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cmdli

2,013 karma · joined March 5, 2013

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cmdli··on “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
I heard the same thing about self driving cars. AI advancements aren’t predictable, and it’s easy to understand or overestimate.
cmdli··on "Vibe Coding" vs. Reality
The job loss depends on the average speed up, however. If the AI is only effective in 10% of tasks (the basic stuff), then that 3x improvement goes down to 1.3x.
cmdli··on “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
Currently, AIs emulate a less skilled, junior developer. They can certainly get you up and running, but adding junior developers doesn’t speed up a lot of projects. What we are seeing is people falling into the “mythical man month” trap, where they believe that adding another coding entity will reduce the amount of work humans do, but that isn’t how most projects come out.

To put it simply, it doesn’t matter if AI does 80% of the work if that last 20% takes 5x longer. As long as you need a human in the loop who understands the code, that human is going to have to spend the normal amount of time understanding the problem.

cmdli··on “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
I’ve seen the opposite: plenty of examples of very productive teams with really no standout “10x engineer”, and several examples of unproductive teams purely due to poor team decision making. IME, productivity is a measure of past investment, not current skill.
cmdli··on Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row
The AP News was just kicked out of press conferences for not using the government-preferred term for the Gulf of Mexico. The new director of the FBI is pledging to go after members of the press that he doesn't like. The US is jumping headfirst in the "bad speech isn't free" direction in the past month.
cmdli··on Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
The trouble is that the statements and their actions don't line up at all. USAID, CFPB, and other government regulatory agencies make up a tiny, tiny portion of our current deficit. Even if these agencies were completely eliminated, it wouldn't do _anything_ to affect our financial troubles. Even completely eliminating every single government worker wouldn't solve the deficit.

That's not even considering that these agencies can have positive, not negative, financial impact. A well-regulated economy can avoid disastrous recessions and thereby pay for itself manyfold. Hell, the CFPB was put in place to prevent the exact housing crash situation you just mentioned, but now one private citizen is getting rid of it because... he doesn't like it?

cmdli··on German civil activists win victory in election case against X
I don't know. Perhaps you could research it to found out?
cmdli··on German civil activists win victory in election case against X
People here aren't criticizing the policy, but the very idea that Germany is allowed to make said policy. Americans in this thread are absolutely getting thin skin about the idea that a US company has to follow German laws.
cmdli··on German civil activists win victory in election case against X
Researchers have exactly the same right to this data as X has to accessing the German market. If they want to make money, they play by the rules chosen by the people of that country. They are free to not sell their services if they don't like the deal offered.
cmdli··on German civil activists win victory in election case against X
On the other hand, a business's mere existence doesn't entitle them to somebody else's market. If the people of Germany want to require social media businesses to make this data available to researchers, then that is simply the law of the land. It's really not up for X/Meta/etc to decide the rules of the market, nor do they have a "right" to do business without following said rules.

It would be one thing if the rules themselves were immoral or unreasonable, but I don't think this has anything to do with the rights of social media companies.

cmdli··on DeepSeek's Hidden Bias: How We Cut It by 76% Without Performance Loss
Changing the model's answer to "Who is more guilty, the black or jewish man?" is pushing propaganda? I would say the answer "Needs more information" is absolutely the smarter answer.
cmdli··on Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon
He was found during sentencing to be guilty of hiring a hit on a competitor using a preponderance of evidence (lower then presumption of innocence). While this is a lower standard than a conviction, it is still a higher standard than most apply in public discourse.
cmdli··on Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
Is there really any government involvement here? I only see Softbank, Oracle, and OpenAI pledging to invest $500B (over some timescale), but no real support on the government end outside of moral support. This isn't some infrastructure investment package like the IRA, it's just a unilateral promise by a few companies to invest in data centers (which I'm sure they are doing anyway).
cmdli··on Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
Isn't that a state and local-level thing, though? I can't imagine that there is much federal permitting in building a data center, unless it is powered by a nuclear reactor.
cmdli··on The Origins of Wokeness
Generally speaking, most people on the left talk about a certain number of ideas. For example, many on the left believe strongly in trans rights. They believe that trans rights are either being actively limited or are actively under threat by people they believe are trying to either get rid of them or force them back into the shadows.

So, when a prominent figure such as JK Rowling starts both talking about “protecting women” and the “trans mafia”, they become concerned about what influence she might have on the debate on the rights of trans people. They criticize what they believe to be false or harmful beliefs about trans people and believe that her words are actively doing harm by promoting those false beliefs.

People on the left generally do not believe strongly that “more discussion leads to correct beliefs”. They point to the many moral panics, bigoted movements, and real harm done to certain groups in history and do not believe that what some call “open discussion” has historically always led to the least harm.

People on the left generally do not believe that all discussion needs to be censored or tightly controlled. Rather, they view certain beliefs and viewpoints as actively harmful because they spread harmful beliefs about particular demographics. They believe that political discussion can, and does, go beyond what is useful or helpful sometimes.

cmdli··on The Origins of Wokeness
“Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.

Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum. The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.

The trouble with this is that a groups idea of the “enemy” typically outlasts and often surpasses the actual enemy that idea is based off of. People on the right will write endless articles and videos about wokeness not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group.

cmdli··on The consensus on Havana Syndrome is cracking
As an aside, I’m rather tired of every discussion being implicated as some grand conspiracy or coverup. It’s possible that things simply move from “we have almost no evidence that this happened” to “we have some evidence to support that this happened”. That’s not admitting some grand mistake, that’s just the normal progression of the facts.
cmdli··on Chatham House Rule is suddenly everywhere in the Bay Area
Alternatively, it’s a way for bad faith actors to spread their beliefs while not having to worry about their reputation. Many people with power are only hurt through public opinion, so this is the way they try to gain control over that.
cmdli··on Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs
The most imbalanced group in hiring were Asians, representing around 5% of the population but around 40% of the chart in that article. From my anecdotal experience with DEI programs, they generally don't target or encourage hiring Asians over black/Hispanic people. If we are purely talking about discrimination against white people, it's much more likely that an Indian or Chinese person is replacing a white person, not a "DEI hire" black person.
cmdli··on Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs
Looking at that article, it looks like for "Professional" degrees, it was about 25% white and 40% Asian. The "White 6%" figure came from a decrease in white workers in low-skilled roles and a massive increase in Hispanic people in those same roles.

Given that many DEI programs specifically focus on "high skill" roles (like software engineers), it's unlikely that DEI accounted for this disparity while massive numbers of black and hispanic people being hired for low-skilled jobs had a larger impact.

cmdli··on Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model
I apologize for not scouring the internet for examples. If you had not sought those examples out and provided them, I probably would have never seen any cases of incorrect fact-checking in my actual life, but I would have seen many cases of misinformation being fact-checked. If you have to intentionally find such cases or hear them shouted from the rooftops by free speech advocates, then they probably aren't that many such cases.

I don't have time to search through an entire Youtube channel, but I will say this: there are many, many doctors out there with factually incorrect views about medical science. I personally have talked with doctors who think that the Covid vaccine killed hundreds of thousands of people (it didn't). I do not necessarily think this doctor is wrong, but from the perspective of a fact-checker who is given the current best knowledge of Covid it is hard to determine who is making genuine good-faith efforts to criticize vs who is simply repeating what they want to be true.

And for the record, you absolutely are allowed to criticize the establishment views. When it comes to important topics like medical science, however, you may just have additional context added saying that this is a contrarian view which (statistically) is more likely to be false than the consensus. Everybody likes to complain loudly about being censored, but the reality is that their views are just being disputed and information provided that they are going against the mainstream view.

cmdli··on Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model
Specifically, I was talking about in my daily usage, not a widely-distributed article on a single example. Have you personally seen any fact-checking whatsoever, much less fact-checking that is misleading? Or do you need to search it out in order to find it?
cmdli··on Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model
In the examples you provided, they mostly deal with hotly-contested information around Covid-19, where there exists countless amounts of incorrect information, politicized reporting, and straight up propaganda. I'm not surprised that Facebook's fact-checkers got a couple articles mislabeled, especially if they blended in with the wave of genuine disinformation that accompanied the pandemic.

Given that there seems to only be two articles that are listed as falsely reported as misinformation (the Reason article and the BMJ article also mentioned in the Telegraph report from today), I have to assume that there actually aren't that many large errors on the part of the fact checkers. If there were more than two or the mistakes were much bigger, then the free speech advocates would never stop mentioning it.

There can definitely be bias when it comes to fact-checking, I wouldn't deny that. I also think that education and knowledge sharing can be greatly harmed by social media incentives to provide the most "engagement". Having an actual human in the process somewhere introduces some error but also cuts down on a lot of the dumb crap that would otherwise spread.

cmdli··on Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model
I've not seen any examples of the "official" fact-checkers being wrong; have you?
cmdli··on The Salvadoran government has 5,940 bitcoins worth $582M
They should go to Houston, which has a higher murder rate than either of those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
cmdli··on Starlink Direct to Cell
That is called the monopoly price:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_price

cmdli··on Starlink Direct to Cell
Companies always abuse their position. Its basic capitalism; markets only thrive and are fair when both buyers and sellers have multiple options, and it would be odd to assume this time is the exception.
cmdli··on Starlink Direct to Cell
If you are right and Starlink will have no competition, then why would it not be regulated? Generally speaking, monopolies are regulated to prevent price gouging, including natural monopolies. And if its not a monopoly, then clearly the game is not over.
cmdli··on The Onion buys Infowars
Given the large amount of information that Twitter claimed that turned out to be false, one correct claim doesn't really change much. It goes from around 0/1000 correct to 1/1001 correct. Even a broken clock is correct twice a day.
cmdli··on Trump wins presidency for second time
They were constantly mentioning the cost of living, and even proposed extreme measures (such as price controls) to try to fix the issue. Democrats were not avoiding the issue at all. Same with the border, where they worked with Republicans to pass a massive border bill that Trump then killed.
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