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c7b

1,732 karma · joined September 3, 2022

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c7b··on BMW Spider-Man in-car advertising
I haven't driven a recent model but afaik the answer for most is Yes, or at best you can disable them for the current ride and they turn on again automatically on every start.
c7b··on BMW Spider-Man in-car advertising
It sounds awful, but it might not even make the top-5 of the most annoying/concering things you'll get in a new car (bought in the EU at least), many of which are now mandatory by regulation. What you'll also get is a camera that tracks your eye movements to play an alert when they're not on the road, an alarm when you drive over the allowed speed limit as determined by a camera, an alarm plus a mechanical yanking of your driving wheel when you're approaching the side of your lane without a turn signal on. As a cherry on top it's unclear what happens with all the data generated by these systems. And I'm probably forgetting a few.

I'm wondering what a good cutoff date is when considering buying a used car.

c7b··on London’s most equidistant pub
Very relevant for anyone whose friends live uniformly spaced across all boroughs of London. So probably no-one.
c7b··on Darktable
Stupid question, if there's an old version that you liked, couldn't you just keep using that version?
c7b··on "Uncensored" open LLMs are measurably more optimistic than their base models
In this case it's about how you say it, not what. Which is also covered by the HN guidelines, btw.
c7b··on "Uncensored" open LLMs are measurably more optimistic than their base models
The amount of unacknowledged privilege in this post is hard to bear.
c7b··on French firefighters face 'pyrocumulonimbus' for first time
Ok. But what about just making the credits 5x more expensive without requiring monstrous bookkeeping of tree populations and their associated credits over centuries?
c7b··on Using an open model feels surprisingly good
The inflation-adjusted cost for getting one of the early personal computers to do some BASIC programming was probably a lot higher than $5k today, and you could still go cheaper. Local AI is still (expensive) hobby territory. A capable local AI machine runs for about as much as a good mountainbike.
c7b··on Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27
270727 if we want to save tokens :)
c7b··on French firefighters face 'pyrocumulonimbus' for first time
If the program works as advertised (big if), the money should flow into projects like yours, with the success rate that those projects generally have. So far ok I'd say. Just pointing out that trying to adjust for fires would tie up capital and create a whole new layer of middlemen. Whatever you think of those programs in the first place, that doesn't sound like an improvement to me.
c7b··on French firefighters face 'pyrocumulonimbus' for first time
So 20% of the trees get planted later or maybe never? How is that better?
c7b··on French firefighters face 'pyrocumulonimbus' for first time
How would non-permanent credits even work? You purchase the carbon-offset option on a flight, a tree gets planted somewhere, ten years later it burns in a wildfire. Then what?
c7b··on DeepSeek pause fundraise after comments on compute gap to US leaked (transcript) [pdf]
Sudden availability of capital and the perceived need to be seen doing something with it can be a curse. WeWork comes to mind, eg. Stay lean and mean until you actually need the capital. A company like DeepSeek will have zero issues raising anytime.
c7b··on The Dark Night of Mathematics
The endangered art form of human mathematics is one thing. Another thing is that there seems to be little concern for whether a theorem was created using a documented open-weights model or some unknown model in a web chat.

If you want to make the case that the journey of creating the proof is part of doing mathematics, then you should also document that path and make it reproducible, as science should always be.

There were some examples of mathematicians publishing their AI proofs like that in the last days, but by far not all.

c7b··on Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment
Do you have a source for the 2.3%? I'd have thought it would be more. Does it include people who spend at least $20/mo, through a subscription or other means? Or what would that figure be? Also, we shouldn't forget about corporate customers.
c7b··on Petals: Run LLMs at home, BitTorrent-style
Not a neural network though ;) https://biologyinsights.com/do-fungi-have-a-nervous-system-t...
c7b··on Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample
My favorite moment of this kind was when the teacher said 'Ok, and for the rest of the course we will look at a completely different problem', and the equation he wrote down was exactly the same as before. Except that the letters referred to vectors/matrices now.
c7b··on Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain
UX is not the problem with Passkeys. Passkeys were designed to align with the interests of BigTech, who are bent on stopping the abomination that is general computing devices in the hands of consumers and forcing them into their walled gardens. The language that is used for taking away freedoms is the same as always, safety. Where we ended up with Passkeys is an operating model that is suitable for corporate devices, i.e. the user can only do what the owners of the device allow them to. Suboptimal UX is downstream from that problem.
c7b··on The unreasonable difficulty of time series forecasting
Well. Lots of math that boils down to 'predicting the future is hard'. Especially when the future is one of social construction, that's what gets lost a bit here. Predicting the future is easier for planetary motions than for Bitcoin.
c7b··on Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
git as-is is completely unfit for purpose and a huge security risk for this use case, because it uses MD5, which is no longer collision-resistant.

If your proposal is 'something like git, with a few modifications to make it suitable for this use case', then that's exactly what I'm proposing. What you will need, once you've considered all requirements to the best extent feasible, will be a blockchain. Eg you do need the ability to make protocol updates, no matter the time scale of transactions.

c7b··on Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
Clearly, you would scope the features and choose implementation options so that it makes sense for the use case. Mining (ie PoW and/or Nakamoto consensus) is clearly inferior to any deterministic consensus here. A cryptocurrency isn't necessary and would be a distraction. But at least some limited programmability could make sense (eg for escrow).
c7b··on Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
That is what I'm saying. And you may be right, but the security guarantees are math and math is patient. If people decide to ignore it today, it'll still be true any time they decide to take another look.
c7b··on Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
Agreed that you don't need total ordering and hence consensus for pure asset transfers. But if you want to make any changes at all, like updating the list of nodes, you do. So in practice, you do need it. Every other proposal will fall short in a critical and avoidable way. Amending your git proposal with the necessary parts will turn it into a blockchain.
c7b··on Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
You need that anyway. It's not technology that's stopping notaries from falsifying transactions in the current system.
c7b··on Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
You can put an index on your blockchain DB, what are you talking? Every node can manage it as it pleases (within the limits of the consensus algorithm).

Yes, if you have a centralized model you don't need it. Just saying that this incident is the exact risk a blockchain is meant to mitigate through redundancy. You can say you don't care about this risk, but it doesn't change the truth of the statement.

c7b··on Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
2/3 attack. Read up on BFT.
c7b··on Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
Internally, you don't need it, agreed. But that is centralization risk exemplified in this incident. Which isn't necessary. Every notary could be a node. It would be a lot more resilient, and it would look a lot like a blockchain (not necessarily with a crypto currency though) if you do it properly.
c7b··on Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
A blockchain solves the problem of consensus under Byzantine faults. Payments are an incidental use case, and not even a good one because managing payments including avoiding double spending can be achieved with a weaker primitive than consensus.
c7b··on Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
A blockchain isn't stopping you from doing any of those things, if anything it's facilitating different backup models by different parties. A paper record is so much more susceptible to various kinds of risks, adversarial and otherwise. I recommend to look past the hype or hate at the technology. A blockchain is the logical extreme of where you end up when you think about how to sync backups, and you recognize that it comes with certain mathematical limitations on how much disruption you can handle.
c7b··on LM Studio Bionic: the AI agent for open models
Neural machines were always going to be an alternative computing paradigm to von Neumann machines. Had it not been for Minsky we would arguably have gotten to a point where they're useful sooner. But why do you say that as if it's a small thing?
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