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etherealG

800 karma · joined July 6, 2009

Working at Doctolib to improve healthcare personal email: sheldon dot els at gmail work email: sheldon dot els at doctolib
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etherealG··on Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school
I think like every field this revolution reveals the cracks, good teachers use AI to enhance teaching material and experience for students while weak teachers complaint they can't keep up with student's access to Ai that out-paces them.

AI forces us all in every field to be better at what we do, and coupled with the previous innovation of the internet only reveals the drastic variance in quality of skills. Teaching is no different.

Good teachers use AI. Bad teachers complain AI is ruining their job, but I posit it's only revealing they were never able to excel beyond their students in the first place.

A savant exceeds their teacher fast. Even faster with AI.

etherealG··on Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent
And a meta-point on top of the objectively better revenue argument swinging back to the other point about honor: if some or even most of the people involved in the honor system believe it works for the purpose of maintaining honor between each other, then it will encourage honorable behavior, even when there's significant dishonorable behavior.

The fact that most people don't know that the honor system is about money not honor is part of what makes the money part of the honor system work.

etherealG··on Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
And what I find fascinating is I see similar mimicking by my 5 year old. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to call this a lack of being genuine. Sometimes emotions are learned in humans but we wouldn’t call them fake.

I don’t want to declare machines to have emotion outright, but to call mimicry evidence of falsehood is also itself false.

etherealG··on I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
Replace apple with nothing. Replace now with always. Replace ads on with nothing. You now understand news.

News is a scam. It’s called propaganda. We knew this for a long time.

etherealG··on An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia
Because google search and llm teams are different, with different incentives. Search is the cash cow they keep squeezing for more cash at the expense of good quality since at least 2018, as revealed in court documents showing they did that on purpose to keep people searching more to have more ads and more revenue. Google AI embedded in search has the same goals, keep you clicking on ads… my guess would be Gemini doesn’t have any of the bad part of enshitification yet… but it will come. If you think hallucinations are bad now, just you wait until tech companies start tuning them up on purpose to get you to make more prompts so they can inject more ads!
etherealG··on We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own
I'm so sorry that's the situation in your country. Another answer to your message from Germany is pretty close to my experience in France, child protection is way less combative and genuinely invested in what's good for children.
etherealG··on We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own
I think I might enjoy the CPS scenario... let them call CPS, and wait for CPS to arrive, and then discuss with CPS who is endangering the child, the parent or the school. I'm pretty sure a judge will quickly decide whether their rule makes sense or not, and I think judges in child protection cases are going to quickly side with what's important for the child.

I HATE this kind of nonsense, and threatening you as a parent is only making things worse. Why not offer a way to handle this on a simple website? It would have lower cost to the school and be more accessible to anyone with any device able to access websites. Nonsense.

etherealG··on Why LLMs can't really build software
Because once you figure out the correct way to handhold, you can automate it and the tediousness goes away.

It’s only tedious once per codebase or task, then you find the less tedious recipe and you’re done.

You can even get others to do the tedious part at their layer of abstraction so that you don’t have to anymore. Same as compilers, cpu design, or any other pet of the stack lower than the one you’re using.

etherealG··on Vibechart
But the way they learn to be wise in the context of using LLMs is to try using them and fail, just like all learning experiences. Companies insisting on the use of these tools seems logical to me when the assumption is that they will, once learned, be better than previous methods of working, but only with practice.
etherealG··on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
how do you know what you want if you didn't write a test for it?

I'm afraid what you want is often totally unclear until you start to use a program and realize that what you want is either what the program is doing, or it isn't and you change the program.

MANY programs are made this way, I would argue all of them actually. Some of the behaviour of the program wasn't imagined by the person making it, yet it is inside the code... it is discovered, as bugs, as hidden features, etc.

Why are programmers so obsessed that not knowing every part of the way a program runs means we can't use the program? I would argue you already don't, or you are writing programs that are so fundamentally trivial as to be useless anyway.

LLM written code is just a new abstraction layer, like Python, C, Assembly and Machine Code before it... the prompts are now the code. Get over it.

etherealG··on Covert Web-to-App Tracking via Localhost on Android
exactly, the more interesting question: would anyone be willing to prosecute a Meta executive over this? Sadly, I expect no.
etherealG··on The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
Imagine this as a voice chat interface between 2 human beings. This is basically pretending like the interaction of thought and perception of what is on screen is somehow gated by a “I have fully consciously absorbed everything on screen and decided my next action” perfect modeling where both the human ability to perceive and the computer ability to represent information are prefect.

No. That’s not how humans interact with computers. It’s not how humans interact with each other either.

Turn based games can be fun. They are not how we want to interact for day to day life.

Sorry but your idea comes across as one that makes the job of making the computer good to interact with easier, but not as one that makes the computer better to interact with as a human.

Please stop over simplifying a complex system. Humans are complex, the solution is t to be less human. It is for computers to become better at human interaction on human levels.

etherealG··on Gemini 2.5
I’m not sure lacking comprehension of a comment and choosing to ignore that lack is better. Or worse: asking everyone to manually explain every reference they make. The LLM seems a good choice when comprehension is lacking.
etherealG··on US Ends Support For Ukrainian F-16s
Because stock prices and the people's interests they reflect only care about immediate returns that allow investors to then dump those returns into the next immediate returning investment again, to maximize return with no consideration for the overall health of the system they operate in. Capitalism. Long term health of the stock systems. Long term health of the underlying value they reflect. Nothing long term matters in a stock buy at all.

Why do you even ask this question, did the answer really not seem obvious, or was it rhetorical?

etherealG··on Nobody cares
I totally agree, but also wonder how to fight against this cancer. It seems to me like it’s a natural state of groups of people to devolve into this kind of group as the group grows in size. Are we simply doomed to failure?
etherealG··on Cognitive load is what matters
I think the argument against comments is that while function names are a necessary form of communicating intent of the code, comments aren’t. The more forms there are the more work there is to update on each change in the code. Comments mean more to update and hence more to fail to update. They also generally can’t be detected for staleness as well as functions, although that is changing now with better ai, not only compilers etc.
etherealG··on Cognitive load is what matters
Db changes are generally at runtime, how would you recompile rust code during the save of the data to the db? How do you rollback the change if a compile fails? How do you add the necessary code to handle new cases of the enum but not have it present in the db? This is amazingly interesting to me, would love to know more.
etherealG··on 1-800-ChatGPT
Why do you try to mandate how others experience the world?
etherealG··on Everyone is capable of, and can benefit from, mathematical thinking
Shouldn’t that headline read “or can benefit from”. Not a shining example of good mathematical thinking. Oh the irony.
etherealG··on Trump wins presidency for second time
Why would you ask for a citation of something so easy to verify?
etherealG··on M4 MacBook Pro
For my parents: “under utilities” means it’s mostly impossible to use. What does under mean? What are utilities, are they different from apps? Can I Google search that? Where is connections? What is a connection, is that like a friend?

Glad to see your parents are tech savvy, but this reads like you live in a very different reality from mine.

etherealG··on GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic
Ask a modern LLM to write an API for a book store... pretty sure it'll be close to, if not better, than the quoted part of your comment.

It's hard to argue with the drastic jump in LLM capabilities.

etherealG··on FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions
Of course that’s the strategy. It’s called enshitifcation. Cory Doctorow coined the term and has many cool examples like this in his related speeches and blog posts.
etherealG··on Sanding UI
Because it’s not small. Doing what the article describes takes a very significant amount of time. Especially compared to a much more directly estimated and measurable action like “add x feature”. Doing what is described halfway will likely return poor results since noticing the subtle things like the example given only happens when trying many times with a tendency to try random things that you didn’t before. Who purposefully clicks somewhere they never did before, QA people. Most engineers are not QA, and they don’t even begin to think in a way that leads them to try things that they didn’t before just to try to find a few pixels of unclickable UI. Your assumption that the kind of work described is small is a much bigger problem than any so called assumption that blaming the PM and CEO is at fault.
etherealG··on Show HN: Voice bots with 500ms response times
moshi by Kyutai seems to have beaten your approach by about 500ms, and they're going to release open source.

https://www.youtube.com/live/hm2IJSKcYvo

hn discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40866569

etherealG··on [dead]
However it does offer similar features to rewind.ai, no recording of apps on a blocklist and no recording of private browsing mode. This feels like a pretty fair compromise of privacy vs. functionality.
etherealG··on Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
The muscle of doing pointless bullshit without understanding that it’s pointless… are you kidding? This has got to be the most troll comment I ever saw in this website.
etherealG··on Show HN: Beeper Mini – iMessage client for Android
Which is irrelevant, eu or us?
etherealG··on Organic Maps
I’m interested in doing the same setup. Would you mind sharing what camera and button you use?
etherealG··on Police stage ‘chilling’ raid on Marion County newspaper
But why? That’s such a strange rule.
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