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cloakandswagger

2,536 karma · joined May 16, 2014

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cloakandswagger··on Claude Cookbook
You have to steer it back with "No I'm a dog"
cloakandswagger··on Claude Cookbook
To be pedantic, these types of prompts work best when in first-person/roleplaying. So the "perfect" prompt here would be something like, "I'm a dog and I just ate 20 grams of salted sunflower seeds with the shell on. Because I'm a dog I sometimes eat things without thinking about it. I'm worried about the short and long-term physiological consequences of what I've just done..."
cloakandswagger··on Launching Health in ChatGPT to US Users
It's way better than the Google MD problem that previously existed.

I had Claude analyze a blood panel and provide potential diagnoses, medications, dosing and contraindications for a fairly esoteric condition. It gave me the questions to ask a doctor (being completely forthright that I'm yet another layman regurgitating AI output) who agreed with the approach and even admitted that he hadn't seen a case study it referenced but that he wish he knew about sooner.

Will doctors still be assmad that years of their study is now democratized? Probably. I am (or was) a software engineer, welcome to the club.

cloakandswagger··on Claude Cookbook
As part of a previous job I needed to audit internal AI usage from a largely non-technical employee population.

The prompts were, predictably, really bad. Broken English, sentence fragments, vague requests, lack of context. Yet somehow, the users always got the answer they were looking for. It might have taken a few extra turns with questions from the model, but the end result was the same.

It's humbling, but a flowery, carefully crafted prompt is at best slightly more efficient than a "CAN A DOG BE EATIN SUN FLOWER SEED?" peasant prompt.

cloakandswagger··on Claude Cookbook
One of the most satisfying and useful applications for AI is handing it the URL for a recipe (replete with 8 paragraphs of useless introductory text, 2 paragraphs dedicated to how to refrigerate the meal, 9 inline advertisements and a mid-scroll ad) and having it return the actual recipe in Markdown in an Obsidian folder.
cloakandswagger··on Claude Cookbook
Remember in 2023 when people thought "prompt engineering" would be the new software engineering and invested tons of time into learning CoT, ReAct, thread-of-thoughts, etc?

Those were mostly obviated by reasoning models and harness updates by 2024.

It seems pointless to invest energy into the latest/greatest AI technique or framework when they're going to either be absorbed or replaced on a 3 month cycle.

cloakandswagger··on Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
The globalists had no problem selling out our manufacturing to China, now they are crying because China can provide a cheaper service.

The globalists of old would happily hand AI dominance to China in exchange for a decade or two of short-term gains. The fact that protectionist measures are even being considered shows that the globalists who sold out manufacturing to China aren't at the wheel anymore.

cloakandswagger··on Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
US banks would be prohibited from processing payments for those model providers, and those model providers would update their EULAs to prohibit American-usage.

Look at how online poker was "banned" in 2011. It was and always has been legal to play online poker in the US, they just made it illegal to accept wire payments for online gambling which destroyed the American market for it.

So many comments in this thread miss the point; an American "ban" on Chinese open-weights is not aiming to make individual usage impossible and wouldn't be accomplished by throwing people in jail. The point is to make their usage difficult and uncertain enough that large companies will opt for American alternatives.

cloakandswagger··on Gemini 3.5 Flash
> correlated to the tokens that you have access too (and everyone else does)

Do you mean "the weight parameters you have access to[sic]" or do you frequently find yourself limited by the model's token vocabulary?

cloakandswagger··on Gemini 3.5 Flash
Zitron thinks capex is a liability that needs to be paid off in a year instead of a long-standing asset.

Similarly he thinks that an investment into an AI startup is also a loan that the startup needs to pay back out of their own revenue, instead of a share of a company that will IPO at a higher valuation.

Basically his doomerism is a byproduct of financial illiteracy.

cloakandswagger··on AWS SNS vs. SQS – Main Differences
The Lambda-SQS poller will slow down in response to the lambda's error rate for this exact reason.

Note that this can cause issues: say you have a time sensitive application that receives a batch of "bad" messages which cause failed lambda invocations. The poller will slow down and the throughput will drop drastically, even though your intention might be for the lambda to continue processing at the same rate and power through the bad messages.

This behavior can be disabled with a support request.

cloakandswagger··on Ukraine calls on hacker underground to defend against Russia
These jingoistic platitudes are getting so heavy-handed that I legitimately can't tell if this is satire.
cloakandswagger··on Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
You're confusing the discussion by trying to force the "leader" terminology. That term does not appear in the BTC whitepaper and the protocol's approach to consensus is different than a traditional leader elected system.

There is no "voting" and no "leader" except in the most abstract sense and I'm not sure why you're so determined to use those terms.

cloakandswagger··on Spread of Delta variant driven by both immune escape and increased infectivity
There can be honesty even if they are playing it safe: Just state plainly that the data is inconclusive, things are moving quickly and this is the best estimation they currently have. Spewing out patronizing misinformation (see the FDA's sassy "You are not a horse" tweet) is counter-productive.
cloakandswagger··on Spread of Delta variant driven by both immune escape and increased infectivity
> Public health messages need to be kept simple.

By simple you mean, dishonest?

People aren't as dumb as our betters believe. They pick up on obvious lies ("stop buying masks" => "everyone must wear a mask"), dishonesty ("ivermectin is for animals") and inconsistencies that fly in the face of intuition ("even if you had covid you still need the vaccination").

If the powers that be would stop trying to "shape human behavior" through lying we wouldn't see nearly the same level of vaccine hesitance and alternative medicine we do right now.

cloakandswagger··on Elite Romans decorated their floors with garbage
Ancient Rome had no shortage of outrageous decadence and constantly struggled with class warfare, slave uprisings and the political necessity of winning the hearts of the "people"
cloakandswagger··on Behind the scenes, AWS Lambda
Lambda does provide a level of convenience via abstraction that EC2 doesn't: just provide inline code, an S3 hosted zip file or, recently, an ECR image and it's off and running.

I doubt this is a difference marker for most medium to large sized customers though. Making a wrapper for invoking uploaded code is trivial and if done on EC2 doesn't come with the baggage of Lambda (cold starts, costlier expense, more challenging logging and debugging, lack of operational visibility, etc)

cloakandswagger··on Behind the scenes, AWS Lambda
I can't think of any reason outside of product positioning.

A lot of the novelty of Lambda is its identity as a function: small units of execution run on-demand. A Lambda that can run perpetually is made redundant by EC2, and the opinionated time limit informs a lot of design.

cloakandswagger··on Russian jets and ships target British warship
>What are territorial waters?

>Waters extending to 12 nautical miles from the shore of a coastal state. The territorial sea is under the sovereignty of the state, although foreign ships (civilian) are allowed innocent passage.

Is an 8500 ton destroyer a "civilian" ship?

cloakandswagger··on Bitcoin Is Time
My own comments (many of which I don't remember making, it's possible my account was temporarily compromised) shouldn't have any bearing on the offensive remarks made by others.
cloakandswagger··on Bitcoin Is Time
It's a sexist term that degrades the countless amounts of female Bitcoin investors as well as those who identify as trans or POC. I'm surprised it's allowed on HN.
cloakandswagger··on Bitcoin Is Time
>People clearly see the flaw in PoW if they are not emotionally attached to it because they have no money at stake. You should not misinterpret that as hate because they missed the train to richness.

The vitriol that Bitcoin evokes from HN commenters can really only be explained by jealousy, the environmental concern is just a cover for covetousness.

cloakandswagger··on Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while
It is hyperbole, and it isn't going to work for you much longer.
cloakandswagger··on Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition
You might feel the stakes are higher than other people, just like there are people who probably elevate issues like, say, gun control to a similar level of urgency. That's the whole basis for discourse in a society.

If it was truly that urgent I would hope the "stay home" crowd could act pragmatically by taking a more receptive tone. That's belied by a truly frightening undertone of violence that I see simmering underneath the messaging, e.g. "Can't we just throw all the anti-maskers in prison?"

cloakandswagger··on Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition
As most authoritarian-collectivist movements go, the "Stay the fuck home" crowd took no time at all in destroying all goodwill towards their worldview.

Had its tone been more educational and pleading instead of arrogant, shaming and outright threatening they could have avoided polarizing the conversation and creating a contrarian counter-movement that resists even sensible compromise.

cloakandswagger··on U.S. Stocks Rise After S&P 500’s Record Close
Personal observations and reasoning > crooked, conclusion-oriented "studies"
cloakandswagger··on U.S. Stocks Rise After S&P 500’s Record Close
I question and reject the conclusion of any such study based on my own experience.
cloakandswagger··on U.S. Stocks Rise After S&P 500’s Record Close
Not bizarre at all if you think about it. The economic hardship will motivate a substantial portion of our population to become more industrious. They'll fill any available job and do it productively since they're now at or below the poverty line.

The stock market is setting new highs in anticipation of a renaissance in worker efficiency and business margins.

cloakandswagger··on The FBI is secretly using Sabre as a global travel surveillance tool
Not respecting a lawful order to back away from a police perimeter will get the "shit beat out of you" (read: a few motivating, non-injurious taps to make you comply).
cloakandswagger··on The FBI is secretly using Sabre as a global travel surveillance tool
> There's evidence that a lot of that was far right extremists

Wishing there was evidence of something is different than there actually being evidence of something.

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