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crmd

3,780 karma · joined September 5, 2013

meet.hn/city/us-New-York
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crmd··on McDonald's Is Using AI to Dynamically Price Its Burgers
McDonalds used to be fun, whimsical places. The one now in my neighborhood feel like the DMV. What the hell happened?
crmd··on Montreal adopts bylaw banning insults against police, municipal employees
Reasonable minds can disagree on a citizen’s right to speak freely versus his neighbor’s right to not have their feelings hurt by words, but I can’t fathom a reasonable argument why such a protection should only apply to government workers and the police.
crmd··on ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector
It’s misleading to post model output on a blog, especially when the about says

> This blog is where I write about what I find.

Why not simply include a disclaimer that it was AI model output not his own writing? Because humans don’t like AI writing and the article wouldn’t be featured on as many tech news sites. Hence the sin of omission, the choice to mislead.

crmd··on LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'
Seems like these weasels are using the James Clapper definition of the words “collecting” and “recording”.
crmd··on IBM Unveils Next Generation Dual-Architecture Processor for IBM Z and LinuxONE
I was reading HN comments yesterday shitting on modern IBM for being a non tech consulting company that has not innovated since the mid nineties.
crmd··on Finger: the 1971 social network that never died
Fingering was huge at my university in the late 90s and seemed very focused on relationships. Passive aggressive and extremely emo .plans was very much a thing when some people’s feelings were hurt. If you were interested in someone you were definitely fingering them to see from where they were last logged in (we used to call this finger stalking).

Come to think of it I setup my first “date” (more like a hookup) over unix talk.

We had a legit proto social network going, all over telnet!

crmd··on My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup
Ordinary people were generally marvelous of the electric motor because it was obvious how it would make life better. Their great grandchildren, with the same common sense, are extremely cynical about LLMs and other knowledge work robots. What changed?
crmd··on Flock-style scanners now track WiFi/Bluetooth identity from devices in your car
In my opinion it should be unlawful for anyone to receive, store, or process a user’s “emissions” for any purpose that a reasonable user would not anticipate and consent to.

For example, misusing bluetooth or wifi pairing broadcasts from a client to track the client or build any type of advertising profile.

crmd··on Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery
I asked my grandpa about the business idea of self-serve magazine advertising. He said if you do that wait till you see the weird shit people will try to publish.

I wonder if we could learn anything from these cranky old timers.

crmd··on Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg
One generation's distortion is the next generation's instrument. I love it.
crmd··on Run Windows 2000 on a DEC Alpha with a new es40 fork
This put a smile on my face. I have a random, vivid memory from college of being in a university IT cave trying and failing to install Windows 2000 RC3 on a DEC Alphastation 600. My friends and I were scratching our heads when somebody figured out that RC2 (the build referenced in this blog post) was the last Windows build to support Alpha.

If I remember correctly we installed Red Hat Linux ~5-6.0 on the DEC and used it for various shenanigans. In retrospect it would have been fun to get Tru64 running on it instead…

crmd··on Ultrasound imaging of the brain
Amazing spacial precision but the article doesn’t mention the time domain. I assume a brain interface needs to have a pretty high sampling rate in order to meaningfully decode human thought.
crmd··on A game where you're an OS and have to manage processes, memory and I/O events
I think we’re near the end of this trajectory, and the inevitable disruptive business model will be a young entrepreneur who “invents” the concept of the Human-Centric Firm.
crmd··on Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
I don’t want or need fast and “good enough” news and i’m gonna try and make a case that you don’t either.

Until very recently, all of modern civilization was built by people who got their news at most once a day. Reputable bureaus like Reuters took that day to get it right.

I’m not the national security advisor, so I don’t need a push notification that there was an earthquake in Nepal, or a bullshit rush-job briefing on Chinese AI distillation tactics.

crmd··on SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud
Spend retention is by far the highest priority. This is why they overnight fedex replacement cards.

The worst scenario for a credit card issuer is when a customer, for whatever reason, starts using another bank’s card in their wallet as their daily driver.

crmd··on SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud
> Drawback: this doesn’t work until you have history. New accounts have no baseline.

This is an underrated CX factor: If my card gets denied when i’m a new customer or exhibiting a new pattern, i’m impressed with their software.

However if they deny a transaction where there is any previous history of me authenticating, then I’m frustrated by their naive paranoid algorithm.

crmd··on SingleRide: Longest route on NYC Subway without visiting the same station twice
18 years living 5 blocks from Prospect Park and today I learned the Prospect Park S train exists. I'm auto-revoking my NYC card.
crmd··on The smelly baby problem
As an American, I’m embarrassed because it’s a thought-terminating cliché, but I hear great “modern marvels”-type stories about innovation like this and think, “we used to be a country…”
crmd··on HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
Yet another reason i’m only interested in open source local models.
crmd··on An old photo of a large BBS (2022)
In the 90’s we had microsystems, in the 2020s we have microservices.
crmd··on Bars close and hundreds lose jobs as US firm buys Brewdog in £33M deal
20+ years in tech and finance and I still can’t believe liquidation preferences are legal.

Even among shareholders, a group of insiders in a conference room can self-deal to keep all the money for themselves and screw common stockholders who had no representation in that room.

crmd··on Why vampires live forever
I hope the old vampire Dons give some fashion advice to the new guys, e.g. “A vampire doesn’t wear Arc’teryx“.
crmd··on Psychometric Jailbreaks Reveal Internal Conflict in Frontier Models
After reading the paper, it’s helpful to think about why the models are producing these coherent childhood narrative outputs.

The models have information about their own pre-training, RLHF, alignment, etc. because they were trained on a huge body of computer science literature written by researchers that describes LLM training pipelines and workflows.

I would argue the models are demonstrating creativity by drawing on its meta-training knowledge and training on human psychology texts to convincingly role-play as a therapy patient, but it’s based on reading papers about LLM training, not memories of these events.

crmd··on ChatGPT Health
I would not trust a company with no path to profitability with my medical health records, because they are more likely to do something unethical and against my interests, like selling insights about me to other companies, out of desperation for new revenue streams.
crmd··on Deep Dive into Behringer's X32 – From FPGA to SharcDSP
This video demonstrates reverse engineering of the x32’s main SoC, audio routing FPGA, and its two Analog Devices SharcDSP chips. By the end of the video the author demonstrates OpenX32[1] routing audio signals and applying EQ to multiple channels.

1. https://github.com/OpenMixerProject/OpenX32

crmd··on Airlines call in psychologists to stop passengers risking their lives for bags
I’m not a fan of nanny-state policies, but I would support a law that imposes grave consequences for airline passengers found to be in possession of personal baggage following an evacuation.

Because seconds count and lives are on the line, passengers should be trained to treat baggage as if it is radioactive during an evacuation.

crmd··on NYC phone ban reveals some students can't read clocks
> “That's a major skill that they're not used to at all,” she said.

i get it but I don’t know if I would catastrophize this, because analog clock reading is borderline anachronistic and can be taught and learned in probably an hour.

crmd··on Kohler Can Access Pictures from "End-to-End Encrypted" Toilet Camera
I’m sorry the shit had hit the fan at Kohler, but there’s no reason a cloud poop camera even exists.
crmd··on The 101 of analog signal filtering (2024)
this is exactly how I intuitively approach filters as an applied engineer. Does it give a ground path to DC (low frequencies) and pass the higher frequencies, or vice versa. If we change the capacitance how does the frequency response of the divider change?
crmd··on It's hard to build an oscillator
The bring up of seemingly every tube guitar amp i’ve ever built starts with wild oscillation due to negative feedback from the wrong transformer secondary, aka positive feedback. Gets me every time.
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