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groby_b

7,970 karma · joined October 20, 2009

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groby_b··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
4A still doesn't permit you to destroy the evidence. Resist on 4A grounds, destroy the evidence, 4A reasons get overturned - you've got yourself a conviction. US v. Akram Musleh.
groby_b··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
While I think it's an abuse of power from a moral point of view - yes, that would be the expected legal outcome. Under any administration.

You can refuse to hand over access. You can't go torch evidence. Caught Ollie North as well.

groby_b··on I am morally opposed to updating my Claude.md
It's working reasonably well for me.

Given your description of the behavior, my guess is context window compression bit you. Less likely if it's a root level CLAUDE.md and you used a recent version of Claude Code.

groby_b··on I am morally opposed to updating my Claude.md
Possibly. But telling it in a rules file eats significantly less context than if it needs to read a bunch of files every time just to find what "conformant" means.

AGENTS.md is a poor substitute for agents actually learning, but it somewhat works.

And sure, you can (and should) enforce constraints via githooks whenever you can (determinism is good), but if the agent only finds out at checkin time, it's created a whole bunch of code it needs to redo, and that doesn't run properly if you do the caveman thing and actually run your code before committing. Again, token & context waste.

groby_b··on I Am Morally Opposed to Updating My Claude.md
If your writing gets called "slop", you might want to look at why. It's usually and indication it's considered low quality writing, and... you can fix that. (Unless you use AI, then you're doomed ;)
groby_b··on I am morally opposed to updating my Claude.md
Uh. The .md files are also there so I don't need to say every single time "In this house, we believe in uv & PEP723. Also, no fucking localized imports, no just-in-case try/except."

(Or the equivalent incantations for other languages)

They aren't there for others, they are there to make sure the code produced measures up to my standards. Sure, it helps that it also applies to requests made by others, but that's a bonus.

groby_b··on I Am Morally Opposed to Updating My Claude.md
It's... a weird take.

"Sure, the model makes repeatedly the same mistakes, and I could prevent that, but then it wouldn't be the same model" sounds like an excuse for masochism.

The one small bit of truth is that yes, instructions might become outdated, and they might affect negatively how the system performs. You fix that by... updating your instructions.

And if you deeply care about that potential negative impact (most models are pretty good at just ignoring long outdated issues), you run evals on model upgrades. You certainly don't refuse to use anything but the bare model.

(Of course, there are also folks who refuse to write code in any way except with sed, so there we go)

groby_b··on Google Discloses $94.1B in SpaceX Stock, Marking 6% Stake
> you can always short the stock.

Which is going not too badly for the shorts, so far. There's a reason almost 50% of the float is loaned out.

We'll see once the earnings call rolls around.

groby_b··on If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
Given doing better costs money, and people don't want to pay for better, leaving that place is hard. We've seen the same play out with physical goods - the cheapness of just-good-enough-but-right-now-cheaply outcompetes quality, which costs and takes time.

We as society are choosing to be in that place.

groby_b··on If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
> Use Linux/KDE.

Yep. I, too, get more productive by spending a PhD worth of effort on choosing a window manager.

groby_b··on Proving a human wrote something
"No information about your text is ever sent to the server, and there’s no way to identify the author based on the minted certificate"

This means the certificate is independent of author and source text.

There's nothing stopping you from sending fake counts/duration to the semoi server. It's a certificate that only says "at this point in time, this is the information I was provided with".

You can then attach it to any piece of text you like.

At the very least, you'd need the ability to prove that there is an underlying event stream with these characteristics, and that this exact event stream creates the document in question. You still can fake that event stream, but it becomes enough work to distract at least casual abusers.

But really, it's the equivalent of saying "I wrote this without AI, honest" in-doc and signing that with your personal key. The value depends entirely on your willingess to be truthful. (IOW: I predict we'll see a resurgence of reputation systems, to some extent)

groby_b··on Perfection is not over-engineering
Sure, but did it need to be written by AI? Does that solve for the right constraint?
groby_b··on Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
Yes, to get funding.
groby_b··on Kaiser nurses say AI, workplace surveillance are making their jobs, care worse
But they don't want to, because figuring that out is your job as a supervisor.

If you outsource that work to customers/patients, you'll end up with the car dealership model, where the sales rep begs you to give a 10 on every single question including on the interior design so they don't get fired.

That's the part most of this discussion misses. Supervisors exist for a reason. Congrats on your flat org structure, you fucked up an important feedback channel.

groby_b··on Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
There are other phones. They allow publishing PWAs, it turns out.
groby_b··on Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price
"you just need radiators which are passive

"Just" is doing a lot of work there. SpaceX is planning to launch 100 GW of compute annually, that comes with ~ 2.5 square kilometers of radiator (assuming an optimistic 800K radiator temp and emissivity of 0.9, double sided)

Go for advanced carbon composites, you can do that with just 5,000 metrics tons or so of material. That's 34 starship launches just for the radiators. We haven't solved assembly, we haven't brought up power panels or core compute. Planned launch cadence that SpaceX hopes to reach end of this year: 12/year.

groby_b··on Apple targets dozens of OpenAI employees with legal letters
"Altman doesn’t appear to be a beacon of corporate ethics."

Do those exist? I'm usually happy to see a mild candle flicker in the ethics window.

groby_b··on My car’s OTA update broke Android Auto
This is a general belief of our current version of capitalism. As much work as possible is outsourced to the user, the gains are captured by the company.

See also self-checkout etc.

groby_b··on Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
It does. It's called a PWA.
groby_b··on Why American ambulance rides are so expensive
In retrospect, I think my wording might be misleading - I didn't mean to imply the US is doing significantly worse than developed world, just that none of the developed world does significantly worse than the US either.

I.e. I was responding to the original "in 'most of the world' EMS quality is ass.", trying to say that you only get that outcome if you compare apples and oranges (developed vs developing)

8-10 minutes in urban areas is pretty much universal (for the developed world). Rural areas are where differences come in, and even there standards for the developed world are somewhat on the same level.

groby_b··on How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI
So, KYC propaganda?
groby_b··on Why American ambulance rides are so expensive
Haven't yet seen a developed nation do worse than the US. If you prefer to compare against developing countries only, sure, winning by lowering the bar to the ground is an option.
groby_b··on Girls just wanna have fast MPMC queues with bounded waiting
This project was likely not written just to be convenient for you.

And if it's got value for you, hey, it's open source. Spend the 15 minutes and 10 cents, it's a bargain.

groby_b··on I think I have LLM burnout
Write an LLM script to review them. Tell it to find at least three severe issues. Set to auto-reply.

He who brings the slop cannon shall be drowned by slop rain.

groby_b··on The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous
They're not just "too zealous", they're ludicrous.

I've had it reject looking at pages served from my local network because it "can't find it with my search tool" and had "ethical concerns about consent for access".

The People's AI Concern Front has gotten the classifier they want, and it's made Claude hilariously useless. I am waiting with bated breath for their next set of revenue numbers. (And happily hand my money to competitors instead)

groby_b··on 30papers.com – Ilya's 30 essential ML papers, in a beginner friendly format
I mean, you don't have to annotate them :) Would I love to read annotations? Sure - but it's a boatload of work for you, and if it's just meant as a repo for you and your friends, no need to do a ton of work just because an Internet rando asked.

But given the sudden wide audience, a quick "here's what this is for" at the top might be helpful.

groby_b··on China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes
Good for China.

Society cannot work with too many corrupt civil servants. Yes, "autocrats", "civil liberties", and yet - the guy slurped up $325M to put his finger on the scale, not to change the model of governance.

I wish we in the west took corruption more seriously, but I suppose we're more interested in cage fights on the lawn these days.

groby_b··on 98% isn't much
"Truly robust engineering isn’t about what works for most; it’s about gracefully handling the edge cases"

Not really. Truly robust engineering includes a cost-benefit analysis of which edge cases you handle. We don't live in a world of unlimited time & money.

groby_b··on Software Bonkers
Yes, but we've traded LLM psychosis for agent psychosis, followed by loop psychosis. (Or was it the other way round? Also, we did dark software factories already, right?)

Turns out that if you try to be "15 minutes into everyone else's future", you get better and more frequent trips than any psychedelics could provide.

groby_b··on 30papers.com – Ilya's 30 essential ML papers, in a beginner friendly format
I think it'd be interesting to hear what you think the goal of the site is.

Is it just rehosting the list, plus a reformatted copy of the papers? I was hoping you'd have at least annotated them with what you'd learned?

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