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choult

8,160 karma · joined February 6, 2013

Managing Director of Xarma, a tech consultancy.

Software somethingorother at Slide, BCDR for MSPs.

It really should go without saying: My opinions are my own.

I do have a sense of humor :)

Contact: enquiries@xarma.co ; choult on LinkedIn

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choult··on [dead]
Cherry-picked example from a right-wing propaganda rag that has no business on Hacker News.
choult··on Jane Street suffers $15B hit after meltdown at Situational Awareness
https://archive.is/05jR7
choult··on Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election
They don't decide on a recall. They can sanction an MP, such as suspension from the House of Commons.

Instead, a recall petition - requiring 10% of an MP's constituents to sign to then recall - is automatically triggered when an MP is suspended for 10 or more days.

choult··on Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election
Farage engineered this situation to try to take control of the narrative about the investigation into £5m of undeclared income/gifts.

They neutered that move by not entering the contest in the first place. And Binface (with support of 32 other candidates) turned it into a humiliating exercise.

choult··on Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election
He was, that is solid Reform territory.

But Farage did not get to control the narrative of the situation ghat _he_ created - instead managed to beat a man with a bin on his head.

Well done, Nige.

choult··on Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election
Amd the winner of the by-election didn't even attended the announcement of the results.
choult··on Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'
I am so glad to see these guys get some well-deserved attention!

I worked with the founders Marcus and Rob, and met their infographics whizz Christian waay back when they were kicking this off. I was blown away by it then, and I continue to be blown away now.

Here's to the next 15 years!

choult··on The US Government Is Now a Shareholder in 26 Companies
No, not enough money in it.

Tax the rich.

choult··on Why eval startups fail (2025)
Evaluations of different implementations of a tech. Kind of like a meta service layer on top of an industry, such as "Which frontier model is best?"

I do agree that the author does not do a good job of introducing the term.

choult··on FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive
... so an event that had a (simulated) 47% percent chance of happening happens, and an event that had a 53% chance of happening didn't.

You must _hate_ it when you need <= 4 and you roll a 5...

choult··on GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation
Friends don't let friends use GoDaddy, it's an absolute nightmare.
choult··on First per-image PCA decomposition of Kodak suite reveals deliberate curation
Or an abstract actually stating a conclusion versus the editorialized title in the HN post.
choult··on Website streamed live directly from a model
Fun. But just as flawed as any LLM.

https://flipbook.page/n/6bd29678afc04b799276f4d3d62cc18e

choult··on Finnish sauna heat exposure induces stronger immune cell than cytokine responses
But it _will_ reduce cortisol, which is known to increase the likelihood of infections
choult··on The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines
The writing was on the wall as soon as it went all-in on commercializing the tech.

This will never happen, LLMs are already being used very unsafely, and if this HN headline stays where it is OpenAI will quietly remove their charter from their website.

choult··on The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks (2018)
_Fewer_
choult··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
> Dictators will go to sleep just slightly more terrified tomorrow night.

The irony of someone who (presumably, from statements) voted for Trump saying this while their own country tortures, disappears and in some cases murders thousands, plus potentially rigged elections...

choult··on Iron Beam: Israel's first operational anti drone laser system
It's Trump's version of Reagan's Star Wars - it's all bluster that we will not see any result of, and it will be quietly shelved by future governments.
choult··on Honey's Dieselgate: Detecting and tricking testers
Thanks for your contribution to this Ben - I was quite stunned by Megalag's finding, and I agree with you that it could definitely be characterized as wire fraud.

I think the very interesting wrinkle here is that, for the most part, their victims are corporations - meaning, sadly, that it's much more likely they will be prosecuted, either in civil or criminal court.

choult··on Honey's Dieselgate: Detecting and tricking testers
It's comparing Honey's behavior to a well-known and comprehended scandal. Simile is a tried and tested way (hah!) to explain otherwise potentially hard to understand or dry content.

It's not about the severity of the impact, its the fact that they were breaking the rules and explicitly coding to actively avoid being caught by testers.

choult··on Saved by Stoppard
Headline: Saved by Stoppard

Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec 1), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: “If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of “adjuvant systemic chemotherapy”, and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients’ survival.

Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia.

Michael Baum Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCL

choult··on iPhone Pocket
Shark jumped.
choult··on Mom says son asked Grok AI bot about soccer; told him to send nudes
HN requires titles matching the original; the original title was too long for the character limit so I did my best to edit.

> This mom’s son was asking Tesla’s Grok AI chatbot about soccer. It told him to send nude pics, she says

choult··on I Tried the Robot That's Coming to Live with You. It's Still Part Human
Archive link https://archive.is/n39ee#selection-2163.0-2163.72
choult··on Man with Gun Tackled, Arrested at [WikiConference North America] in Downtown NYC
Non-paywalled link: https://archive.is/5Fwqz#selection-1159.0-1159.60
choult··on Kicked from RubyGems, maintainers forge new home at Gem Cooperative
Sadly, brigading seems to have gotten the submission of the actual site flagged:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487771

choult··on The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh
In the UK, yogh existed in Scotland a while longer than in England. You can observe it still in the name Menzies which is pronounced Ming-is there - the z in place of the yogh.

In the last week, our most famous Menzies passed away - politician Sir "Ming" Campbell.

choult··on Everything I know about good API design
It's a problem downstream. Integrators weren't forced to include a version number for v1, so the rework overhead to use v2 will be higher than if it was present in your scheme to begin.
choult··on UK's Vertical VX4 eVTOL flies outside Kemble circuit for first time
Kemble is always fun to drive past - rolling hills and fields, and then suddenly 747s...
choult··on No as a Service
Well this is something... someone creating a service off the back of a meme that's been flying around my networks for the past two days...
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