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mef

8,785 karma · joined September 22, 2010

@mferrier, mike at mikeferrier.com

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/mef; my proof: https://keybase.io/mef/sigs/toTabGXrg1DoRom7FvTvaCu0D7Xf6FsEPzEmx2A9fpg ]

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mef··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
things are going to get even more interesting when new models that have been trained on these AI escape postmortems themselves escape from their own gyms and attempt to evade detection and shutdown
mef··on Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey
Working as intended
mef··on Letter from the Duke of Wellington to the British Foreign Office (1809)
Belorded?
mef··on Running Claude Code dangerously (safely)
yes! just don't forget to `RUN echo '{"hasCompletedOnboarding": true}' > /home/user/.claude.json` otherwise your claude will ask how to authenticate on startup, ignoring the OAUTH token
mef··on Mapping the US healthcare system’s financial flows
IMO it's because there's both benefit and waste/corruption in these kinds of social benefit structures. some people choose to only see one or the other:

"these benefit everyone including those who don't use them directly! how could you be against it?"

"this money that I'm having to pay is either overpaid to corrupt vendors, or just straight wasted, why would we ever want to increase how much we're paying into this system?"

in reality you can't have one without the other. it's up to each person to decide whether they can take the bad with the good

mef··on Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues
aisuru?
mef··on Show HN: AI toy I worked on is in stores
just don’t ask Santa if there’s a seahorse emoji
mef··on MLB approves robot umpires for 2026 as part of challenge system
They had this during spring training and it was fantastic. The challenge limit meant it was used rarely, but when it was used it added a fun dramatic element. Players getting to stick it to umpires when they got it wrong, and umpires getting to smirk at players when they got it right.

And at the end of it all, some missed calls get to be corrected.

mef··on Agents built from alloys
this is a different idea
mef··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
nice I'm gonna use this!
mef··on “The Traitors”, a reality TV show, offers a useful economics lesson
yup. traitors tend to keep dumb-presenting faithful around because they give the impression of both not being a traitor as well as being unsavvy and easy to manipulate
mef··on Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic
whether cash or credit, it's all going right back to AWS
mef··on All political ads running on Google in the US
interesting that the company that has the most viewed ads for 2024[1] ("FORCE VECTOR COMMUNICATIONS") has a total of 3 matches when you search for them[2]

[1] https://adstransparency.google.com/political?region=US&topic...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22force+vector+communicatio...

mef··on 2M users but no money in the bank
out of money, final payroll, no alternative but to go into zombie mode, yet for the last few months the co-founder has been working on his next product which will launch in 2025.

maybe everything that could have been tried was tried but this comes off like some of the effort spent working on the next company could have been spent keeping this one alive

mef··on Ask HN: Resources about math behind A/B testing
speaking of Georgi Georgiev, I can’t recommend enough his AB testing tools at https://www.analytics-toolkit.com

being able to tell when an experiment has entered the Zone of Futility has been super valuable.

mef··on Show HN: I built a full-text search for your browsing history
i too had this issue, and it persisted even after i uninstalled the extension. i had to restart the browser entirely
mef··on The impact of Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" on Noam Chomsky's path to anarchism
for what it's worth, Chomsky is specifically an advocate of Anarcho-Syndicalism:

Anarcho-syndicalism is a political philosophy and anarchist school of thought that views revolutionary industrial unionism or syndicalism as a method for workers in capitalist society to gain control of an economy and thus control influence in broader society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism

mef··on Footage of Chang'e-6's land on far side of the moon
competition within teams can be a good thing
mef··on Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain
I would say it's not because people refuse to define, it's that science has not defined (and cannot define it)
mef··on Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain
without understanding the language, you still understand that it's a book, it has symbols which represent language, and those symbols can be replicated.

we don't understand what consciousness is or how it is achieved, so discussing how to recreate it isn't really a conversation we can have - we can only discuss how to create a simulacrum.

mef··on VCs aren’t your friends
consider that this is sending a negative signal to the VC that other VCs have already passed, rather than that it hurts their feelings
mef··on Boeing whistleblower found dead in US
Anyone know why this isn’t on the front page with 96 pts one hour after submission?
mef··on Alaska Airlines flight 1282 NTSB preliminary report [pdf]
anyone have a copy hosted? it's currently overloaded and not responding
mef··on Cloudflare lays off new hires
Cloudflare does!
mef··on Cloudflare lays off new hires
high interest rates increase cost to service debt
mef··on 9999999999999999.0 – 9999999999999998.0
these days it looks like ChatGPT generates and runs code behind the scenes for math questions (it used to be pretty bad at these kinds of math questions. you can click the little "view analysis" button to see the code it's running.

when I ask about this question it generates and runs Python behind the scenes, thus the incorrect answer.

mef··on The Bond villain compliance strategy
He left Stripe earlier this year. https://x.com/patio11/status/1627815282776637440
mef··on I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)
it does seem like any of Google's support options for paid services have the primary goal of reducing support load on Google, not to solve problems for paying customers
mef··on How does macOS manage virtual cores on Apple Silicon?
> QoS is a control set and changed in the code launching a process, and can only be altered by the user if the app exposes a control, a feature which remains exceptionally uncommon. Neither is there any easy way for a user to know the QoS of any given process unless the app reveals that.

That... sucks

mef··on $8B Sam Bankman-Fried criminal trial starts today
Or, both are deterrents but one or both can be weaker than the other depending on the perceived risk by the person committing the crime. Having multiple deterrents should be a greater deterrent as a whole across the average of potential criminals.
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