly autonomously agentic and start doing anything on its own, thus posing danger. I could be wrong of course, but I do not see it for now.

You can say "yes and you have to fear the humans weilding the AI" - that I agree with.

bad_username··on Large language models develop novel social biases through adaptive exploration
> how LLMs can develop new previously unseen biases for demographic groups, even when there are no differences between groups in the first place!

In real life there ARE differences between groups, and models are trained on real life data, so I do not find surprising that models anticipate differences in this synthetic situation as well, and fail to see the significance of this result.

bad_username··on The Twelve-Factor App
> X. Dev/prod parity Keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible

Notably, there is no requirement or recommendation that the dev environment be a single, shared environment. Development processes where this environment is single is shared is as terrible as it is ubiqitous.

bad_username··on The Government Report That Made Me Stop Trusting Our Statistical Agencies
Person outside the USA here (reasonable, hopefully).

First off, it is too simplistic to try and categorize a political regime as "ok" or "not ok". A political regime, the problematics of a large country, and and a huge voting base of people like the US population, are an extremely complex phenomenon. One will not reach useful insights by labeling a regime as "not OK" and its voters as unintelligent or evil (I am not saying you are doing so, but lots of people do).

Talking about reasonable people: for reasonable people, the Trump regime, and any regime for that matter, is a mixed bag of things to like and dislike, to weigh and trade off. For sure, for each reasonable person the scales will tip in different directions. But for a reasonable voter this not a sports game where one roots for their team just because it's their team.

For many reasonable voters Trump is not "ok" or maybe even "good", but he still responds to some of their pressing priorities and concerns enough that he merits voting for. I personally voted for politicians in my country that I disliked deeply, but I'd done the calculus and concluded that the alternatives are worse. Similarly, you shouldn't conclude that the electorate of Trump predominantly loves him. You hear mostly from the loud MAGA crowd, but they do not decide.

What are the concerns and priorities that may force a reasonable person to hold their nose and vote for someone like Trump? I wouldn't like to engage in a political debate here, so I will keep things meta. But as an outsider I can see political and social trends of the last decade that are quite prominent, rather sudden, pretty radical from my vantage point, and concerning to conceivably reasonable voters enough to tip the scale, even if you or I may not really align with them specifically.

bad_username··on Scrap (2006)
> Being poor has zero correlation with being “lazy”.

This doesn't sound right. If that were literally true, and the level of industriousness didn't affect prosperity at all, why would anyone bother to work?

bad_username··on Scientists stunned by children's lung recovery in ultra low emission zone
Health improvements are not measurable any more if you go below 5 mcg/m2 average level of PM2.5 particulates. For 50x reduction to be beneficial, you need to live in an area where the pollution is 250 mcg/m2, which is an extreme level found only in a few unfortunate places on Earth. 5-10x reduction is reasonable almost everywhere.
bad_username··on A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome
I believe that any simulation of consciousness is consciousness, so ethical implications apply. But I also don't believe fruit flies are conscious for any definition of that word.
bad_username··on ChatGPT has almost stopped citing Reddit
The public discussion on Reddit is very heavily censored and probably already dominated by bots at this point.
bad_username··on Data centers raise nearby temperatures by up to 4 degrees in Phoenix
> it's all people seem to care about.

You shouldn't try to assess what people care about from what you see in the media, including social media. Focused thought and gigantic resources go into shaping the public perception of reality through media.

bad_username··on Incident with Github.com
> GitLab free tier has all I need ... their next tier is $29/mo, which is too much.

Pay every Nth month, or M months per year :-) Use the free tier features throughout.

bad_username··on Bedtime Procrastination
> I often joke with my finance

> My finance makes fun of me

Your financial situation is very interesting!

bad_username··on Has the hallucination problem in AI been solved?
There has been quite significant progress.

From my experience it has been largely solved for one significant use case which is chatting to frontier models about the reality as described by public knowledge. 2 years ago models would rely on their training data, today they go out of their way trying to look it up on the Internet and verify thoroughly. I have not had a problem for a very long time.

When working off of limited, private/unverifiable context, LLMs still hallucinate, but again, much less than 2 years ago, and more within a "getting confused where a human would easily get confused" range, rather than "outrageously making things up" range.

bad_username··on At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis
What didn't help was the response to the pandemic by governments and the scientific establishment, that supplied an unfortunate and pretty devastating blow to public trust in these institutions.
bad_username··on US conducted mass spying campaign against leftwing and anti-ICE protesters
I think if all protesters really just protested (and nobody tried smashing ICE cars tail lights, physically blocking their vehicles, and damaging officers' hearing), that would go a long way helping prevent this. So the measure protesters can take is to discipline their ranks.
bad_username··on Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time
Even if the entire Germany stopped existing overnight, this would barely make a dent in global carbon emissions and planet destruction rate.
bad_username··on Ask HN: I still don't understand why AI agents need "skills"
Skills is just lazy loading of well-organized Markdown docs. The "lazy" part is the core part.
bad_username··on The five primitives I run a one-person company on
> An agent that drives a real browser session with my real logins: seller dashboards, banking portals, government sites, ad platforms, ..

What are some viable architectures for such an agent that are token-efficient, effective and convenient?

bad_username··on Astronauts describe persistent 'observer' sensation after 6 month missions
Readers describe persistent "AI slop" sensation after 3.5 years of LLMs
bad_username··on Bitchat is now on Radicle
IKR? "Where's your Bitchat?" is a question better never uttered to anyone in person.
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