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chii

20,536 karma · joined March 5, 2010

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chii··on Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
> The world would be quite miserable if "perfectly legal" would be what everyone optimizes for.

what you will find is that this is what corporations optimizes for. Therefore, you as a person, cannot compete with the corp.

That's why you need to become like a corp, or make the rules "socially acceptable" the same as "legal" (which is the best option).

chii··on ICE Has a $2M Contract for Spyware That Can Hack Phones Without a Click
> ICE is becoming a paramilitary force

this is how the gestapo gets established.

chii··on Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
> Google has probably the most and best code base among all tech companies but its Gemini is bad at coding.

probably because google knows people would want to extract google's proprietary code from gemini if they use their own code base to train it! I bet they purposefully gimped it to prevent that from happening.

chii··on How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
> In many cases people don’t switch to something else because there isn’t an alternative.

no, they have an alternative - abstinence. And yet, large majority overwhelmingly chooses not to abstain. Therefore, it does not matter what they say, because actions are the truth.

chii··on Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones
With each hellfire costing upwards of $150k per shot, it's not cost effective to use them to shoot down jammers
chii··on Twitterwebviewer.com Service Discontinued
completely expected, but still quite sad.

But like hydra, cut off one head, and two shall spawn. It should never be illegal to proxy another site, if the information content from that site was originally user generated. Using copyright as a shield is just a legal mechanism, and i don't believe it is just.

Therefore, it is civic duty for all to commit civil disobedience on this.

chii··on Saving 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1's DNS cache
> start generating profit, and then you can start optimizing your costs.

this assumes you can generate profit before you can get optimized - what if profit generation is only possible with optimized software? A lot of online MMO-style games tend to require such optimizations as they scale into the size required to generate profit.

Or, in the current era of ai, the cost of the capital investment is far exceeding the ability to generate profit off it. The optimization in how the resources gets used will be needed to cut the costs down, and allow increase in the scale of usage for the same hardware. That's where profits would lay.

Of course, in order to achieve any of this, you'd need the runway to survive until such times. A small scale operator won't have this runway, and so die before they can accomplish anything profitable (or get big by begging for investor money to grow large - as we've seen in the past 20 years of tech).

chii··on CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
the price swings are part of the market's reaction to real life situations.

The opposite of a market solving a resource allocation problem is the command economy, where some (small) group people are tasked with decisions like how much copper to actually produce. Instead of price swings, you get shortages.

In any case, the point in my parent comment is that crowd intelligence solves some problems that cannot be easily solved by human intelligence (command economy vs free markets). But i would not call crowd intelligence a super intelligence.

chii··on Taylor Farms: How One Company's Reach Became a National Risk
News and recency bias tend to cause people to make wrong (or non-optimal) choices.

And in any case, a preventative measure, like thoroughly washing the lettuce is a good form of insurance for home made foods, regardless of what's reported on the news.

chii··on Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account
but it's a really shallow form of discussion, as most tweets are the equivalent of short-form videos of tiktoks.
chii··on CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
collective intelligence is not a superhuman intelligence.

Markets solves the resource allocation problem, but it doesn't and realistically cannot be called intelligent (even tho it's been called wisdom of the crowds), in the same way that darwinian natural selection cannot be called intelligent design.

chii··on Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
> as a force to have open weight models run better on Nvidia against the rest.

this is the crux - if nvidia makes it so that open weights end up running better on nvidia hardware than competitor's, then it's going to prevent hardware innovation and competitiveness in the entire sector.

It's like as tho General Motors buys out oil refinery to make gas for all, but the gas somehow runs smoother in GM cars.

chii··on How Universities Should Prepare Founders
it's a crude approximation to economies of scale. However, big doesn't always mean economies of scale because efficiency tends to drop when growing big, unless the head works hard to ensure it isnt bloating. Unfortunately, sometimes these managers (i.e., non-founding managers) rather have a bigger fiefdom rather than a better/more efficient company.
chii··on Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down
> taxed electricity exports

it is easy to tax exports, but this makes the export less profitable (for the entity making that export). Unless you mean the producer raises prices to cover the new tax - in which case, the export is now more expensive, and less of it gets exported.

It doesn't really help with the tariff situation much in any case - a political problem requires a political solution (such as reciprocal tariffs). Both sides hurt, and there's no good outcome.

chii··on There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
> the other half were definitely "wow" moments.

do you have some samples? It would be interesting to learn what it might be.

chii··on The Amazon Tax
and what stops the amazons of the world from paying the ai provider, and getting your ai to buy from them instead of the best deal? How are you going to check and verify you got the best deal?

In the recent past, there was a browser extension called "Honey", which purported to find and apply the best coupon code for you when you online shopped. Turned out they were actually (amongst other things), in cahoots with the shops by ensuring that you get only a modest discount, rather than the best available coupons (and this was paid for by the shop).

chii··on Google buys crashed airline Spirit's data at auction
> de-identified

De-identified but far from useless.

as an example, they can remove the names off these sales data, so you can't identify who purchased what items. However, the purchaser would be identified by some sort of number, and you would be able to extract information about purchasing habits, and aggregate these habits into usable information for advertising purposes (like targeting and profiling).

And that's before AI training for LLM purposes.

chii··on Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
> blindly trusting they won't train on any of that

being allowed to train on any data that you can legally obtain ought to be a right for anyone.

After all, i am allowed to learn off anything i can legally read (and perhaps even illegally read). The only thing not allowed (rightly so) is to produce a copy with enough similarities that it can be replacing the original.

chii··on DeepSeek API Pricing Update
> becomes a commodity/race to the bottom.

that's a good outcome - it means they're fungible, and easily available.

chii··on Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe
china won't want to drop the advantages of being able to have such tight control over the flow of yuan.

Maintaining control over capital flight from china, for example.

chii··on OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining
This is exactly why ethics doesnt work, and it is why laws work. If ethics worked, we'd have no need for laws.
chii··on llama.cpp
> I had older NVIDIA card (RTX 3070) and llama.cpp instalation was smooth

what model was it that you were able to run with the rtx 3070?

chii··on It's time Amazon played by the same rules as everyone else [video]
The people making propaganda (and yes, this is propaganda) knows that people are not rational but emotional. The video targets emotions - that amazon shirks responsibility is an emotional appeal.

The hidden assumption is that there is some sort of responsibility that amazon ought to have, and that by shirking it, they're doing you harm. Instead of facts, they're listing things that give viewer a bad gut reaction like injury and accidents. The idea is already baked into the premise of the video, rather than propose a neutral question to the viewer; ala, at what level are a client responsible for the contractor's health and wellbeing. Why don't they ask this for tradies and plumbers?

chii··on “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
grammar and rules of language has almost nothing to do with the difficulty of writing good text (ala, written prose fit for purpose).

Understanding of grammar and rules of a language is like having good bricks, but building a stylish house is more than just using good bricks. It's a higher level cognitive exercise. Schools attempt to teach this, but i think they fail quite miserably (look at how essays had to be written by students, and how poorly most are written).

chii··on Improving Heuristics for A* Pathfinding
Teach Yourself A* in Ten Years
chii··on What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
> Would you turn every leaf in the forest around twice

if someone is paying for this, then it must mean it is useful to the one doing the paying. If you're not the one paying, you also cannot decide whether it's useful to the payer or not.

chii··on DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731
> There's no way large companies outside the US will pay the "US AI lab" premium

this has already happened with manufacturing, so it isn't surprising that other industries follow.

The US premium in engineering and scientific endeavors have been lacking for the past 30-40 years, and if it werent for tech and silicon valley, the US would have nothing state of the art. Even on that front, the US is falling behind given how much effort in tech has been diverted into privacy invading, and advertising.

The US has been riding momentum, but eventually that momentum will stop. It will take half a century to get back up to speed, and by then, the US will have fallen behind so far that catching back up will seem impossible.

The telling evidence would be if china has the first moonbase before the US does. I think this is highly likely looking at today's US administration.

chii··on What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
> much intrinsic meaning now

work should not be considered to have to have intrinsic meaning for it to be worthwhile - you merely need to make sure your pay is worthwhile.

Find intrinsic meaning outside of work. The best way, imho, is to find the highest paying job you can, work super hard and earn maximally, until you built up a nest egg from which you can draw a living off indefinitely. Then, use the remaining time you have left to pursue what you find to be intrinsically rewarding.

chii··on Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
And this is why you know age verification is not done to make sure kids are protected.
chii··on Don't be a meat proxy
> The foundational knowledge is lost, meaning that even if we do look at the code, we won't understand it anyway.

but this is similar to a lot of other technical fields that have width and depth. People would not understand assembly any more and blindly trust the output of the compiler. People now can only design a part of a CPU, and not the entirety. Chip manufacturing is so complicated that there's probably no single person who could understand the entire process, from end to end.

Yet, we all trust these things.

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