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bandushrew

1,329 karma · joined January 31, 2009

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bandushrew··on GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"
The problem is that the response of an llm has nothing to do with the facts of the context and everything to do with its vibe, the locations in the hyper sphere of the llms knowledge that are triggered.
bandushrew··on The value isn't in the code (2022)
I would love to see your Celtic knotwork generators, are they online?
bandushrew··on Asteroid fragments upend theory of how life on Earth bloomed
The why explains itself. Cells that do not divide and reproduce disappear.
bandushrew··on Texas banned abortion, then sepsis rates soared
We can accept that you are a person, the fetus is a person and the mother is a person.

Which of those should be coerced to give up a piece of their liver to save your life? Morally speaking…

bandushrew··on Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
Producing 200 lines of usable code an hour is genuinely impressive.

My experiments have been nowhere near that successful.

I would love, love, love to see a transcript of how that process worked over an hour, if that was something you were willing to share.

bandushrew··on Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet
Except that you cant, in a practical sense.

I can sell crypto to anyone, anywhere.

That cannot be used to purchase anything, anywhere.

Its only useful for a very narrow subset.

bandushrew··on Peter Thiel backs 'Olympics on steroids' event that allows athletes to dope
When you put it like that, honestly, it sounds pretty epic....
bandushrew··on Illinois to become first US state to abolish cash bail
Thats pretty much the argument in favour of it.

The argument against it is that it makes life harder for everyone except those who have spare cash hanging around.

Coincidentally, those who have spare cash hanging around may not value it as highly as their freedom, so they maybe are still likely to ditch and run?

Which means that bail is really only a good motivator for that sweet spot of accused criminal who both has enough cash available to be able to put it up, and has so little cash available that getting their bail back quickly is hugely important to them. Except that they dont get it back quickly anyway, it can take quite a long time...so ehh...

bandushrew··on Pesticide safety limit for salmon farms watered down after industry lobbying
The counterpoint is that this isn't a step that is being taken because we are desperately trying to feed all of humanity. Its a step thats being taken because these providers want to increase their profit margins.

The question is whether thats a good enough reason to take whatever risks are being taken here.

bandushrew··on Today's North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature (4.8 Sigma)
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-of-natu....

"The true heavyweights for reconstructing ancient seawater temperatures are the microorganisms. Foraminifera, single-celled organisms roughly the size of the period ending this sentence, occur nearly everywhere in the oceans and have an exquisite fossil record."

bandushrew··on OPEC+ announces surprise oil output cuts
Which is why we should start now, surely?

The best time to start was 20 years ago, the next best time is to start today.

bandushrew··on Over 50% of CEOs say they’re considering cutting jobs over the next 6 months
Your comment doesn't exist to give me an account model of reality.

It primarily exists to give me a believable model that promotes your beliefs.

That kind of statement is literally true for everything.

bandushrew··on Head of election worker management company arrested for theft of personal data
1.8 million poll workers sounds like a huge number, how many poll workers were there in the US last election?
bandushrew··on Ask HN: Does anyone else think SQL needs help?
You can use stored procs and/or views to hide the details of queries if you want.

the specifics of an inner join vs outer join vs left join etc are crucial though. It makes sense to be able to specify them.

bandushrew··on Hawaii shuts down its last coal-fired power plant in bid to fight climate change
Sure, but the cost of really good planning that never messes up sequencing is likely to add a lot more than 4% to your utility bill.

How much more are you really willing to pay for completely flawless sequencing?

bandushrew··on Infection fatality rate of Covid-19 inferred from seroprevalence data
That matches what we were being told 18 months ago though.

As I understood it, the problem was with the number of people being infected, because of the lack of any existing immunity.

Ie, most of the population has some degree of immunity to the flu, so it kills people in much lower numbers each year. COVID was going to…and did…infect large numbers all at once which would wreak havoc on the health systems of countries and cause the death rate of all caused to skyrocket.

bandushrew··on The erosion of the Mac experience
Let me use a single device but via different hardware depending on context.

Give me a phone I can plug into 2 monitors and a keyboard and interact with as a desktop, or slot into the back of a laptop case for portable computing, or put into my pocket.

bandushrew··on We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
Over 60 according to something, but I’m not.

Hypothesis: the older a person is, the more likely they are to understand that HHHHHHHHH is a statistically likely outcome from true randomness.

bandushrew··on The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown
You have lived in a world in which the government can confine you to your house your entire life.

Why is it only recently you have noticed?

bandushrew··on Notes on Nationalism (1945)
I find it interesting that your language implies it is the responsibility of the west to persuade Russia to back off?

Surely the responsibility for the actions of Russia rest on the Russian leadership?

Russia has decided to invade Ukraine. Russia needs to decide to stop doing that.

Where does it become the responsibility of the west?

bandushrew··on Police in tiny Alabama town suck drivers into legal ‘black hole’
The extremes always vote, many moderates only bother to vote if you can convince them the other side are totally insane/evil/stupid and life as they know it is going to be over if the other side get into/remain in power.

So politicians in particular get very good at making the other side look extremely insane, evil and stupid.

The better they are at that (lying) the better they do in elections.

So...the politicians who would be good for us tend to have integrity and strong personal beliefs about lying, and so tend to do poorly in elections.

Which leaves us with everyone else.

bandushrew··on Police in tiny Alabama town suck drivers into legal ‘black hole’
Its a social problem, largely driven by the FPP political system in the US.

The left hold up the opinions of the far right/right lunatics and say "see? this is how insane everyone on the right is"

The right hold up the opinions of the far left/left lunatics and say "see? this is how insane everyone on the left is"

The moderate left and the moderate right have far more in common with each other than they do with the extremes at either end, yet somehow each is convinced that the other is represented most accurately by the extreme edge.

bandushrew··on The Dead Sea of West Texas
Why are there so many absent landowners?
bandushrew··on New Zealand to ban smoking for next generation in bid to outlaw habit by 2025
People will grow their own, but it from a mate.

Point is it’s not illegal to smoke, it is illegal to sell an addictive, harmful substance commercially.

bandushrew··on New Zealand to ban smoking for next generation in bid to outlaw habit by 2025
They are not banning smoking, just the sale of certain tobacco products.
bandushrew··on New Zealand to ban smoking for next generation in bid to outlaw habit by 2025
The article and the headline is wrong. The government is not banning smoking, it is banning sales of certain tobacco products.

You are absolutely allowed to smoke them.

bandushrew··on Why salt was so important throughout history (2018)
Debt doesn’t have to be seen as borrowing from the future, it can also - depending on culture- be seen as borrowing from the past. I give you the difference of a cow and a sheep now, and next year when I need it, I will have a claim that may help me survive. Even today that attitude exists in some cultures and some families.
bandushrew··on Ask HN: I am being pushed out. How do I handle?
Life is change, brother.

My approach would be to start preparing to move on, this kind of change is scary, but it usually works out.

Start practicing your interview skills by going to interviews.

Good luck!

bandushrew··on The Problem of Marital Loneliness
I think maybe its the attitude, not the act that is different between a "self giving" turn taking, and a "compromise" turn taking.

Under a "self giving" regime, I want to spend time with my partner, enjoying her enjoying the movie she wants to watch. My partner wants to spend time with me enjoying the movie I want to watch. We can't both do that, so we each take turns letting the other one enjoy being with us while we watch the movie we want to watch.

Under the "compromise" option, we each get to watch the movie we want to watch, taking turn and turn about. That is what is important about the event: that we get to watch the movie we want to watch.

I think maybe the movie choice is a pretty trivial aspect of the relationship anyway, the GPs post around the willingness to serve your partner was a lovely insight to what makes a partnership work over the long term, far beyond how you both decide what movie to watch.

bandushrew··on The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus
I keep wondering how long it would take for a new cold virus to be recognised as such here in NZ.

When you think about how common the basic symptoms are, I think it could take quite a while before someone wondered whether it was different from the common cold and went testing.

IMO Its a perfectly reasonable theory that it was spreading slowly through China for months, from some distant province, and it wasn't recognised as a new virus until it arrived somewhere there was the expertise to look at it in the right way.

That would mean that the reason it was found in Wuhan and not anywhere else is just because Wuhan was the first place with people who had the expertise and the interest to investigate and figure out it was new.

Whatever the truth is, that is just as good a theory as any other, and it explains the apparent evidence for the virus appearing a few months earlier in some countries.

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