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jlawson

700 karma · joined August 9, 2018

Developer developer developer developer.
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jlawson··on Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia
The controller told the truck to proceed, before telling it to stop. That was a serious ATC error.
jlawson··on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US
It'd be hilarious if women formed their own closed rideshare economy; they'd discover that they demand much higher prices from each other than they get from men.
jlawson··on Stop Killing Games update says EU petition advances
SKG is more like if the car company is required to provide a working factory, capable of manufacturing all the car's parts, along with working supply chains for all those things, to the car ownership "community", if they ever want to stop manufacturing that kind of car. They're required to do this for free.

You know, so the "community" can take it over and keep manufacturing parts to keep the car going forever.

Modern multiplayer game infrastructure is extremely complex; you don't just "hand over the server code". It's a massive multimillion dollar project to do anything analogous to that, and this project is mandatory and must be done for free. And no, gamers won't expect to pay any more because of SKG.

jlawson··on The microstructure of wealth transfer in prediction markets
Prediction markets don't uniquely enable it, but they make it far more effective and easy.

Insider trading is illegal. And for trades that aren't technically insider trading, often having some information ahead of time isn't as useful as it seems. Markets are known to react unpredictably to news; sometimes they move the opposite way from what you'd think, especially over the mid-long term, and there are many other influences on the price.

With a prediction market though, if you know what'll happen in the world, you know exactly what you'll win in the market.

jlawson··on Claude Code CLI was broken
I love how this sci-fi misalignment story is now just a boring part of everyday office work.

"Oh yeah, my AI keeps busting out of its safeguards to do stuff I tried to stop it from doing. Mondays amirite?"

jlawson··on The sword-wielding man hired to kick squatters out of empty Oakland homes
I think the legal approach depends on him being a tenant, which the homeowner can't actually be so easily (because they live somewhere else).
jlawson··on Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
> Food is less nutritious

You can buy the exact same diet as decades ago. Eggs, flour, rice, vegetable oil, beef, chicken - do you think any of these are "less nutritious"?

People are also fatter now, and live much longer.

>you have to buy a separate sound system to meet the same sonic fidelity as old CRT TVs

When you see a device like this does the term 'sonic fidelity' come to mind?

https://www.cohenusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/blogphot...

jlawson··on If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
From experience, there is a huge shortage of human talent.

Some people really are exceptional and there are very few of them.

How many Einsteins do you think are just kicking around? How many Robin Williams's or Tom Hanks's?

How many Kobes? We know not many because there's a huge search to find more.

There aren't 20 more Elons waiting in the wings there. Or 20 more Jensens. And so on.

It's actually far more rational as a society to pay the one guy who can create 100B his 10B for it.

jlawson··on If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
This podcast covers a bunch of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5nj3DLvT64

It's one of those things that can be tricky to research because almost all the researchers and journalists on the topic very much don't want to see this conclusion. So there's a tremendous amount of misrepresentation and wishful reasoning about how to interpret the data. The truth comes out from actually reading the data, not researcher or journalist summaries.

jlawson··on This is not the future
Sure, but go try to build a house while ignoring what Euclidean geometry tells you about it.
jlawson··on If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
This is actually _because_ automation has been so effective.

It's called Baumol's cost disease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

jlawson··on If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
> If we limited individual wealth to $999 million--just outright capped it, and enforced that--it would not impact these people in the slightest.

It would certainly impact their willingness to do the company-building that creates all those innovations and jobs.

With such a rule, Tesla wouldn't exist, no electric cars, no SpaceX, no cheap advanced launch tech; basically most of the modern world would be choked in the crib by taking away the incentive to build it.

jlawson··on If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
The problem is that for the vast majority of people to be psychologically healthy they must have a job. This isn't a societal decision, it's a reality about how humans are.

The alternative is like feeding an animal instead of letting it live the lifestyle it's adapted for. That helps it in the moment but over time its capacities atrophy and it ends up weakened, twisted and harmed with nothing to spend its natural instincts on.

jlawson··on If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
Studies on basic income have shown that it's harmful to the people who receive it.

They report no improvements on any measured outcome. Not lower stress, not more education, not better health. They work a bit less but that doesn't help them or their kids.

Over the long term it harms them because their productive skills, values, and emotional capacities atrophy away from lack of use.

jlawson··on Making Crash Bandicoot (2011)
This trick was used by later games as well. It was pretty funny in Batman: Arkham Asylum to see Batman faceplant while walking down a hallway.
jlawson··on Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3
Unfortunately, people are born with a certain intellectual capacity and can't be improved beyond that with any amount of training or education. We're largely hitting peoples' capacities already.

We can't educate someone with 80 IQ to be you; we can't educate you (or I) into being Einstein. The same way we can't just train anyone to be an amazing basketball player.

jlawson··on Scientists now know that bees can process time, a first in insects
Humans have that too. Startle response, withdrawing from pain (hot stove), blink response upon incoming object - all these happen without involving the higher brainstem at all. I think some of them barely even connect with the brain.
jlawson··on NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
The space race was not just about inventing, though. It was about doing.

You can do the same thing twice, and you can also lose the ability to do something.

The ability to do the thing is what is really being maintained and demonstrated.

Every country has the technology to go to the moon - it's well established now. But who can actually make it happen? That's a huge organizational, human, financial, industrial challenge. And people do notice when only one country can do it.

jlawson··on Gifted children are special needs children
Ending all school programs that separate children by ability is the most radically egalitarian position possible, even in theory. There is no more extreme position one can take.

Given that, there's nothing else to save the word for. This is the limit; the max. So if radical refers to anything at all, it refers to this.

jlawson··on Gifted children are special needs children
The belief that every child has the same natural ability is as radical.

It's radical because goes against all evidence, experience, and common sense - it is ideology taken to a puritanical extreme. There is no more extreme position one can take.

jlawson··on Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its tech in mass surveillance of Palestinians
You are confusing emigration with death. We are not concerned with who is physically in Gaza, we are concerned with births and deaths.

There are less people physically in Gaza now because a bunch of people emigrated. Not because of deaths.

The overall group of families who lived in Gaza on Oct 7 2023 is about the same number of humans now. A few hundred thousand have emigrated. About 40-60k were killed. About 50k were born.

jlawson··on Getting AI to work in complex codebases
This is not correct. If the algorithm is deterministic and the random seed is the same, temperature can be anything and get the same result.

Same as using a seed to get the same map generated in Dwarf Fortress.

jlawson··on Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its tech in mass surveillance of Palestinians
Goalpost moving.

Now you're saying, okay they do have restraint, but what I really meant was their restraint is driven by the PR concerns, not by their own moral hearts. Well, that's pretty different accusation now.

I'm glad you've conceded the original point that they do indeed have restraint. Thank you.

jlawson··on Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its tech in mass surveillance of Palestinians
Demanding cities be evacuated is what you do when you have restraint. Otherwise you would just kill everyone inside. If they had not done this, you would also claim that it's evidence of lack of restraint.

Beyond that, everything you wrote is perfectly compatible with the IDF showing tremendous restraint. It is all more or less inevitable with any war in such an environment. All of it happened in Iraq with the Americans, for example.

- Buildings destroyed aren't people

- Documented cases are just that - cases. You need to demonstrate a pattern at scale. Bad cases are inevitable among millions of interactions.

- Investigations opened is a signal of political incentives as much as actions taken.

jlawson··on Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its tech in mass surveillance of Palestinians
Since the Oct 7 attacks the Palestinian population has not shrunk. War deaths have roughly equalled births.

Are you claiming that the IDF is trying their hardest to kill all the Palestinians they can, and that this is the best they can do? Really?

jlawson··on Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its tech in mass surveillance of Palestinians
The point is that they could do similar attacks to the Tokyo firebombing (or much worse), but choose not to.

Yes, that is a sign of restraint, obviously.

jlawson··on Getting AI to work in complex codebases
Specs are ambiguous but not necessarily non-deterministic.

The same entity interpreting the spec in exactly the same way will resolve the ambiguities the same way each time.

Human and current AI interpretation of specs is non-deterministic process. But, if we wanted to build a deterministic AI we could.

jlawson··on VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in
There is not a government-wide conspiracy to cover up the sex crimes of white British people. That conspiracy is what people are most horrified by. I don't know how to say this any clearer.

>Somehow the Glaswegian associates and neighbours of the "Beastie House" aren't tarred with the same brush

Because this is an isolated incident, not something happening at a mass scale in that community.

You are helping mass rape continue by trying to minimize it; you are part of the problem here, right here, right now. Your kinds of thoughts and words are the support that those ongoing mass gang rape of children requires to continue. Hope you're proud of yourself; at least nobody can call you racist.

>crimes committed by gangs of mostly second generation British Pakistanis

It's hard to connect immigration to crimes by committed by ethnic immigrant gangs? Dear lord.

Look up the stats on sex crime convictions per capita by immigrant origin in various European countries.

jlawson··on VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in
Not just Rochdale. You forgot Rotherham, Telford, Oldham, Oxford, Derby, Bradford, Huddersfield, Keighley, Halifax, Bristol, and Newcastle.

Your second point is a hallucination on your part. Nobody is saying it's bad because they're minorities. We're saying it's especially bad because the government was implicated - they very people charged with keeping children safe sacrificed them for political reasons, by the thousands, for years, and still are. That, combined with the scale of crimes by the Pakistani and other rapists and the acceptance these crimes received in their community, form a different type of crime - a massive crime committed by authorities and a whole community over years. That's what's so especially horrifying.

jlawson··on Visa and Mastercard are getting overwhelmed by gamer fury over censorship
There is no hint that what they just censored (i.e. Steam games) was illegal.

This isn't about fear of handling illegal payments; it's purely morality enforcement.

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