Hacker News Reader

cthoron Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps

Switching costs are still low. Anthropic can only do this while they maintain frontier status, and while they do, they can charge whatever they want. An Oracle or Broadcom would fall behind and lose all its customers in an instant.

cthoron Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence

These are sensible criticisms and things one should be mindful of when using prediction markets as a signal (I would also add an awareness of how discount rates affect the reliability of markets that trade at low probabilities), but none of them justify the original statement being contended with, which was: "They offer zero positive utility to the world."

cthoron Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence

That is not surprising. If your point is that 10% is not 5% and the odds change over time then you have unreasonable expectations. It's not an oracle. Where did I say it was? I said it's a quick and robust signal. Of course there's plenty of ways to get alpha, but those require both effort and domain expertise.

Is this a standard you hold to any other single signal? Name it. What signal (a) predicted <3% over a month ago and (b) you believed prior to be a reliable signal?

cthoron Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence

The utility is a fairly robust signal about the probability of certain events occurring. It's pretty helpful for grounding your beliefs about the world (in certain domains).

For example, I had a lot of people ask me about the Hantavirus and if it was worth worrying about. I didn't have to do any research other than look at the various prediction markets and see them all at 5-10% to determine it was probably a nothingburger. Much quicker than having to parse a bunch of fearmongering news reports and such.

cthoron The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

They are worried about both risks.

cthoron Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

This is an insane response to someone having their carefully written work casually bastardized by an LLM that rewrote the entire design spec without even being informed. The amount of institutional noise generated by such carelessness far exceeds whatever improvement in readability you could possibly imagine. Any criticism you could aim at the original text that you don't even have on hand (i.e. are completely speculating wrt its readability) you could direct 100x over at the manager's horrible communication skills.

cthoron Scott Adams has died

I read what you wrote and read it as sophistry. You reply by adding more.

"It's why you believe [...]" But you don't know what I believe.

"Scott Adams claimed [...] because of a response to a survey question [...]" But his statement is, if one applies some very basic "media literacy" (as you like to call it), clearly rhetorical, with the underlying message that there seems to be a lot of racial hatred from blacks towards whites in the United States in 2023, and that this racial hatred seems to be institutionally supported, and that as a white person of means he'll use his means to avoid this racial hatred and suggests others do the same. The cited survey is merely one data point he presents to support this belief. Arguing as if he arrived at this conclusion purely off of that alone is total sophistry.

I don't live in the US, so perhaps that will give you some reprieve. Scott Adams might well have been wrong. I don't claim to know here if he was, just that you haven't actually contended with his position at all despite writing a lot of angry words, and that this excess of sophistry justifies a dismissive response.

cthoron Scott Adams has died

Winning a primary would be nice.

cthoron Scott Adams has died

They do. They understand you cited ADL in lieu of an argument. If it could stand on its own you wouldn't need the citation and guilt-by-association. They understand the culmination of all the surrounding context reduces to a schmittian friend-enemy distinction where you are placing yourself as enemy. Everything else is sophistry.

cthoron AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

This demonstrates where a lot of the mismatch in impressions of this tech arise. The thousandth amateur Wonderwall rendition is not at all interesting as a piece of recorded music, but for the performer (and those listening around them) it can be a fun and playful experience. The same could be said for AI generated music: it could be a fun and playful experience in the present moment, even if the resulting product is totally worthless to the market. This would still be a valuable thing for the human experience.

Arguably this is a return to a more traditional way of experiencing music from before the invention of recorded music. Before this, music was an entirely transient and often communal experience. Once the musician stops playing, the music is over. Songs from these times have largely unknown authors, and likely don't even have any single author or for that to even be a coherent concept. They were simply part of the shared culture that many had contributed to. Now music is owned by specific people and you can play back their performance as much as you like (for an increasingly insignificant price).

This tech may be a negative thing for the market of recorded music, but it needs to be argued that recorded music is the only authentic way to experience music, and that this is why that's how most people experience music currently, rather than that being an historical anomaly due to the technology available. Once you step away from treating music like it's only valid when it's a product for a market, the problems of AI music seem a lot less catastrophic.

cthoron Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

Not that this affects the political calculus (where perception may as well be reality), but the cost burden specific to universal healthcare is actually opposite this intuition.

Things like obesity, smoking, and alcoholism all kill you before you can get too old. Healthy citizens end up using far more of the far more expensive end-of-life care, to the point where it outweighs the extra healthcare the unhealthy citizens use in their youth.

cthoron Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

https://cthor.me/SSG

Getting someone else's SSG to do exactly what you want (and nothing more) takes longer than just building it yourself. Juice isn't worth the squeeze.

cthoron What if I don't want videos of my hobby time available to the world?

You must not have looked very far. Here's one example from circa 2011 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN9E3vJzxk0

People respond to a camera shoved in their face. It's not felt the same as simply being looked at.

cthoron I miss using em dashes

See em dash in text

Think text much more likely from robot than first thought

Grug say this change too big from just one em dash

cthoron The Deletion of Docker.io/Bitnami

Just because you want that to be "the key" doesn't make it so. You make that your singular focus and you let antisocial behaviour off the hook. That is your prerogative.

For me, the key is the bait and switch. It's like a drug dealer offering first time customers a discount. It's a good business strategy to get people hooked. Very enterprising. Nonetheless, I would prefer a society without such behaviour.

cthoron The Deletion of Docker.io/Bitnami

Yes, yes. And a person who's pick-pocketed may well do better to protect their pockets. This does not absolve the thief.

Reasonable people can disagree about the degree to which vendor lock-in is antisocial or the degree to which there even is vendor lock-in here. But telling victims of such behavior to just suck it up and price it in only serves to distract from and abet actors abusing positions of power to rent seek and create low trust environments. It's not a systemic solution and it's not a serious engagement with the criticism levied.

cthoron The Deletion of Docker.io/Bitnami

Vendor lock-in is a thing. Switching costs are a thing. They know this. That's the whole business model. They're expecting that the cost of switching to outweigh the cost of the subscription.

I get that this business model is fashionable amongst wannabe rent-seekers, but it's still antisocial and should be shunned.

cthoron The Moat of Low Status

Surgeons mark where on the body they're operating. This didn't used to be a standard practice.

Asking "Did I mess up my left and right?" or "Is this the right patient?" feels like a stupid question to ask. I'd certainly rather they ask those questions before operating on me! But turns out it's very hard to get them to do that, so we do surgical site marking instead.

cthoron How to Write Compelling Release Announcements

Stopped reading at the graphic. None of those descriptions for dishes sound anything like what a developer would write. Just pure obscurantist nonsense. "Cow secretions" to refer to cheese? Really? Even though that's more ambiguous, wordier, less helpful, and less descriptive? The author tells on their own shoddy writing skills. A developer might be guilty of writing "Pizza - goat's milk mozarella, wood fire oven" instead of "Cheese pizza" but certainly not that nonsense.

cthoron Denuvo Analysis

It's a pretty good outcome, yeah. Kind of makes one wonder why copyright needs to be 70 years + life, when the overwhelming majority of sales are in the first year...

cthoron Are you VC-funded? No, we're profitable

It's a signal whether you like it or not. Saying "well shucks anything could go out of business" is meaningless. What partners and customers want to know is the liklihood of that happening. Moreover, going out of business isn't the only risk to consider but also pivoting into another business entirely.

cthoron BYD has already produced its first solid-state cells

You can short without tail risk, e.g. buying puts.

cthoron Zeroperl: Sandboxing Perl with WebAssembly

There are no programs that will fully transpile Perl to not-Perl, because that would require parsing Perl.

A code converter that kindof-sortof-but-not-really transpiles (like Python's 2to3) would require a lot of debugging of ugly machine generated source code. Who wants to do that? Would probably be even harder than a full rewrite. (How many Python libraries were actually ported using 2to3?) Similar for using any translation an LLM might spit out.

So yes, by hand. And it's not obvious if a full rewrite of a complex library would be easier than porting its runtime to WASM, especially when said runtime has been ported to countless other systems already.

cthoron Zeroperl: Sandboxing Perl with WebAssembly

ExifTool is merely a bunch of Perl code, which can't be parsed nor compiled to a program, i.e. computer instructions. There is nothing to port.

The only other option is a rewrite. Does that really sound easier?

cthoron Misguided Apple Intelligence ads

> if a summary could fully capture the report, the author wouldn't have written the report, they'd just have written the summary

That is not my experience with corporate writing in the slightest.

cthoron ChatGPT Search

Many people have an intrinsic motivation to share knowledge. Have a look at Wikipedia. There are enough of these people that we don't need to destroy the open Internet to accommodate those who only write when they expect to be paid.

cthoron Fighting back against proper noun feature names (2021)

The odds of "the data" being gathered in a rigorous enough manner to have any truth value is exceedingly low. It's mostly a tactic to avoid accountability, much like consultants and committees.

cthoron Examples of Great URL Design (2023)

Rather than totally ignoring the slug, I prefer sending a 302 to the correct slug if the slug is absent or incorrect.

cthoron Old dogs, new CSS tricks

Just because you don't understand it yet doesn't mean it isn't useful.

An ideal version of CSS would remove the need for SASS, BEM, and any non-thematic framework. That we have to use those right now is a problem to be fixed.

cthoron YouTube cracks down on synthetic media with AI disclosure requirement

Maybe the author is a good writer with interesting things to say, but has a bad speaking voice?