drdaeman

Jujutsu is perfect for that - you create new changeset upfront, providing message at the same time (which can be later amended as needed). Feels so much more logical to declare the topic first, rather than come back to some accidentally uncommitted changes and wonder what was doing there.

You mean https://tosdr.org/?

Ah, I see you’re a person of culture as well.

Not really relevant though. They sure should be serious about GitHub, npm, and plenty of other things they run, too.

Yes, exactly, with addictive content it boosts the engagement even further. We all agree about that. And - my point here I’m trying to convey - with nonaddictive content it doesn’t do that. Which is why I’m saying “we need to classify better”. I don’t understand why you’re against a more nuanced approach, when the goal is to allow non-harmful cases. I’m very much favor of regulation, just a more careful one.

Vaping analogy is not perfect, as it doesn’t hold true in some aspects, but... Nobody makes vapes that go unpleasantly sour for a while after a fourth puff. But if they do we’d better not ban them from adding flavors, when the flavoring here does the right thing.

We’d still want to regulate vaping on other aspects (such as harm to health, which - unlike speech - doesn’t get protections), but that’s another, different story.

About the infinite scroll: I just found not just a hypothetical counterexample, but an actual experiment that suggests that infinite scroll is not addictive on its own. Not the ideal experiment, but it proves the key part of my point. So now I have not just logical inference, but also a real-world empirical confirmation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49823933

Actually, I found an experiment that directly contradicts your statement. So my disagreement is IMHO valid and your appeal to "mountains of telemetry" is not. To me it seems that you've just parroted the chorus without trying to understand the problem by decomposing it into pieces and trying to attribute the potential causes. Which just happens to be something that I spent some time doing (total amateur hour and N=1 but sort of worked for my purposes).

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/design-for-continuous-e... - look for the slide 32.

Etsy ran A/B tests with and without endless scrolling. Same content source. Infinite scroll haven't produced any increased engagement: surprisingly, it decreased it - people searched less. Potential reason: it was a store, not a social media feed, the feed wasn't addictive in its nature (decreased relevancy, lower chances of finding something good buried down further and further) and the whole alternative pagination design didn't help at all. This is my interpretation, but c'mon - if you're appealing to the telemetry: here's the telemetry, how'd you explain it?

In the neighboring comment, I was mistaken in that it would still increase length of browsing a bit, turns out it was off-putting.

Upd: found an experiment that strengthens with my point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49823933; leaving the below unredacted.

(Sigh) And what exactly does it show? What makes you think you interpret the statistics correctly?

It shows a correlation that suggests - at best - that certain design patterns decrease friction and increases duration of engagement, making system more captive. It does NOT show that those design patterns are captive (= are a problem) by themselves.

Have those mountains of telemetry ever included an experiment where the addictive component was intentionally not present or maybe even designed to be anti-addictive (next element becomes increasingly less likely to be interesting/relevant past some threshold, frustrating the viewer) but the endless scrolling remains, so we test on its presence alone? Ideally, with an engagement-optimized feed as a separate control.

I don't know of such experiments, so I cannot counter your point with a definitive proof. But your interpretation isn't a proof either - there are multiple factors and no control to tell them apart. Those mountains of telemetry didn't have a goal of isolating factors to determine their actual effect, they just had to optimize engagement, find the best combo that works.

If someone ran something like that - I'd love to hear about it, and what they show. I'm utterly confident (as someone who had dealt with various addictions) that it'll show endless scrolling would have mild effects at best (maybe just a bit longer engagement compared to classic pagination as telemetry suggests, but I expect it to pale in comparison to an actual addictive/engagement-increasing feed source logic).

I respectfully disagree. I’ve clicked way too many “next page”s (or refreshed pages, or whatever) to be aware that while the friction is real, it’s not the actually addictive component.

Endless scrolling aids, but isn’t what makes a system addictive. Continuous relevance gamble “maybe the next one is good, or the one after” is the actual driver, and “I stop at this page” is a weak stopper condition. Not negligible (as proven by testing) but not the fundamental piece.

The whole point of food delivery is for the occasions you can’t (e.g. sudden illness, or time management mishaps) or don’t want to (laziness/tiredness) cook or drive to grab a takeout. You pay a premium for the convenience, someone else takes care of it. Nothing wrong with that, no “suckers” in the general scheme.

Excuse me… what? You must've misunderstood what I argued about. Yes, they’re not the same!

I'm going to reiterate for the third time, to break it down even further in a hope it clicks.

We have: 1. Predatory/addictive algorithms (A_bad). We don’t like those. 2. Old good user preferences-based algorithms (A_good). Those are fine. 3. Probably some other algorithms but let’s go with just two alternatives for simplicity’s sake, as extra (A_more) won’t affect the argument here.

Definition from the law (A_law) covers both (A_bad)+(A_good). As I already said twice, it’s overbroad.

You said “if (A_law) wouldn’t be bad there wouldn’t be an issue”. That is obviously true, because (A_law) contains (A_bad). What you said is true, and it doesn’t contradict what I said - that (A_law) containing (A_good) in addition to (A_bad) isn’t great and lawmakers should’ve done better.

Just so we’re clear, I’m not arguing that A_law = A_good (that’s not true, they’re not the same! but neither A_law = A_bad either, it's the fact that it's A+bad+A_good[+A_more] is the issue), or that A_bad isn’t bad, or that A_bad isn’t covered by the law, or anything like that. Your knowledge that A_bad is bad, is my knowledge too.

As for the second point, I provided a counterexample of how endless scroll can be a non-issue. If endless scroll can be a problem (no argument against that from me - yes, there are clear examples we all have seen) and endless scroll can be non-problematic too (my counterexample design), that, says endless scroll is not what’s problematic per se. That’s just simple propositional logic.

Endless scrolling can be a proxy/substitute for the actual issue if nothing better could be named, but I think a better target can be identified and pointed out.

In other words, all I’m unhappy about is that laws are poorly worded and loosely defined so they can potentially cause unnecessary collateral damage. All I’m saying is that lawmakers are missing the point and just vibe-legislate in the vicinity. They’re banning the thing they (and you, and I) see, but the way they do it kinda like how Plato defined what a man is. And I’m just plucking a chicken here.

If you see a logical flaw - please do point it out for me. I don’t see any.

Recommender algorithms as defined aren’t just the recommender algorithms you’re thinking about. It’s merely this idea that precise definition matter, nothing more. I’m not arguing that it was a bad idea to restrict some crappy patterns, or anything like that. Just that lawmakers defined that poorly.

And endless scrolling is pagination with a page size of one and a gesture (scroll down or swipe) for the next page. And trust me, “next page” can be helluva addictive. Endless pagination is an aesthetic preference. It may make it more slicker, frictionless, more visually appealing to get addicted, sure, but it doesn’t change a thing about the core element of the addiction. Same endless feed can be easily made counter-adductive by degrading relevance past some threshold, which clearly tells me the issue is elsewhere.

> The thing which measures your preferences and usage patterns then decides what to show you

That (plus a clause that exempts algorithms with user controls with full informedness and ability to confidently and reliably predict the outcome = old good filters and such) is the thing that should be in the legislation’s definitions section.

But then in the actual law it’s worse than “algorithm”, they’re actually banning broad over generalizations and design patterns instead, stuff like this:

>> recommender features – content selected and displayed based on information associated with the user’s account;

(Obvious legit use cases are regional content and user preferences.)

>> endless-feed features – continuous feeds of end-user content;

(Pure design pattern, pagination can be addictive at any span size.)

There is such a thing, or, rather, used to be. Problem is that security is expensive (essentially one needs to examine all possible states of the system), and it inevitably failed to keep up with the crazy growth of complexity of modern computer systems. It became impossible to maintain a model of a system with myriad of moving parts, so it became impossible to make behavior guarantees.

Remove the complexity (all the way down to the hardware quirks), and security will be doable again.

Cloud GPUs have ToS about purposes you’re allowed to crank numbers for?

I thought this only applies to LLM inference providers, but not raw GPU rentals.

Those tokens aren’t guaranteed (esp. with RE and security tasks - rooted my own TV last week, Claude crapped out on “cyber safety” grounds; but also no guarantees about the model served - providers can pull a switcheroo on weights or quantization at any moment, and new options may not work for you), and you’re throwing money at entities that aren’t aligned with your interests instead of entities who are interested in actually empowering you.

Except that there’s no such thing as a “normie”.

Everyone - save for people with developmental difficulties or ahedonia - has a specialty, something they know that the majority of other folks don’t. Every such domain of knowledge (useful or otherwise) has its shorthands and jargonisms.

Some domains of knowledge lag behind their technological adoption. Which is natural and fine, except that society at large got infected with this silly idea of normalizing mindless consumption with a shallow (if any) underlying mental model. In other words, the nerds are actively told to shut up and keep their mumbo jumbo talk to themselves and spare people from knowing how things work under the hood.

So it’s not just that those silly nerds bad at communicating. That too, but it’s meeting with the unwillingness to learn is what makes it truly bad. It’s in the very idea of a “normie” - an anti-knowledge, ignorance-normalizing, curiosity-dampening attitude - that’s to blame. Not that nerds use nerdy words on nerdy websites and that usage spreads to less nerdy areas - that’s part is just life as usual.

BTW, those “loud idiots” are the actual normal people learning and making mistakes (including the mistake of overconfidence - especially easy to make when something feels important) and having opinions. Modern mass communications changed the world’s landscape, so instead of a few peers in their kitchen they’re broadcasting their knowledge (including the errors in it) to orders of magnitude more people and that sometimes gains traction - but that’s a separate issue, very far from nerds and their words.

> Rule Number One: You may not use a single word an LLM suggests to you.

I think there's a use case where this rule can be ignored. Sometimes I ask LLM to help me pick a single word or short phrase in some language, that has specific meaning, and connotations. Or doesn't carry some connotations or associations. Especially when I have an idiom from some language in mind, but I'm writing in some other language and my brain struggles to find a good replacement.

LLMs are super handy as fancy vibe-based dictionary search engines. They're all about words that go with other words, so when I'm struggling for a good term, I see no harm in asking and picking an option that I feel closest to what I want to express. My choice, my voice, just a very fancy thesaurus machine.

What's the point of complaining about use of jargonisms in a specialist-leaning spaces?

Anyone with a resemblance of a functioning brain (that is, any "normie" included) can understand "ability to install and run custom aftermarket operating system, or modify pre-installed one", assuming they know what an "operating system" is. And if they don't know what it is, that can - and should (!) - be explained too.

This ability matters to people who don't know any much about any computer programming, because it affects their ability to use the devices they own. They may not know how it all works, but they do express regrets when something doesn't work the way they expect or want it to work. And we all know and hate enshittification here, don't we? Personally, I'm tired of saying "no, because Apple/Google decided only they can control this, and neither you or me can change this on this device" to "can this work so-and-so" questions.

And "open bootloader" is a jargon shorthand for that. Crude, because it should be actually more like "bootloader that can be configured to validate software integrity with user-provided key material", but most people familiar with the space and lingo get the right idea anyway, and shorthand needs to be short. And this is Hacker News, not a Wendy's, so jargon is more than expected.

If someone (a "normie") reads something and don't understand it, we should all be encouraging them to ask questions and try to give them accessible answers. Not shield them from this knowledge, not fetishize mindless consumerism, not behave like snobs, and especially not dismiss something important only because it's not commonly understood.

For marketing materials that target "normie" audiences, it should be just phrased in "normie"-accessible way (look how Valve does that with their hardware), but when we're compiling a HN wishlist from HN comments, complaining about jargon is silly.

/rant

It’s an interesting book for sure, but I had (minor, but still) issues even with the introductory premises. Just a few notes I made from the very first chapter:

- Jaynes used the term “reminiscence” in a way very different from Ballard and claimed no animal is capable of reminiscence. That was a very odd claim overall.

- Then he claimed that if we ever create a language that can express everything, metaphors won’t be possible. Which is, I think, almost obviously false, because many metaphors are constructed artistically, despite having exact terms.

- And he talks about spatialization as a primitive aspect of consciousness, but he seems to talk about relations/connectedness at best.

And so on - I misplaced my notes somewhere and only recovered a few random bits. Still, interesting reading, fun (albeit really questionable) core idea, but those papercuts were kinda off-putting for me.

Yes, of course.

My point was that computers are as secure as human(s) who programmed them were careful and competent. Computer security is ultimately human knowledge and reasoning competence (plus time/money tradeoffs, if made willingly)

Human security. Computers are fine, they usually do exactly as they’re programmed.

Yes. That’s “is used to cause harm” situation, exactly.

Isn’t the whole hope is that Google (and other app vendors) doesn’t even get a say at what’s possible through Siri.

All it takes is to expose application’s UI to the model, and let the model send actions. If a human can do it tapping on the screen, the machine should be able to do the same thing.

Sometimes that lead ends up in some school kids instead of enemy combatants or other plausible threats to life.

> In the physical world, it seems like when an tool/device/instrument causes harm (or is used to cause harm), we assign blame to either the user of the tool or its creator.

Firearms are a notorious example where some people get, well, weird.

I like the overall direction, but how to tax it without screwing over hobbyist archivists aka data hoarders? That is, how to assess the value of some datastore, somehow distinguishing between personal preference profiles, random LLM software slop and, say, vintage anime collections?

We didn’t have laws but every TV at the dawn of the era came with full schematics and documentation.

That said, I’m not arguing that we don’t need laws today - we do, or at least I have no other idea how to do a course correction from where we are. Preferably wide-range ones that alter the whole consumer-producer relationships.

But the key thing is not the laws, it’s the attitude (individual and corporate) towards others. Can’t legislate that, I’m afraid.

Which ones?

Aren’t we all living with an illusion of intentionality of our actions, and the uncanniness of a machine is because it doesn’t pretend?

Meaning is listener’s own perception (author’s own intent is a suggestion at best - if I’d be paid a dollar every time I thought some artist meant something when they didn’t or meant something different, I’d sure have a good wad of cash), and when a listener learns about the purely mechanistic “authorship” they start to feel uncanny unless they find an outing in appreciating the mechanicity itself.

Two completely different stories. One is public data scraping, another is private conversation scraping (where they're a first-party to the conversation). The key difference is that in the former case, no one made any promises, in the latter an explicit promise was made that data is not used for training (assuming opt-out).