bun_at_work

Nope. I'm out. I might still use the API, but the monthly subscription is already gone and I'm on to Claude.

Is it prohibitively larger? And is the size a fundamental constraint of the technology, or is it possible to reduce the size?

Hey - this is awesome. I've been working on a small local app like this to import financial data and present a dashboard, for the family to use together (wife and I). So yeah - great work here, taking control of your data.

I'm curious about real-time data, or cron jobs, though. I love the idea of importing my data into this, but it would be nicer if I could set it up to automatically poll for new data somehow. Does Timelineize do something like that? I didn't see on the page.

Be careful what you wish for.

VS Code is maybe the best product Microsoft has ever released, largely because the extension market. If Microsoft polices the marketplace more, you can probably expect VS Code quality to degrade.

Here's my argument: More scrutiny of the marketplace will lead to less extensions overall (the scrutiny process will reduce the number of extensions overall as barrier to entry will be increased). Less extensions available will create an incentive for Microsoft to add features to VS Code directly. The more features MS adds, the more bloated VS Code will become.

So then, more security auditing in the extensions marketplace will lead to a more bloated VS Code.

All that said, it would be nice if there were better security controls in the extensions marketplace, I just don't trust Microsoft to do anything in a way that actually improves their products for the people who use them.

Using a random walk algorithm through genetic space over millions (or billions) of years.

If you don't like the equivalence to slavery, pick a different example, there are three I posted and more you can probably think of on your own.

We know that the idea of a rational agent in economics is a myth, and as you mentioned, it is about incentives, as well as motives.

Students who take on debt that limits them in later life don't have all the information they need at the time they make the decision. Saying the information is available is not reasonable. These students are told they _most_ go to college to make a living.

They are not told they need to get an engineering, medical, or finance degree to make going to college worth it, economically.

They are shown all the loans they can get without an equivalent amount of effort put into educating them about the consequences those loans represent. For example, how much the loans will cost in the long run, along with estimated pay for various fields of study.

Furthermore, the loans are given for any degree program without restriction.

All the comments I made about game theory still stand, and we don't need to get into the myriad problems with our education and student loan systems. I agree they aren't perfect; I just think the argument 'I didn't get my loans paid off neither should you' is an extremely selfish one. Just because someone suffers doesn't mean everyone should. Also - in my experience people who are ready to make that selfish argument are very offended when it gets flipped on them. So they can understand intuitively the issue with the selfish position.

> not all students get the benefit, some already paid off their debts or a large part of it.

I'm one of the people who paid off a large portion of debt and probably don't need this assistance. However, this argument is so offensive. People were encouraged to take out debt for a number of reasons, and by a number of institutions, without first being educated about the implications of that. This argument states that we shouldn't help people because other people didn't have help. Following this logic, we shouldn't seek to help anyone ever, unless everyone else has also received the exact same help.

- slaves shouldn't be freed because other slaves weren't freed - we shouldn't give food to the starving, because those not starving aren't getting free food - we shouldn't care about others because they don't care about me

These arguments are all the greedy option in game theory, and all contribute to the worst outcomes across the board, except for those who can scam others in this system.

The right way to think about programs that help others is to consider cooperating - some people don't get the maximum possible, but they do get some! And when the game is played over and over, all parties get the maximum benefit possible.

In the case of student debt, paying it off and fixing the broken system, by allowing bankruptcy or some other fix, would benefit far more people than it would hurt; it would also benefit some people who paid their loans off completely: parents of children who can't pay off their loans now.

In the end the argument that some already paid off their debts is inherently a selfish argument in the style of "I don't want them to get help because I didn't get help." Society would be better if we didn't think in such greedy terms.

All that said - there are real concerns about debt repayment. The point about emboldening universities to ask for higher tuition highlights the underlying issue with the student loan system. Why bring up the most selfish possible argument when there are valid, useful arguments for your position?

Given the Cambridge Analytica scandal, why wouldn't it be achievable at Facebook, let alone TikTok.

The CCP could mandate that the TikTok algorithm display certain types of political content, then further mandate that any criticism of the CCP be limited, especially discussion of the said censorship. Most users wouldn't know about it and leakers at ByteDance wouldn't be able to change that. It's not the US - they are punished in China in a way that doesn't happen in the US.

One way could be age limits and more stringent verification of age for all social media platforms.

Another way could be limiting feed algorithms to chronological order only.

Another could be limiting what data can be collected from users on these platforms. Or limiting what data could be provided to other entities.

Who knows if these are the best ways to regulate social media, but they would like help mitigate some of the clear harms.

> but it looks at times like the company is less an organism and more a writhing mass of creatures in a thin, shared skin trying to make it appear as one.

This is pretty accurate. A bunch of disjointed orgs who get sometimes seemingly random direction from the overlord. The random direction isn't really random, it's whatever move the overlord believes investors will respond to.

Copilot is a great example - shoved ungracefully into every product with the effect of making basic tasks more difficult. But hey - early movement on LLMs makes the stock go up.

The why is not trivial to explain, but it's related to the petrodollar system. It's good for the USA if we create markets with countries that are developing by moving manufacturing there, because it helps them acquire the dollars that they need to buy energy on the international market. This helps the USA maintain global hegemony.

Again, my comment here is super simplified.

Just calling out that worker protections and increased labor costs seem to be the result of workers making more money. As the work force becomes wealthier, they _need_ less money, and their standards rise. This means their labor becomes more expensive and they demand safer workplaces. They demand more time off. This happened in the USA and is currently happening in China and other low-labor-cost nations.

I think the person you responded to is right. The USA can and should restore its manufacturing base, for many reasons. The whole country would greatly benefit from the return of blue-collar jobs.

I don't have sources for this, but the info is out there.

Also, there are a lot of nuances around this topic that I'm not getting into here. Just want to acknowledge that...

That's true - their revenue from VR/MR hardware is less than 2.5% of revenue though. Meanwhile, ads make up the other 97.5% of their revenue. 97.5% of everything Meta does is to hoover the data and sell it. It's effectively their entire business, while VR/MR stuff is a little side project.

> Users must take responsibility for knowing how software works and the motivations of its creators.

This doesn't seem reasonable. Let's try to apply the logic elsewhere:

> Patients must take responsibility for knowing how medicine works and motivations of its creators/prescribers.

Requiring everyone to have deep technical knowledge about anything they use would prevent everyone from using more than the things they are experts in. So, there needs to be either a technological regression, or something to help defend users from unethical practices. The only entity really in a position to do that is a government, for better or worse.

side-step flamebait like winnie the poo

Sure - there is plenty of attention grabbing AI content - it doesn't have to grab _your_ attention, and it won't work for everyone. I have seen people engaging with apps that redo a selfie to look like a famous character or put the person in a movie scene, for example.

Every piece of content in any feed (good, bad, or otherwise) benefits the aggregator (Meta, YouTube, whatever), because someone will look at it. Not everything will go viral, but it doesn't matter. Scroll whatever on Twitter, YouTube Shorts, Reddit, etc. Meta has a massive presence in social media, so content being generated is shared there.

The more content of any type leads to more engagement on the platforms where it's being shared. Every Meta feed serves the viewer an ad (for which Meta is paid) every 3 or so posts (pieces of content). It doesn't matter if the user doesn't like 1/5 posts or whatever, the number of ads still goes up.

I really think the value of this for Meta is content generation. More open models (especially state of the art) means more content is being generated, and more content is being shared on Meta platforms, so there is more advertising revenue for Meta.

Meta makes their money off advertising, which means they profit from attention.

This means they need content that will grab attention, and creating open source models that allow anyone to create any content on their own becomes good for Meta. The users of the models can post it to their Instagram/FB/Threads account.

Releasing an open model also releases Meta from the burden of having to police the content the model generates, once the open source community fine-tunes the models.

Overall, this move is good business move for Meta - the post doesn't really talk about the true benefit, instead moralizing about open source, but this is a sound business move for Meta.

I read the whole article, that's where I found the quote attribution. Like I said, I'm not here to defend Altman, or attack him. It's just disingenuous journalism - or click-bait journalism.

> "We want to make sure you understand that if you don't sign, it could impact your equity," one rep told an outgoing employee, according to Vox.

The article is doing a lot of click-bait stuff here. The quote, without the source, is shown at the top of the article, near Sam Altman's face and a title referencing Sam Altman. However, the quote is not from Sam Altman, which makes its placement a bit disingenuous.

I am not invested in defending Altman, but this type of journalism is trash clickbait and a far bigger issue than a tech company threatening employees' vested equity unless they comply in some sort of non-NDA NDA scheme.

Until people complain that Apple is being anti-competitive by not making vision tracking open, or allowing third-party eye-tracking controls, etc. etc.

I have a similar view to you and not much to add to your comment, other than to reference a couple books that you might like if you enjoyed 'Thinking, Fast and Slow'.

'The Righteous Mind' by Jonathan Haidt. Here, Haidt describes a very similar 2-system model he describes as the Elephant-rider model.

'A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence' by Jeff Hawkins. Here Jeff describes his Thousand Brains theory, which has commonality with the 2-system model described by Kahneman.

I think these theories of intelligence help pave the way for future improvements on LLMs for sure, so just want to share.

Don't people often fall into the "vaccines cause autism" trap from Google?

> OK I have a table in postgresql and I am adding a trigger such that when an insert happens on that table, an insert happens on another table. The second table has a constraint. What happens to the first insert if the second insert violates the constraint?

How can I get help with this now?

Google result 1: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77148711/create-a-trigge...

Google result 2: https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/307448/postgresql-tr...

Like 90% of my questions like this are going to ChatGPT these days.

I can figure it out via the docs, but ChatGPT is SO convenient for things like this.

GAs are super cool and I think underutilized in the NN era.

One thing that might improve the algorithms in the linked write-up is not choosing the strict top results. Often, GAs perform better if you choose a random selection from the result set, then choose the top performer from that selection.

So, if your algorithm generates 100 results, pick 10 randomly, then use the top 2 from that selection to generate the next generation. This allows more exploration of the solution space and mitigates landing in local optima. Introducing the new parameters means more playing with the values, but it's been shown to work better, and makes sense in the context of biological evolution, as well.

Anyway - GAs are fun and I'd like to see them used more. Thanks for the article OP!

I wonder if it's actually overloaded or if there's a bug.

I think it's because of game development. Many devs target Windows for DirectX, since it's easier and cheaper to target one platform, and Windows dominates desktops, so you won't get gamers to migrate without that support.

There are various ways to get Windows games working on Linux or Mac, but they aren't out of the box, which is significant enough to prevent wide scale adoption.

Hopefully this serves as an incentive to Google to improve their search results. I find GPT-4 works so much better for finding answers (even in cases when it's wrong) than searching Google, especially for trivial ones. Add plugin features like code interpreter and the usefulness is not even close for most of the cases I use it.

It's always worth verifying the answers, but that's also true for google results, and with GPT I don't have to dig through mountains of trash advertising sites to get to something useful.

Really, I'd just like to see Google as useful as it once was.

Sadly, these individual contributions don't move the needle much. Like you, I've made many personal choices to mitigate my impact on the climate and environment, but humans are fickle and driven by game-theoretic pressures. If everyone stopped driving, we would see change, but without a law or forcing function, people will act selfishly, causing a chain reaction of inaction.

I don't think it'll be a single point. The calamity has been happening, but we aren't super directly threatened yet. However, my more pessimistic view is that as the climate changes, those with more resources will be more insulated to the effects, and we'll likely see climate refugees first, then wars because of the climate refugees and a loss of natural resources (like water).

Something, something, interesting times...