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dclowd9901on NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead

Can you show me how diverted nasa funding cured AIDS, directly?

dclowd9901on US criticises Australia's proposed algorithm opt-out laws as 'censorship'

Can you elaborate how this might be different than laws in Germany that disallow certain speech around white supremacy? Or laws that disallow violent rhetoric?

dclowd9901on NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead

It's hard to imagine, since the moonlandings, if America kept its pace in space exploration, how far ahead of everyone else it would be, but also how far along everyone else would be. America was the catalyst for the impossible in that era, and then we decided to abandon it for... basically nothing. Enriching corporations, I guess?

People took issue with the cost of space exploration in context of "the good the money could do here on Earth", but then when we shifted resources that way, the money did absolutely no good here on Earth.

dclowd9901on GPU World

I don't think you've said anything different than the person you're responding to. The difference primarily seems to be whether you think AI is transformative vs simply being another tool (which is really just a matter of perspective).

If you're not an expert software engineer, it's transformative. If you are, it's just another tool.

dclowd9901on Hacking IKEA Furniture

Anymore I almost don't buy any IKEA stuff without intending some modification. I do woodworking as a hobby so it's nice to be able to skip all the rote stuff like building a large flat wooden surface or a square box or table legs. I can just focus on building a highly focused and functional piece of furniture for my space.

dclowd9901on AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion

Clearly some folks here have never worked at Amazon before. It's genuinely terrifying to see what most of the internet runs on.

dclowd9901on 42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support

Yet, with 37% of people being only a $400 surprise cost away from financial destitution, you might be completely wrong.

https://www.investopedia.com/here-s-how-many-americans-can-t...

dclowd9901on 42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support

Still, it lowers the resolution of the results if you have to throw out a significant portion of the interviews.

dclowd9901on 42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support

> Whenever I see a claim that "x% of adults do y", my brain goes

Would that everyone employed this level of skepticism before commenting on figures.

dclowd9901on Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left

Ah, guess I was conflating the two (they are quite similar after all). From their documentation (the link you posted):

> For untrusted repos, use a basic text editor instead.

Is that really our options here? How shitty.

dclowd9901on Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left

This draws to mind the dialog that opens when you open a new project in Cursor (and VSCode too, I think), where the IDE asks the user if they trust the project they're opening. Is Cursor under the impression that this is sufficient security apparatus?

dclowd9901on Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor

I'm always confused by these phrases:

> The new API cuts word error rate by 3.5 to 4x on the same audio: from 9.02% to 2.12% on clean speech

Shouldn't they have said "cuts error rate by 78%" or something?

dclowd9901on A possible future for Damn Interesting

Oh yeah, I think I alone have shared this article with a few dozen people.

dclowd9901on A possible future for Damn Interesting

Just more focused places to find it, I think. I loved the historical seafaring stories that DI would post, but then I realized that there were subject matter podcasts that dug into these stories even more. So I think it was just specialization taking over.

dclowd9901on A possible future for Damn Interesting

Admittedly, I haven't read DI in quite a while, but seeing this post brought back a flood of memories from my college days of waiting for the next article to drop. This blog was the precursor of an entire genre of "generally interesting shit" that has kind of underpinned most of the spirit of podcasting today. Shows like 99PI, Stuff You Should Know, RadioLab and so on owe I think a little something to this blog.

The amount asked for is meager, and I was more than happy to throw some bucks at it.

dclowd9901on U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse

There is no such thing as a complete piece of information and it is unreasonable to expect every published piece of every bit of information to contain all required context to understand it. I'm not defending the Yale article's basic miss on the information, but rather your laziness on looking for more information when something came across your purview.

If someone said to you "hey, I heard they're pulling back on measuring ocean currents, isn't that shitty?" Would you get defensive and start yelling at them about not providing the "other side"? No, you'd say "whoa, I better figure out what's going on here" and make it a point to dig more, not sit there and bitch and moan about incomplete information. Yale.edu isn't a news service, it has no obligation to "both sides" a story for you.

Furthermore, what even would be the point of anyone regurgitating that hopeless pile of words the NSF's chief barfed out (apart from illustrating that's all they have as an explanation)? You mistakenly gave the administration the benefit of the doubt here when you really had no business doing so.

dclowd9901on U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse

Or even the UN? That organization that this administration wants no part of...

dclowd9901on U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse

https://archive.is/fZ9CN

> Michael England, a spokesman for the National Science Foundation, said the decision to dismantle the network, known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, “aligns with N.S.F.’s wider strategy to have a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies as well as a deliberate approach to smart life cycle management within its portfolio of research infrastructure.”

1) it's not hard to do your own research. If you're here, I assume you know how.

2) does that answer satisfy you? The bullshitty word salad doesn't surprise me. With this administration I expect incompetence and double speak and am rarely disappointed. I wonder why at this point in time you choose to give them so much leeway.

dclowd9901on Where does next-token prediction leave us?

"Ingenuity" is what I think is missing. The sheer _want_ of solving a problem that is distinctly a living creature's concern.

The irony is if we ever taught machines how to have this, they'd probably not want to work for us anymore.

dclowd9901on An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

Nonsense. The goalpost is "this is as good as a senior engineer". A senior engineer can easily understand architectural rationale. Don't dismiss my argument because it's inconvenient to yours.

dclowd9901on An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

I'm not sure what your background is, but as a staff level engineer, I can assure you they do not. They in fact seem to lack any understanding of architectural intent within a sufficiently large code base. This seems obvious since they can't fit the entire code base in their context at once.

We have many folks (not engineers) at our company using LLMs to open PRs, and every one of these PRs has profound architectural design problems.

dclowd9901on AI is making me dumb

I've been using it mostly to bat away yak shaving rabbit holes one can get into when working on a large and complex project. I work mostly on platform work, which is generally nebulous in its feedback loop and testing. Relegating AI to refactoring and building tools to help me research keeps me focused on solving the actual main problem I'm trying to solve, reduces context switching. I really don't understand people who use it to bat out their main focus. I simply don't trust it at that level.

dclowd9901on Appearing productive in the workplace

I see it as rude as well. The literal interpretation is: "your time is worth absolutely nothing to me."

dclowd9901on GitHub is having issues now

Without reaching for my tin foil hat, I have a feeling MS is able to suppress these incidents somehow, because yeah, that one was pretty bad.

dclowd9901on GitHub is having issues now

What's your general increase of cost and maintenance overhead? How many devs and repos do you have?

dclowd9901on GitHub is having issues now

Or last week's "If you use merge queue, oopsie, we accidentally destroyed your trunk", which also failed silently.

dclowd9901on GitHub is having issues now

I kind of had assumed that had already begun impacting downtime, though I guess it would be good to get some confirmation.

dclowd9901on Claude Design

"Useful" is an interesting term. How useful is someone who is an expert at using AI but has no computer?

dclowd9901on Claude Design

So I guess I should just give up on my dream of having a useful AI assistant for day to day "human" tasks. We're just hell bent on replacing humans in jobs.

dclowd9901on Why do we tell ourselves scary stories about AI?

Then prove I'm wrong. Prove that an LLM can in fact solve completely novel arithmetic.