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berniedurfee

662 karma · joined June 19, 2018

Lifelong professional programmer and amateur musician.

Music https://fieldsandwaves.band

Writing https://berniedurfee.substack.com/

Older Writing https://medium.com/@berniedurfee

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berniedurfee··on Accountability sinks
I think this is related to the concept of “aligned incentives” in a way.

The chain breaks when incentives aren’t aligned and there’s a cascade of crap that roles downhill that seem like bad decisions. When, in fact, as the article points out, the decision made didn’t take knock on effects into consideration.

I’ve learned that seemingly poor or even terrible decisions almost always make sense in the context of when and where the decision was made.

berniedurfee··on Working from home is powering productivity
It’s the other way round many times. Companies get fat tax breaks to move into a particular town or city.

Those tax breaks are explicitly contingent on butts being physically in seats to add to the economy and tax revenue of that municipality.

Too few butts in seats triggers penalties or revoking of the tax breaks altogether.

berniedurfee··on Indian entrepreneur, industrialist, and philanthropist, Ratan Tata, dead at 86
I think this is a big part of his legacy. I’m sure his contributions to the Indian economy are staggering in total.

That’ll conjure different emotions depending on where you sit in the world.

berniedurfee··on Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]
I think common decency should have been considered here regardless of what a lawyer would say to do or not to do. Yuck.
berniedurfee··on Mira Murati leaves OpenAI
This is the money grab part of the show.

As LLM capabilities start to plateau, everyone with any sort of name recognition is scrambling to ride the hype to a big pay day before reality catches up with marketing.

berniedurfee··on Mira Murati leaves OpenAI
Here now, you just need a few more ice cold glasses of the kool-aide. Drink up!

LLMs are not on the path to AGI. They’re a really cool parlor trick and will be powerful tools for lots of tasks, but won’t be sci-fi cool.

Copilot is useful and has definitely sped up coding, but like you said, only in a boilerplate sort of way and I need to cleanup almost everything it writes.

berniedurfee··on The Intelligence Age
You should _always_ be skeptical of what’s said by anyone who is trying to sell something.

Like everything else being sold, the marketing is 95% BS.

LLMs are amazing and wonderful tools, but me thinks we’re near a plateau in capability. Now investors are pumping for ROI before that becomes evident.

After we reach the plateau in capabilities, the next phase is cutting production and operating costs to maximize margins.

I’m the meantime, expect the marketing to get increasingly cringe until the bubble bursts.

berniedurfee··on They stole my voice with AI
No doubt it’s bipartisan!

Politician’s careers live and die in the fickle Court of Public Opinion. They’re probably the most susceptible cohort to AI fakes.

One of the rare times, it seems, that politician’s incentives are aligned with the populous. (Yes, I could have left that last part out.)

berniedurfee··on They stole my voice with AI
What country is immune to this?

As far as I can tell the collective conscious of every country is swayed by propaganda.

A written headline is enough to incite rage in any country much less a voice or video indistinguishable from the real thing.

Folks in “developed’ countries have their lives destroyed or ended all the time based on rumors of something said or done.

berniedurfee··on How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
Our admin used to just prop the door open with a fan and blow the “something’s burning” smell out into the hall.
berniedurfee··on How America's universities became debt factories
Regulation should allow students to forgo their tuition payments if they can’t land a good job in their field of study.

That’d help align incentives.

Schools would compete on placement rates and quality. They’d need robust post-graduation placement services and would need strong partnerships with industry players to stay in alignment with required skills.

berniedurfee··on Notes on OpenAI's new o1 chain-of-thought models
I’m starting to think this is an unsolvable problem with LLMs. The very act of “reasoning” requires one to know that they don’t know something.

LLMs are giant word Plinko machines. A million monkeys on a million typewriters.

LLMs are not interns. LLMs are assumption machines.

None of the million monkeys or the collective million monkeys are “reasoning” or are capable of knowing.

LLMs are a neat parlor trick and are super powerful, but are not on the path to AGI.

LLMs will change the world, but only in the way that the printing press changed the world. They’re not interns, they’re just tools.

berniedurfee··on Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?
This is a great argument as to why we need stronger regulations to make these practices illegal.
berniedurfee··on New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike
And as has been demonstrated, popular revolts tend to leave a power vacuum that gets filled by just another abusive regime.
berniedurfee··on New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike
| post-colonial intervention
berniedurfee··on Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination
I think this is the same behavior in Finder on MacOS. Sometimes right clicking requires some pixel-perfect sniping to hit just the right spot.
berniedurfee··on Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined
Ah! Thanks, I misread that as “grift” and thought it was another jab at De Beers.
berniedurfee··on Sainsbury Wing contractors find 1990 letter from donor
This is brilliant!

I always leave stuff for future remodelers or archeologists when I do remodeling or building.

Mostly coins, I throw a few in the concrete mix or inside walls for future generations to discover.

It’s always a treat to find long forgotten artifacts when remodeling old houses.

A little treat for people working on something I built 40 or 400 years in the future.

berniedurfee··on Anthropic Claude 3.5 can create icalendar files, so I did this
Sounds like the burning of the library at Alexandria, but worse.
berniedurfee··on I'm tired of fixing customers' AI generated code
I burned a couple hours debugging some generated code only to finally realize copilot was referencing a variable as ‘variableO1’.

Artificial Incompetence indeed!

berniedurfee··on CrowdStrike's impact on aviation
They certainly have DR infrastructure primed and ready to go… with Crowdstrike pre-installed on every DR server.
berniedurfee··on AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach
So is this data fair game to be used by lawyers and cops in the US?

I guess maybe a cop would still need a warrant to use the data, but what about civil court cases?

berniedurfee··on Ask HN: Why do message queue-based architectures seem less popular now?
Yep. It’s a really nice architecture for lots of use cases where it fits.

Every new idea goes through the same cycle of overuse until it finds its niches.

berniedurfee··on Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
We’re in the middle of “The Dark Ages II” and we don’t even know it.

I’ve been thinking for a while about how historians will view our chunk of history and it ain’t too good.

There will be some bright spots, but for the most part humans have been behaving pretty terribly, at scale, since harnessing the power of electricity.

berniedurfee··on A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material
That’s not the four letter s-word I would have gone with.
berniedurfee··on POV-Ray – The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (2021)
I used to play with this probably around when it first came out.

I’d sit in my dad’s office at IBM and use his all powerful PC-AT steel full tower PC.

It was so cool to even render simple stuff back then. Amazing to see this project still around.

berniedurfee··on OpenAI and Apple Announce Partnership
I just want to sit down in front of my TV, put on my Bluetooth headphones and have the headphones and TV connect automatically.

Then, when I’m downstairs in my office and want to listen to music on my iPhone. I want my headphones to connect to my iPhone and not my TV upstairs!

I don’t need Skynet, I just need my devices to be a little less stupid.

I would consider that akin to magic at this point. Let’s start there and work our way up to handing over control of our nuclear arsenal.

berniedurfee··on Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us
Not in pro-studios. Most are stuck in Protools forever due to lack of interoperability with other software.

You can run anything you want, until you need to send a session to another studio and they only use Protools.

berniedurfee··on Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us
Wow, I’ve never heard this sort of urban elitism before! Is it common?
berniedurfee··on Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us
They forgot Adobe. Oh, and Protools. And I’m sure many others.
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