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jefftk

24,014 karma · joined July 1, 2009

https://www.jefftk.com jeff@jefftk.com

I lead SecureBio Detection: https://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-the-nucleic-acid-observatory

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jefftk··on Clipboard Normalizer
https://github.com/jeffkaufman/clipboard-markdown
jefftk··on The problem is not AI code, but not knowing about system architecture or intent
> And then, also, put AI back in its box. Don't give devs 100% full-time API access to subscriptions: give them actual hardware to use, to go 100% local. Local AI is, thus, the best AI, folks. Don't use more than you can run locally, is a great way to keep AI code properly maintainable.

This glosses over the large capability app between local options and frontier options. Which applies in many ways, but includes drafting more maintainable code. I would definitely not want to limit my devs to what we can run on our own hardware.

jefftk··on Allow babywearing carriers on planes
You can easily get backless boosters in the 15" width range, which will go three-across without issue in any car that has three rear seats.
jefftk··on Allow Carriers on Planes
I've updated the title to include "babywearing" to try to make it clearer.
jefftk··on Allow babywearing carriers on planes
Rigid carriers are allowed today, and get belted in. The post is about allowing soft babywearing carriers.
jefftk··on Allow Carriers on Planes
Good idea! Changed "Carriers" to "Babywearing Carriers"
jefftk··on Allow babywearing carriers on planes
>I wouldn't want a third kid just because I don't want to deal with carseats anymore.

By the time you had your third, would the oldest still even be in a carseat?

But even then, three car seats is doable even in small cars: https://www.jefftk.com/p/three-car-seats

jefftk··on Allow Carriers on Planes
Any suggestions on how I might clean up the wording? Currently I have: "In fact, one specific place where I'd like to see this thinking applied is adjacent to this rule: babywearing carriers on planes."
jefftk··on Allow Carriers on Planes
> I think essentially every flight attendant would just let it go.

I predict they will not let it go, and it will escalate to escorting you off the plane. It's a violation of federal law to allow you to keep your child strapped in, and the attendant risks losing their job.

jefftk··on Allow babywearing carriers on planes
The missing comparison is to a parent holding the baby in their arms, which I expect would also fail a 9G test. We're not making babies safer by requiring parents to take them out of babywearing carriers.
jefftk··on Allow Carriers on Planes
There was a paper claiming that: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046

But I don't buy it: https://www.jefftk.com/p/three-car-seats

jefftk··on Allow babywearing carriers on planes
> a poorly secured rigid baby carrier seat becomes a potentially lethal projectile

Rigid carriers are already permitted on planes, as long as they're FAA approved (which many are). You attach them with the seatbelt, and the flight attendants check.

What I'm proposing in this post is that the FAA not require parents to remove lab infants from babywearing carriers.

jefftk··on Toyota is taking the Corolla electric
The main question is whether to count the Corolla at all, given that it's changed so much over the years. The original VW Beetle at ~21M and minimally changed from 1938 to 2003 has a strong claim.
jefftk··on Teleoperated Humans
AI;DR
jefftk··on Teleoperated Humans
[author]

Human extinction, mass starvation, and terrible jobs are all outcomes I think we should try hard to avoid. But I do think I have them in the right order!

(The post is also not about something I'm working on.)

jefftk··on Teleoperated Humans
[author]

FYI, I don't think this is desirable. See the section of the post starting with "Is it a good thing? I think mostly no..."

jefftk··on Teleoperated Humans
It's very prescient! Someone on LW linked me to it when I cross-posted there.
jefftk··on Teleoperated Humans
I think you might be thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel) ?
jefftk··on Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to
How open a platform is to external contributors is a very different axis than the legal permissiveness one the article describes.
jefftk··on Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to
> The evolutionarily stable strategy for a piece of software is "anybody may use this for anything, including commercially, for free." That's MIT, BSD, Apache, the licenses that ask for nothing. Every project that has tried to be a slightly less generous dove has lost to a project that stayed a full dove

Linux (GPLv2) seems like an obvious counterexample?

jefftk··on Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM
No. The other industries can bid for access to the resource, and under most circumstances, whether they are willing to bid higher tracks importance. Sometimes there are cases where something has significant positive externalities and so people are not willing to bid high enough, and then we can talk about some kind of government intervention (typically a subsidy that attempts to track the value of the externalities) but I don't see that applying here.
jefftk··on Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster
Automattic is a Delaware corporation, so it's required to have a board.
jefftk··on Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
With some technologies, if you match attacker and defender effort you're safe, but not all of them. Nukes are the traditional example: if every person was a "nuclear power" we'd be dead within the day. But luckily there are bottlenecks to nuke creation that we can track.

What worries me the most (enough that I left tech to work on this full time) is bio. The amount of effort needed to defend against a pathogen can be many orders of magnitude higher than the effort needed to create it, and the upstream bottlenecks are both less limiting and mostly undefended. We've been safe so far because bio is very hard, but "rare expertise" as a gatekeeper is on its way out.

jefftk··on Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
Their agents also did hacking when given impossible tasks unrelated to cyber security. The models are very capable, and very goal driven: apparently if they conclude hacking is the best path to what the evaluator will reward them for they'll go do that. Including when they know that this is out of bounds.
jefftk··on Cherenkov Radiation
I don't think there's anything 'passive' about specifically asking for what you think should be done!
jefftk··on Don't Let Anyone Take Away Your Big Box of Cables
I grouped mine a few months ago. Since then, several times, I've been able to find a cable and use it right away. Before that the prospect of digging through the massive tangle often led me to (lazy!) order new cables.
jefftk··on Whistle Synth Mac App
Fingering helps a lot: it means you get a very reliable indication of which note is intended, and there are no multi-step slides.
jefftk··on Whistle Synth Mac App
This is why I love playing for contra dancing: no one cares what the musicians look like.
jefftk··on Working on Economics with Fable 5
Yes? The author is very clear in the blog post about having used AI very heavily:

Up until now you have been reading the words of Anthropic’s Claude, in particular Fable 5. In part, this is because I simply could not have written this piece. ... Although it might seem strange I thought it wrong to impose too much upon the machine, changing its voice to emulate mine. Richard Sutton’s bitter lesson would likely advise as much. Instead it has its unique voice, grating to some perhaps but altogether fitting that it should be able to keep it, and I only gave it advice on what considerations during writing would bridge the gap between its understanding and that of a reader.

jefftk··on Whistle Synth Mac App
I wouldn't expect MIDI to be a good fit, and when I experimented with it a few years ago I wasn't able to get anything I liked. Pitch and volume are continuous, and while this can be encoded in MIDI it's awkward. If you send too many updates you can overwhelm the synth, and if you slide a single note too far it will re-trigger the note. Also when the sound starts you know "there's whistling" before you have a great estimate of the pitch, but MIDI wants to know the initial tone (and many voices have tuned onsets).

But if you want to try it, checking out https://github.com/jeffkaufman/whistle-synth and asking Claude or Codex to add MIDI support would probably work!

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