HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

pfsalter

41 karma · joined December 3, 2020

submissionscomments
pfsalter··on UK founders rush to sell startups ahead of Autumn Budget
"actively exploring exits" is not the same as "rush to sell". Most startups are actively exploring exits as that's the whole damn point of a startup
pfsalter··on Looming Liability Machines (LLMs)
Humans don't really generate text as a series of words. If you've ever known what you wanted to say but not been able to remember the word you can see this in practice. Although the analogy is probably a helpful one, LLMs are basically doing the word remembering bit of language, without any of the thought behind it.
pfsalter··on Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
Back in 2018 [1], at a similar time that there was a lot of moving about and restructuring. I think this is about the time that Google search started going downhill as well

[1] https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...

pfsalter··on Big tech has distracted world from existential risk of AI, says top scientist
No idea what this guy is talking about. Big tech are only talking about the existential risks to hide talking about the actual very real risks of how the technology will be misused.
pfsalter··on Computer scientists invent an efficient new way to count
My interpretation from the paper is that this algorithm is simpler than other options but also worse. So in a professional context you'd use one of those instead
pfsalter··on Unexpected responses from ChatGPT: Incident Report
The biggest problem is that if you're using this in production then it could cause problems. It's not like a traditional outage where you get a load of 503 errors, the system appears to be working correctly but generates gibberish. If you're using this in a chat bot you could be liable for things it's saying...
pfsalter··on Ancient Rome's failed building projects
Agreed. There's nothing inherent about slaves that is more efficient than paid laborers. It's just cost and time. It can look incredible that the Romans built these huge structures, but the timescales were measured in decades. Same with cathedrals in the middle ages. If you've got 200 years to build something you can really do a great job.
pfsalter··on AI system self-organises to develop features of brains of complex organisms
That's something you could philosophise about but not research unless you already have a human level intelligence to test. We won't know if it's even possible to replicate in silicon for a very long time
pfsalter··on TrasHTTPandas – Trash Panda HTTP Responses
Very weird that it's using paths instead of the Accept header to change the content type, but otherwise pretty cool
pfsalter··on SiFive: The road ahead (post layoffs)
Every person you hire to help drive a period of growth is someone who will later be fired once that growth (or commonly just funding) runs out. It's very easy to just increase headcount to increase growth but it's not sustainable.

I feel like companies often think they're always going up an exponential curve rather than breaching the top of the 'S' and you really need to plan for the long term health of your company. This company obviously hasn't

pfsalter··on "No, it's less effort than that"
Completely agree, the article reads more like someone who thinks they are doing research rather than development. There's no esoteric perfect form for software that needs to be discovered, there's a set of patterns and structures that can be learned before the project starts.

Analogies are often unhelpful because people argue about the analogies instead of the actual problem at hand. If you can't communicate why these things are hard, and why 'do it faster' won't always get results, you need to get better at dev management.

pfsalter··on Authors say OpenAI 'ingested' their books to train ChatGPT
Considering that I'm not allowed to copy any of the physical books, films or songs that I own as it breaks copyright then copying it and putting it into a generative AI should also be illegal. Just because you change it from words into weights, it's just another form of compression. I'd rather not live in the world where AI models have better rights than people.
pfsalter··on The Darwinian argument for worrying about AI
I'd say that none of these have been proved to be impossible but they're hard in a different way than a lot of the developments we're used to because of Moore's Law.
pfsalter··on Lessons from Creating a VSCode Extension with GPT-4
> Writing code does not take most of the day.

Definitely this. I spend about 10-15% of my time writing code so a 20% increase really doesn't save me a lot of time. Also AI generated code requires more reading of code, which is harder and more cognitively expensive than writing code.

pfsalter··on The long life of Apache httpd 2.4
I often find random parts of nginx hidden behind their paywall, and then I'll reach for Apache. Especially when creating load balancers
pfsalter··on Go with PHP
Not since PHP8 it's not [0], it's a real part of the language that you can read and view using reflection

[0] https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.attributes.overview.p...

pfsalter··on Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF
Still more cost efficient to run a single bus than separate vehicles, just in maintenance alone. Also we already have buses, these single occupation EVs that still have enough space for a decent battery size don't exist.
pfsalter··on Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF
A better idea might be to provide the homeless with a better standard of living, therefore making them nicer to be around on public transport
pfsalter··on Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”
Could be talking about Mintel [0] which was a simpler, earlier version of the web

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

pfsalter··on AI Incident Database
This is the same standard for any Startup claiming to leverage AI, so I think that's fair
pfsalter··on Flurly has been shut down by Stripe
Good luck trying to turn that USDC back into dollars without significant tax implications, and definitely good luck trying to get your customers to use USDC instead of a credit card
pfsalter··on Slack is the opposite of organizational memory (2018)
Agreed, the rant about Jira really made it seem like a management issue. At our company tickets are only created for the upcoming three sprints, anything that hasn't been done in three months is deleted as it's obviously not important
pfsalter··on GPT Takes the Bar Exam
Completely agree with this. There's a short sentence in the abstract:

> hyperparameter optimization and prompt engineering

Prompt engineering seems a lot like "tweaking the question format until the AI gets the answer" which is the first lesson in ANNs; don't train on your test set. If you can't put the actual question with the only context being "this question concerns US law" then there's an awful lot of reasoning and thinking that the human is doing which the AI cannot.

Let's not have another Moore's law fallacy, it's not reasonable to extrapolate progress based on existing results. It's like building a car which can go at 200mph then saying 300mph is just around the corner.

pfsalter··on James Lovelock has died
I think it's mostly down to Chernobyl and the cold war. Speaking to people in their 60's (anecdotally) they seem to overestimate the risks of nuclear power and underestimate climate change. This is probably because there's such strong visual evidence for problems with the former.

I'd also say that fossil fuels are very simple to understand; burn thing, generate power. Nuclear is much more 'magic'. And I don't doubt that the fossil fuel lobby is drastically larger than the nuclear power one, just so much more money in it

pfsalter··on Elastic UI – design library in use at Elastic to build internal products
Really great to see a good JS chart library that's truly open source
pfsalter··on Addressing AI’s energy cost
I'll believe it when I see it, but it looks like it's been in the pipeline for almost 6 years[1], so I'd be very surprised if we see it before the crypto bubble bursts.

[1] https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/04/ethereum-research-updat...

pfsalter··on OpenSearch 2.0
The opensearch project was released a while ago as opendistro and was just renamed to opensearch a year ago [1]. As for features, it depends what you're doing, but ES upgraded to Lucene 9 6 months ago [2], and they've had document level alerting for at least two years.

[1] https://opensearch.org/blog/technical-posts/2021/07/how-to-u... [2] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/74057

pfsalter··on OpenSearch 2.0
Feature-wise, it's about 3 years behind the features in ES. Although you have to pay for the higher tiers in ES, there's a much richer feature set. The Elastic cloud offering is much nicer than the AWS hosted version, for a similar price.
pfsalter··on HTTP Feeds
This seems similar, but not as fleshed out as RPDE feeds, which has already been accepted by the W3 [1], and provides many answers to lots of the 'eventually up to date' questions.

[1] https://www.w3.org/2017/08/realtime-paged-data-exchange/

pfsalter··on How does your programming language handle “minus zero” (-0.0)?
PHP just refuses to divide by zero:

    php > $minus_zero = -0.0;
    php > $plus_zero = +0.0;
    php > var_dump(1.0 / $minus_zero);
    PHP Warning:  Uncaught DivisionByZeroError: Division by zero in php shell code:1
Page 1 of 2Next →