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chunky1994

1,357 karma · joined May 23, 2011

2x Startup founder (exited). University (of Waterloo) grad in mathematical physics, interested in anything that makes me curious.

I'm on the lookout for some hard, and interesting things to work on.

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chunky1994··on Fed hikes rates as inflation worries push up bond yields
Variable rate (loans) track the Fed rate. Fixed rate (loans) track the long term treasury yields.
chunky1994··on ER visits for gambling disorders doubled after expanded online gambling market
Because any addictive thing is on a spectrum and you don't want the people with incentives to go all the way up the spectrum to be the operator of the harmful thing, a là the dose makes the poison. (See alcohol, cigarettes, any class of drugs etc.)

Some things are just wholly harmful where no small amount provides any benefits, some are harmful in large doses, but not so harmful in small doses that they cannot provide other uses.

Governments (ideally) don't exist to maximize profit so they are (generally) not incentivized to increase the addictions of their populace.

chunky1994··on Fed Raises Rates as Warsh Bucks Trump to Contain Inflation
In what sense?

By and large it is independent of the whims of the administration because of its goals (specific inflation and unemployment targets) being more or less contraindicative to what administrations want to do (spend money)

chunky1994··on OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents
OpenAI's shareholders, and only them.

I doubt any consumer of ChatGPT wants ads, and even if they did, it would be a specific kind of ad. They specifically would not want ads if they cannot identify them as ads (like google has eventually done on the search page) or if they are not good ads.

chunky1994··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
The problem is the differences are asymmetric. Canadian labour mobility is a lot more impactful when the pool of skilled labour is just overall smaller.

Doctors can move pretty much freely between 44 American states. Doctors can't do that in Canada, and here we need more specific kinds of doctors in rural populations and there is absolutely no reason to not have a harmonized licensing regime.

We also have non-uniform regulation on stuff like the manufacture of construction goods (for example door sizing) which can cause a big drag in trade. This might be harder to fix but it exists and is not comparable to the US market.

chunky1994··on A misalignment of AI in mathematics
This is really well written and exposes a core tension between science and something akin to engineering. The "engineering" of proofs has become "easy" (a compute and $) problem, rather than hard (a time and conception problem).

Without the ability to do things the "hard" way it is difficult to figure out if doing things the "easy" way will help us advance the frontier of math and science.

I may be wrong but historically we had this version of science discovery for a long while (empirical observation and brute force application) rather than first principles leading to applications (tools, the wheel, mills etc). Then somewhere along the way it flipped after Newton and the enlightenment period and started understanding first principles before they become engineering applications.

Perhaps it is not required, and we can just keep doing things the "easy" way like we used to, or we might find ourselves out of the ability to brute force things and then we go back to needing to do this the hard way, at which point this period of AI brute forcing would be seen as a detriment.

chunky1994··on The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
Its clear that you are taking great offence to that particular quote and determined to misunderstand my point due to your pre-existing bias, despite my many attempts to clarify it, so let me finish the quote for you.

I doubt, that someone smart (as you put it) ..and not as GP put it..who..would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it..are..the same people that GP is talking about when they say there are advantages to being "like this".

This is no longer fruitful, but I only hope that this thread might to be a reason to more charitable in your interpretation next time regarding such a discussion.

chunky1994··on Global Glacier Extinction Explorer
That's just an artifact of the graphical display. This paper shows that's not the case (see fig 2): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02513-9
chunky1994··on The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
You seem to be imputing a lot of intent into my comment and then extending that to value judgements about smartness etc. I don't know what any of this has to do with what GP was saying. Yeah, there's a balance between questioning everything and questioning nothing, but there are a lot of bureaucratic things that happen in organizations and its generally a good thing to question certain things that don't have clear explanations, isn't there?

The doubt was simply about whether or not what GP is saying is smart behaviour to exhibit - Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people. is the same behaviour that you are saying you've experienced ( i.e you are talking about different things).

I'm not even questioning if you can tell if someone is smart or not - its just obvious that forcing decisions based off things that are not understood is not a smart thing to do - which..we all agree on -, and neither I nor GP were saying people should do this?

Maybe I could've phrased it better but my whole point was GP says X, you are saying Y. I think there is a distinction between X and Y and I doubt that the people GP is talking about are the same people you are talking about (hence, smart as you put it vs smart as GP put it).

chunky1994··on The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
Yes it is annoying, however I find that it gives me a much better grasp on the things I am explaining to a "proxy" Claude person. Basically, I would never have stumbled upon the arguments that I'm being presented with as I would never have prompted Claude in the specific way that a proxy Claude person would.

I find a lot of value in understanding how they have misunderstood things and clarifying those concepts.

chunky1994··on The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
I'm being nice too and all I've been trying to do in this thread is point at a distinction between GP's point and yours which you seem unwilling to engage with.

It is valuable to ask questions about why things are the way they are in order to understand the fundamentals of it vs we should change these things because I am 'smarter than you' and I don't understand why things are done this way (which I called dumb, and not smart). Perhaps the issue is that these two behaviours are easily confused.

I had to write the long comment to illustrate this difference. I'm saying in mine and GP's definition doing what you are suggesting people usually do is not smart, its dumb, and that is not what GP or I are suggesting people do.

chunky1994··on The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
I was responding to you in the context of the GP.

> The flip side of being confidently wrong sometimes is that we treat understanding new systems as something approachable. So, yeah, it's annoying that we don't stay in our lane, but, from my boss's perspective, I'm the only one who's actually willing to just read code, investigate, possibly read a paper, and figure out what's going on instead of punting and saying it's someone else's turf I'm blocked until they get back to me.

Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people.

GP here is suggesting that accepting established status quo at face value (i.e relying solely on other people's experience/letting them deal with problems you face in their domain without being able to examine why they arrived at the decisions they did) can lead to worse outcomes, and I agree.

Your response was that it is frustrating to have someone walk in and question things (precisely what GP is suggesting), only to have the final product of whatever decisions these people make be worse than the status quo (not what GP is suggesting).

I responded by saying - there is a difference between not listening to experience and examining whether the resulting implementation/decisions based on the experience are actually valid.

You did not address that. Is there not a difference between these two things? GP is suggesting to do the latter, not the former. i.e question why things are the way they are, crucially not that people should make decisions based on things we don't understand about the status quo.

You only responded to - * I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it, that's a trait borne of arrogance not intelligence.*

Your response claimed that I am denying the validity of your experience, when I made no such statement. All I said was there is a difference between questioning things and forcing decisions based on things they dont understand - smart people don't do the latter, arrogant people do. Someone doing what you are suggesting, is not doing what GP is suggesting, they are different. The former is smart, and the latter is not smart.

When I pointed this out here: I was just trying to examine the problem - if this behaviour is something you see often exhibited by “smart” people then: either you are unable to convince them of your side of the argument for different reasons, or you are not actually arguing with smart people. Do you see the distinction?

You accuse me of gaslighting you.

> Intelligence and arrogance are somewhat contra-indicative.

There might be a trend of this in academia (which is where the xkcd joke stems from), but in my personal experience I dont see this much in industry, and you can disagree with that.

I also don't see an xkcd joke being an actual basis of anything either. You are making declarative statements - but a _lot_ that many physics (and pure mathematics) grads are enormously more arrogant than the general population, enough that the trend under discussion has actual basis. - without any backing of this other than anecdata, and I was pointing out a different anecdotal experience.

chunky1994··on The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
My point is that wanting things redone because you don’t understand it is dumb behaviour, not smart behaviour.

There wasn’t even a denial of the validity of experience, I was just trying to examine the problem - if this behaviour is something you see often exhibited by “smart” people then: either you are unable to convince them of your side of the argument for different reasons, or you are not actually arguing with smart people. Do you see the distinction?

> The two aren't mutually exclusive, far from it.

Intelligence and arrogance are somewhat contra-indicative. While you can be intelligent and arrogant, you can’t really learn things without the humility to say you don’t know stuff. In my experience, most physics grads I know constantly say they don’t know stuff, way more than people from other disciplines.

chunky1994··on The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
But isn't there value to refuting what Claude is saying if it deserves to be refuted?

The way I see it, if I was repeatedly getting sophisticated but subtly wrong arguments about my work that require me to understand why said argument is wrong, that's essentially drilling down to specifics of what precisely needs to be true to solve the problems I am aiming to solve. There is enormous value to this precision, isn't there?

chunky1994··on The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
But there is a difference between not listening to experience and examining whether the resulting implementation/decisions based on the experience are actually valid. I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it, that's a trait borne of arrogance not intelligence.

At least in my experience (as a physics grad), me and all my fellow grads are much more likely to apply Chesterton's fence and then make decisions than not doing that and steamrolling existing decisions.

chunky1994··on More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math
Why are we being so charitable to trillion dollar organizations here? If OAI keeps re-enabling the train model toggle on every app update to codex, does it also fall under "common sense opsec" to re-disable this toggle every time?

Arguably you expect that unless you are explicit about providing permissions to these labs to use your data for training then your data is yours, and not theirs. Especially on a paid account (let alone an enterprise one). Why is the opt-out supposed to be "common sense opsec" rather than the opt-in should be common sense regulation?

chunky1994··on List of references on Sony websites to players "owning" their digital games
The case wasn't dismissed because of the arbitration clause. Disney dropped the argument after they got severely lambasted in public over the absurdity of the defense. It was dismissed later by the plaintiff (so there was likely some settlement)
chunky1994··on The Doorman's Fallacy in action
Yes, this is quite standard outside the US. In Canada, Mexico, Europe, Asia etc. this is more the standard practice than the opposite.
chunky1994··on Show HN: Learn from 30 historical figures, open source, nonprofit, self-hosted
Why though?

We have writing, artifacts and objects from ancient peoples which we then use to try to construct historiographies of those cultures, as well as interpretations of their lived experience and circumstances.

This is just doing it for specific historical figures with a different type of technology. Why is it more disrespectful than what historians do?

chunky1994··on AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
Does anyone use LLMs in such a manner that they believe it always has the most up to date information (without web search tools?).

Isn't this whole thesis negated by the fact that tool calling web search exists? This just feels like a whole lot of words to say, don't treat a LLM as an always up to date infallible statistical predictor.

chunky1994··on Mystery jump in oil trading ahead of Trump post draws scrutiny
@dang, this has way more discussion than the previous threa,d but people can't see this because it's a dupe.
chunky1994··on Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromised
Their Personal Access Token must’ve been pwned too, not sure through what mechanism though
chunky1994··on Major insider trading on oil detected ahead of Iran talks
Realistically I think it will come down to the aggrieved counterparties here. Who was on the losing side of the money, was it Joe Schmoe day trader or a bunch of funds who lost their shirt?

If it’s the hedge funds or institutional money, you can absolutely be sure this will come to a head. People don’t like being taken for a ride, and if they are repeatedly taken for a ride and they are organized market participants they will come around and make sure there is a comeuppance as a collective

chunky1994··on The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran
Fair point, but the IRGC telling ships to turn around, as opposed to the ships themselves doing it (as per reporting) would imply that the Strait has been blockaded in some fashion. It remains to be seen if this is all a bluff, I'm just as skeptical as this would be their last option, but given the strikes on other Gulf countries, the threat seems a bit more plausible of actually being real.
chunky1994··on The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran
There is credible reporting (Reuters etc.) that ships are being turned around, so it does appear that the mines (or at least threat thereof) have been deployed. Either way, as long as the threat of sinking is alive the strait is uninsurable and is for all practical purposes closed.
chunky1994··on Management as AI superpower: Thriving in a world of agentic AI
> The dark side of this same coin is when teams try to rely on the AI to write the real code, too, and then blame the AI when something goes wrong. You have to draw a very clear line between AI-driven prototyping and developer-driven code that developers must own. I think this article misses the mark on that by framing everything as a decision to DIY or delegate to AI. The real AI-assisted successes I see have developers driving with AI as an assistant on the side, not the other way around. I could see how an MBA class could come to believe that AI is going to do the jobs instead of developers, though, as it's easy to look at these rapid LLM prototypes and think that production ready code is just a few prompts away.

This is what's missing in most teams. There's a bright line between throwaway almost fully vibe-coded, cursorily architected features on a product and designing a scalable production-ready product and building it. I don't need a mental model of how to build a prototype, I absolutely need one for something I'm putting in production that is expected to scale, and where failures are acceptable but failure modes need to be known.

Almost everyone misses this in going the whole AI hog, or in going the no-AI hog.

Once I build a good mental model of how my service should work and design it properly, all the scaffolding is much easier to outsource, and that's a speed up but I still own the code because I know what everything does and my changes to the product are well thought out. For throw-away prototypes its 5x this output because the hard part of actually thinking the problem through doesn't really matter its just about getting everyone to agree on one direction of output.

chunky1994··on This is not the future
But the world is not deterministic, inherently so. We know it's probabilistic at least at small enough scales. Most hidden variable theories have been disproven, and to the best of our current understanding the laws of the physical universe are probabsilitic in nature (i.e the Standard Model). So while we can probably come up with a very good probabilistic model of things that can happen, there is no perfect prediction, or rather, there cannot be
chunky1994··on Physicists Take the Imaginary Numbers Out of Quantum Mechanics
Dummit and Foote is the classic abstract Algebra textbook to learn about how to precisely define these. Its treatment of ring theory is very well motivated and easy to grasp
chunky1994··on Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week
I don't think anyone is advocating for incentivizing forced/child labour.

Given that the ILAB link you posted itself is maintained by EO 13126 signed by the Clinton Administration, I think there can be nuance in the discussion around whether or not the blanket application of certain foreign policy instruments is the right way to induce a change in the domestic policy of another country to solve the problem of bad labour practices.

We can do this without it becoming an argument about whether trade is "good" or "bad" depending on what "side" you are on.

chunky1994··on Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week
This is a good discussion around the supply chain issues that will likely be happening: https://youtu.be/-dgHWv-Dh6Q?t=1370

Ryan runs Flexport which is a supply chain company so its from the "source" if you will.

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