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finebalance

140 karma · joined March 1, 2018

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finebalance··on Hy4 preview
They are different mediums. While the underlying story might be Tolkien's, every frame is an artistic choice and while LLMs can make a choice is many situations, they are unable to 1) keep it coherent b) make it meaningful because art, to me and most, in an outcome of human experiences and thought, which by definition an llm cannot do.
finebalance··on Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs
Poor people are already being priced out of cheap phones due to rise in RAM-related unit costs. https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/smartphone-sales-to-plummet...
finebalance··on US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire
> This war was unavoidable btw, it was going to happen sometime this year or next.

Iran was, as per the latest reports I've read, complying with terms and not enriching uranium to weapons-grade or close to weapons-grade. Are there credible reports suggesting otherwise?

finebalance··on Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban
"What's the point of having fuck you money if you never say fuck you."

They are all horrible. If there is ever a reckoning, I hope this entire class of spineless shits get destroyed.

finebalance··on Coding agents have replaced every framework I used
"evolution (fit to environment) than engineering (fit to purpose)."

Oh, I absolutely love this lens.

finebalance··on Finland detains ship and its crew after critical undersea cable damaged
It can be both, I think? Politicians/powerful people take advantage of divisions in society, but often those divisions do exist in a fully-fledged or nascent form for them to exploit.
finebalance··on Grok 4 Fast now has 2M context window
Killing USAID.
finebalance··on Dicing an Onion, the Mathematically Optimal Way
I do it more or less this way - except I keep the root intact until the end. It keeps the onion structurally intact until I'm done with the dicing. At which point, the root takes a single chop to lop off, and then the whole thing scatters into tiny, mostly uniform dices. It's quite satisfying.
finebalance··on OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80%
Google exposes their reasoning. You can use their new gemini python sdk to get thought traces.
finebalance··on AI's energy footprint
> not that a single user uses a lot of energy for a simple chat.

This seems like a classic tragedy of the commons, no? An individual has a minor impact, but the rationale switching to LLM tools by the collective will likely have a massive impact.

finebalance··on Gemini 2.5
That's ok. AI will kill those off soon enough, and like all winners, rewrite history enough so that that inconvenient theft never happened anyway. It's manifest destiny, or something.
finebalance··on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
I can't speak to Rust, Go or C, but for me LLMs have greatly accelerated the process of learning and building projects in Julia.
finebalance··on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
Not a clue.

I'm a decent engineer working as a DS in a consulting firm. In my last two projects, I checked in (or corrected) so much more code than the other two junior DS's in my team, that at the end some 80%-90% of the ML-related stuff had been directly built, corrected or optimized by me. And most of the rest that wasn't, was mostly because it was boilerplate. LLMs were pivotal in this.

And I am only a moderately skilled engineer. I can easily see somebody with more experience and skills doing this to me, and making me nearly redundant.

finebalance··on Tech workers flocked to Austin. Now they're desperate to get out
So, tech workers paid >200k couldn't anticipate that hot places are going to get a lot hotter due to global warming and all the trends we've been observing over the last decade or so? Interesting.
finebalance··on Why Men Get So Few Matches on Dating Apps [video]
... like women are all special and interesting by virtue of being female? Most of humanity is bland and forgettable. Gender is hardly a factor there.
finebalance··on I saw the face of God in a semiconductor factory
The purple prose is exhausting.
finebalance··on Facebook says Apple is too powerful – they're right
> And in all of this no-one gives a crap about the children, since they rarely spend even a word talking about tracking down the uploaders or creators of said porn (i.e. they say a site "has child porn", but not how fast it is removed, or if the site gives the IP of child-porn uploaders to the police, or anything beyond trying to establish in the viewer a bad site <-> child porn association).

Aren't there legal requirements in place for this stuff, at least in the US?

finebalance··on India Semiconductor Mission
Collective fucking madness.

It's tiring to be subject to the constant narcissism. The human toll of the incompetence of this government is incalculable. They've set us back decades, if not forever, because I have no clue how our dumb bureaucracy and spineless civil society are going to deal with destruction that climate change is likely to visit on the subcontinent without completely fragmenting.

finebalance··on Is Bluetooth holding back Apple's AirPods? We asked the man who made them
I swear. But it's not just an issue with the cheap, knockoff stuff: my Bose Soundsport Earbuds often fail, too, with the left one connecting maybe two thirds of the time. It's so infuriating. The only upside is that they were a gift rather than a purchase, so at least I don't have to suffer through the fact that I paid for this crap.
finebalance··on Good News on Climate Change
In so many of these papers it seems to be almost a given that the global south is fucked so, holding that constant, they do a cost-benefit analysis on various levels of warming for already (mostly) rich countries.
finebalance··on The metaverse is bullshit
It's kind of astounding how rapidly the series has disappeared from the mainstream. Couldn't have bungled it up worse had they tried.
finebalance··on Google’s new ad goes full Jony Ive on the Pixel 5A headphone jack
Slick pretentious nonsense unfortunately makes the world go round these days.
finebalance··on Alcohol as a social technology to check the trustworthiness of others (2014)
"Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?"
finebalance··on Apple supplier Foxconn to invest $1B in India, sources say
I'm Indian, and I think there's a strong case to be made that the Indian avg IQ is likely to be lower than 100. This is nurture though, not nature: a large % of Indians do not get sufficient micronutriants during childhood, and are anemic (40%~) [1], stunted (40%) [2], and much else besides.

[1] https://www.hospitalmanagement.net/comment/anemia-prevalence...

[2] https://www.indiaspend.com/38-of-indian-children-under-4-poo...

finebalance··on Economists’ projections of interest rates and unemployment have proved too high
Possibly: low income earners lost jobs in substantial enough numbers to affect the median (that to some extent is robust to outliers).
finebalance··on Matrix Calculus for Deep Learning
It matters, in certain contexts.

For example: a large number of clustering methods boil down to matrix factorization, with variations in the constraints. If you have both domain understanding and a general understanding of what kind of output these variations are likely to result in, you can often narrow down the list of methods you need to try.

Also, interviews.

finebalance··on John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
The point the poster above is trying to make is that given the same amount of data, improvements in technique is leading to significant improvements in accuracy.

An illustrative example comes from the first lesson in fastai's deep learning course: an image classifier that would have been SOTA as late as 2012/13, can be built by the hobbyist in like 30 seconds.

That said, I don't disagree that this is all narrow AI, at best.

finebalance··on Failing 15% of the time is the best way to learn, say scientists
Right. We have priors about how the world works, and that usually helps.
finebalance··on Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. I live in a country where people don't get enough protein due to religious and cultural dietary restrictions. Once I got my own apartment I upped my protein intake and significantly limited my carbs, and found that the constant cravings I'd had pretty much my entire life decreased substantially, after a short but painful transition period.
finebalance··on Ultra marathon runner earns awards for both first place woman and overall winner
>The people who are good at this are just so much better at it than the average person. A fast woman, even if she isn't faster than the fastest men, will still be faster than 99.9+% of them.

That's not in doubt. An extremely skilled person will outcompete the field, all other things being equal. Unfortunately, with reference to most sports, all other things aren't equal, which is why good high-school male teams in sports such as soccer can credibly compete with national-level adult female teams.

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