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gbanfalvi

228 karma · joined March 18, 2015

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gbanfalvi··on Feeling Sad about AI
But why organize and risk getting a few of us fired when we can just wait and do nothing comfortably?
gbanfalvi··on How do you keep Web MIDI from crashing a 1983 synthesizer?
You can offer standalone exes without installers.
gbanfalvi··on Wikipedia Workers to Seek Union Recognition
It’s true. The best approach is to stand alone against the fire and try to put it out yourself. Maybe the fire will be nice to you if you beg.
gbanfalvi··on Wikipedia Workers in Britain set global first by seeking union recognition
“Global prosperity” is a good one.

How is global prosperity achieved? Business owners get all the profits of our labor and maybe some of it trickles down? Workers get “prosperous” on crumbs?

I’ll be expectantly awaiting for my prosperity in the mail.

gbanfalvi··on Please Use AI
I don't think that's what the page talks about. There are lots of _valid_ opportunities in our day-to-day lives where we'd benefit _so much_ from doing the research, struggle with a problem or reach out to someone ourselves instead of just asking an LLM -- but we just take a shortcut.

I wouldn'tve asked a stranger in a park in Serbia about a statue, but I do recognize that:

- I'm not thinking for myself almost at all when writing code, just orchestrating the work.

- I don't google to learn about topics/questions that come up, i just ask Claude for a summary.

- I don't reach out to people around me if I can just write a prompt.

And it feels like I'm consuming so much more information but retaining only the surface levels of it.

gbanfalvi··on Please Use AI
And you don't think AI is going to make these things worse? Even if you only have 3 friends, talk to them, hang out, do stuff with them.
gbanfalvi··on Protestware for coding agents
> If something in your software is intentionally malicious or damaging, it's malware.

Seems to me like the library functions as it should. It behaves like a property testing library: it tests properties.

gbanfalvi··on Google changes its search box
Time to start rendering junk data to all crawlers, including google.
gbanfalvi··on Teaching Claude Why
Not sure it’s much of a choice and more of a decision the greedy half make and imposition (often violent) on the other half.
gbanfalvi··on Where the goblins came from
Steel has almost always (as in 99.99...% of the time) delivered to our expectations based on our understanding of it.

The cases where we built something out of steel and it failed are _massively_ outnumbered by the instances where we used it where/when suitable. If we built something in steel and it failed/someone died we stopped doing that pretty soon after.

gbanfalvi··on Deezer says 44% of songs uploaded to its platform daily are AI-generated
> Real art always seems to find its fans eventually, and I don't think AI will stop that.

That's what's happening though. Someone is writing a prompt, generating some slop and then directing bots to collect money that will never make it to real artists.

If they were getting too small of a slice before, now it's even smaller.

> But at that point, if the music really is that good, does it matter?

We're very far from "that point". The point we're at right now, which we need to tackle is the one in which we're drowning in slop.

I'm not personally against using AI tools to write code or help someone generate music, but right now it just impedes, devalues and deplatforms the real stuff to make money from a system that hasn't caught up.

gbanfalvi··on Why Objective-C
I would absolutely not call Rust a simpler Swift. Swift doesn't have and ownership/borrowing system, explicit lifetime for objects, much more expressive (and therefore complex) macro support...

I get that there's a tradeoff. Rust requires you to be way more explicit about what you're intending upfront and that can, in the long term, lead to simpler code -- but there's no dimension (depth-wise or breadth-wise) that I'd call Rust simpler.

gbanfalvi··on End of an era for me: no more self-hosted git
Someone should just come up with some middleware that produces jumbled-up responses. Your website will still match the keywords from search engines but be toxic to ai crawlers
gbanfalvi··on How AI destroys institutions
> Having large bureaucratic organizations

Yes, that's what the paper argues. Institutions at every scale (say, doctor's clinics, hospitals, entire healthcare systems) are very challenging to access compared to me asking ChatGPT. And it's not just the bureaucracy, but there's time, money and many other intangible costs associated with interacting with institutions.

> [Large bureaucratic organizations]that run everything and aren't held accountable

But they ultimately are. People from all types of institutions are fired and systems are constantly reorganized and optimized all the time. Not necessarily for the better -- but physical people are not black boxes spewing tokens.

Individuals' choices are ultimately a product of their knowledge and their incentives. An MLM's output is the result of literal randomness.

> run the world breaking up families, freedom, and fun

There's lots of terrible institutions vulnerable to corruption and with fucked up policies, but inserting a black box into _can't_ improve these.

> where truth is determined by policy

The truth is the truth. Regardless of what policy says. The question is, do you want to be able to have someone to hold accountable or just "¯\_(ツ)_/¯ hey the algorithm told me that you're not eligible for healthcare"

gbanfalvi··on How AI destroys institutions
I think the paper is really good and makes loads of valid points... and it's kinda terrifying.

Having super accessible machines that can make anything up and aren't held accountable run the world is going to break so many systems where truth matters.

gbanfalvi··on European Majority favours more social media regulation
The questions seem more focused around social media but I wish there were more safeguards to stop us (I’m talking as an EU citizen) from crashing and burning when the AI bubble pops.
gbanfalvi··on Markdown is holding you back
The other options look like garbage tho
gbanfalvi··on Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
> Actually, around here they are giving a second chance to people whom over-regulation of the work market made too expensive to hire.

Over-regulation being what, minimum wages? Coverage for basic social safety nets? ‘Cause that’s what we lost.

> It goes like this: (well intended) regulation => raise price of doing business => fewer startups => less competition => incumbents enjoying practically monopoly => incumbents behaving like monopolistic a-holes.

Bell system was broken up into seven different companies, thanks to regulation. It’s _lack_ of regulation that let telecoms merge together into behemoths. There _are_ small ISPs and telecoms in the US, they just can’t compete due to the size differential.

> In China. You forgot "in China". … Good luck promoting environmental regulation there.

Right, let’s jump for a Tu Quoque. China is destroying the planet so who cares what we do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m not blind to the existence of plain bad regulation, regulatory barriers and capture — but the overwhelming majority of these arguments have just been used to make regular people’s lives’ worse.

“Cheap housing isn’t being built in the UK because regulation makes it more expensive!” -> remove regulations -> there’s still no cheap housing but anything from 1990s onwards is now also badly built.

As a construction developer I’m sure I’d say there’s still too much regulation though. Gotta bump those margins.

gbanfalvi··on Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
Lmao you can’t be serious. This is something that can only be said if you can’t/won’t quantify social cost.

Deregulated gambling has had a horrible impact on individuals. Repealing Glass—Steagall led to a global financial crisis. Gig economy businesses are exploiting workers by the thousands through self employment loopholes. We have insane monopolistic pricing and practices in the US in eg the telecom industry. Worst of all is that we’ve likely doomed the entire planet based on what is effectively too little environmental regulation.

gbanfalvi··on Papercraft: Functional HTML Templating for Ruby
Looks great! Kinda wish Python had a syntax that allowed for more “declarative-looking” code
gbanfalvi··on Detached Point Arithmetic
This feels so obvious and simple how is this not already a standard thing everywhere? Is it because the mantissa and point position don't both fit into a single register?
gbanfalvi··on Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation
Agreed. Nepotism is the way forward.
gbanfalvi··on Gross Apple Marketing
What is this "Ubuntu" and how can I use it? As a consumer, what does it mean to me that it's "Certified"? Certified in what?

Apple's ads show you the product, how you can use it and how you and the people around you feel after using it (like you took a sneaky shortcut and happy, respectively).

gbanfalvi··on Use Prolog to improve LLM's reasoning
> 6. I'm not sure what tasks call for this kind of logical reasoning

Basically any tasks that fulfill legal or business requirements? Both companies and governments are rushing to put LLMs into anything they can to avoid paying people. It’s vital to ascertain that, say, a benefits application is assessed properly and the LLM doesn’t hallucinate its way into an incorrect decision.

I’d question if we really need LLMs in many of the places we’re sticking them at all (or if it’ll even be cheaper), but that’s more flawed human decision.

gbanfalvi··on All software in EU under product liability from 2026
Why would companies do that? They won't be held liable once it's modified.
gbanfalvi··on No same site = None cookies for iOS18
Schools can use MDM profiles to track or restrict navigation.

Not only would you _not_ want to do it at this level or by setting cookies from a technical perspective, it wouldn’t work well as soon as a user goes to different app.

gbanfalvi··on Rustpad is an efficient and minimal open-source collaborative text editor
Would be nice if there was some solution to actually run code, so it can be used to pair up and teach or test people. The UI could also benefit from some streamlining (that sidebar takes up a lot of space for info you don't need to see all the time). Also if there's any possibility to share a directory of files to simultaneously work on from one of the user's (or the server's) system. That'd make this a pretty good product in itself.
gbanfalvi··on How the CIA 'kidnapped' a Soviet moon probe during the space race
There was a great episode on the Failure to Launch podcast on the 28th of June that goes into detail on how the theft took place.

https://x.com/launch_failure/status/1806667561129447739

gbanfalvi··on Canada demands 5% of revenue from Netflix, Spotify, and other streamers
That’s not necessarily always true. Spotify may very well pass costs on _right now_, but it may choose to lower its rates if it sees that enough people start unsubscribing.

Companies are constantly adjusting subscriber count vs revenue per subscriber and will charge the absolute maximum they can get away with. Doesn’t make sense not to as a profit-driven company.

gbanfalvi··on You Can Thank Private Equity for That Enormous Doctor's Bill
- Singapore has Medisave, which is mandatory and strictly regulated.

- Insurers in Switzerland are obligated to insure everyone and can't make a profit on the base plan.

- Netherlands has similar requirement for cheap (and subsidized) mandatory insurance plans.

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