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christina97

680 karma · joined January 30, 2024

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christina97··on Things that apparently cause cancer
No, because no correlation was proved. It’s just a flawed methodology.
christina97··on We're Missing a Key Reason Why Americans Hate AI
Strawman. It’s very obvious that people are frustrated by the combination of no perceived benefit with all kinds of perceived risks and downsides.
christina97··on Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met
That is the entire point of it. When it’s hard to tell what’s the machine and what’s a human, that’s precisely the definition of passing it.
christina97··on Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met
I don’t think it’s that simple. I don’t think the AI labs are too concerned about bad press lately. It’s more likely that there actually are some tradeoffs where training on synthetic data gives the model tics but is the only way to improve intelligence.
christina97··on Micron CEO Says Memory Supply Will Be Much Tighter in 2027 and 2028 Than in 2026
Yeah there is no such thing as selling a commodity below its market price on the open market. Someone else will come and arbitrage that away, or it’s not an open market.
christina97··on Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes
A huge reason for the US strength in tech is the R&D tax credit, and its entire purpose is to spur investment in next generation technologies. It doesn’t seem like an insane stretch to classify investments in AI hardware as R&D, especially given their high risk nature.

Taxes are also not a zero-sum game: more innovation increases the pie for all, including the government.

I feel like this is mainly yet another anti-AI hit piece.

christina97··on Footguns with Postgres “at time zone 'UTC'”
Presumably if the conversion logic changes. Eg user enters a future date in a place but the timezone in that place changes in the future.
christina97··on Amazon blocks Meta’s new Muse AI agent from shopping on amazon.com
I use Claude Code often for entirely non-code things: the harness concept is super helpful for going through documents etc.

I think these Claw-type harnesses are basically this for somewhat less technical folks. If eg Muse has been able to make this work smoothly from your phone for completely non-techy people, then that seems like an incredible product.

christina97··on Saving another 100TB of RAM
I’m not sure why folks are finding this so revolutionary. There are teams of scientists at big techs with PhDs working on all kinds of optimization across compute fleets. This seems cute but its exposition of math is more along the lines of “look at how cool I am that I could do a bit of calculus”, and that makes me question the technical depth at CF.

I found the motivation pretty lackluster: nowhere does it actually explain why you use consistent hashing (dividing the item space naively/regularly would actually cause much more than 1/n items to move, which is unintuitive) and how you actually use it.

That said, it got me to spend a few minutes studying this and got me to understand the key bit I was missing.

christina97··on North Korean nuclear test sets off years of earthquakes
If they can’t build high speed rail along the corridor then surely they cannot geo engineer it either!
christina97··on How GLM built its own inference infrastructure
Nobody pretended that Chinese firms would just lay back and twiddle their thumbs when faced with import restrictions. The question was whether they would be far enough to be able to catch up without much issue or so far behind that they wouldn’t ever effectively catch up or that by the time they did, it wouldn’t matter.

Half-arsed export restrictions are the best of both worlds for these firms: enough of an incentive to take homegrown hardware seriously, yet not aggressive enough to cause meaningful handicap in the meantime.

christina97··on GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%
They’re trying to compete with open weight models here. It’s a very different customer segment.
christina97··on Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+
Do people feel Stripe APIs are really that good? I’ve always found them unintuitive, tons of options, weird edge cases, breaking occasionally, etc.

I’m sure payments are convoluted, but I’d still imagine they could be meaningfully easier for the bulk 80% of use case?

christina97··on Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk
GLP-1s seem like a night and day difference in intervention adherence though. For various obvious and non-obvious reasons, it’s very hard to produce an intervention that people will adhere to to make the test group lose weight.
christina97··on I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program
Is it not common knowledge that this is the entire purpose of loyalty programs? As far as I know, if you don’t give them your details and just swipe a card, they are not doing facial recognition and PCI stops them from linking your purchases too heavily.

I’m not really surprised by anything here but the fact that McDonalds disclosed all their predictions?

The bigger question here is whether it is good for large corporations to be run with such brutal profit motives, running on extremely precise data to uncover how to best make a bigger profit. It doesn’t appear good to me, but it is how the entire US economy operates. The lift from the per-customer loyalty timeseries and per-customer upsells is probably modest compared to the rest of the data driven work to understand how to sell more “product”.

christina97··on Muse Glimmer: 30B-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows
The GP is claiming Meta is an awful company for what they have done and how they continue to treat their employees. That’s a perfectly ok opinion to hold, and many seem to agree.

Have DeepSeek, Moonshot, or the other Chinese AI companies done such things that attract moral outrage?

christina97··on AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon
There’s some kind of tradeoff between speed, cost, and quality for every application. I would be perfectly happy with a model 6 months old that was 50x faster for many uses. Right now I use either Opus (for smart stuff) or Flash without thinking (for fast stuff). I would take an even dumber model for more speed (lower latency in particular).
christina97··on Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork
Copyright is an automatic protection (meaning you don’t need to register it, like registered trademarks), for certain types of creative works. Contracts are one way to dish out these rights (eg. for a fee).

If you have a work that is not copyrightable, and you give it to people lawfully, then you cannot protect it via copyright.

christina97··on Franken.domains: Stitched-Together Domains, Because Every .com Is Taken
This wouldn’t really reduce the scarcity though. Right now everyone wants a “.com”, because it’s the convention. If you could buy the TLD “widget” for the same price as “widget.com”, then you would just move up one level in the domain hierarchy and have the same scarcity? If anything, the fact that there are several legitimate TLD options reduces the scarcity a tiny bit?

As an aside (I’m also annoyed by domain squatters etc), it is a fascinating market study how domains are artificially scarce the way they are when everyone can easily and cheaply buy them. I am not sure there is any reasonable solution to it.

christina97··on Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models
I wonder what is happening behind closed doors for these companies to be issuing such a joint letter.
christina97··on Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth
It depends entirely on the time-to-failure distribution though whether used cards are a good deal or not. Often this kind of hardware has a bathtub shaped hazard rate, actually getting burned in cards may mean you get the weeded out solid specimens, and forgo the lemons.
christina97··on Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth
Why would they be shot? Unlike the consumer cards that are basically factory overclocked to look good on benchmarks, the datacenter GPUs are designed to run at full tilt 24/7 and survive for years.
christina97··on Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth
GPGPU programming has become significantly easier now and the payoff is bigger (better hardware), due to the immense investment in this due to ML/AI.
christina97··on Hologram Works. Sponsor What Comes Next
My framework/stack choice on the other hand is now much more dictated by the quantity and depth of existing literature on the internet about that stack.
christina97··on Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers
Because the people in charge of site picking also shop for low regulation environments.
christina97··on Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain
It’s quite the opposite. Passkeys are phenomenal for a lot of consumers. Based on this thread, it’s the engineers who understand authentication in the first place and have their own system (eg password manager) that are confused.

Consider a user in the Apple ecosystem: you are already conditioned to just do Touch ID or Face ID when asked. I was on Amazon the other day, it prompted randomly for “want to set up a passkey to sign in easier”? I set it up and now I can easily sign in to Amazon on my mac or iphone with zero friction.

For the normal consumer this is not a replacement for “dig out my password manager and copy-paste/autofill my password”, it’s a replacement for “oh it’s prompting for my password again” -> proceed to type your shared password for all sites.

christina97··on That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing
I’m not sure if you are just repeating what I said or trying to add something? I was indeed implying that the ethical and moral issues lie in implementation, but my point was that I don’t see an ethical/moral issue with in abstract wanting convenience. There’s nothing wrong with wanting food delivered to your door or an LLM to do the boring tasks for you. The issues of slavery lie elsewhere.
christina97··on That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing
I didn’t really get this point in the essay. What’s wrong with wanting servants as long as it’s done ethically etc and is not indentured servitude?

The whole gig/services economy is just building this up piece-by-piece: you can now pick the set of household needs you want taken care of for varying levels of money; and practically everyone participates in one form or another. This is exactly a disaggregated 21st century version of servants: paying for convenience. Of course with many issues in implementation, but I don’t see the ethical/moral issue with wanting this kind of thing?

christina97··on A Beautiful Theory Falls to Ugly Data
It seems stupid to model books as a durable good. Reading this summer’s bestseller next summer sounds at its face like you should gain the same utility. But that is clearly not the case for the population buying books after a bit of thinking.

Also books without copyright are obviously cheaper beyond pricing than those with copyright. There is a rights holder there somewhere making a cut.

christina97··on Australian energy retailers must provide three hours of free daytime electricity
One issue with grid scale batteries is that the solar is predominantly generated in the suburbs, but the grid wasn’t built for a huge “generator” in the suburbs. It requires retrofitting the grid for this huge excess. It would be better to instead store it in the suburbs in household batteries (which they are also building out like crazy).
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