HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

polio

391 karma · joined October 30, 2021

submissionscomments
polio··on What happened to TheNumbers.com
Every website I visit could get a fraction of a cent in my Cloudflare Wallet. A human browsing incurs a few dollars a month. Plus, any website I access in this way decides not to show me ads either and just charges me the cost of serving the data plus a nominal profit margin.

Disclosure: I am a shareholder and would love for them to solve the AI bot problem and the ad problem like this.

polio··on Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses
Apple will create a comparable device; it'll just take them five more years to get the product experience down.
polio··on OpenAI Acquires TBPN
It's also slow as hell. It takes like 200ms for the social media buttons to change color upon hover.
polio··on Social Cooling (2017)
This just happens to be the consensus opinion for their group. Kids have never cared about being accepted by people 20 years older than they are; kids have always cared about being accepted by their peers. Social cooling means that dissent from their peer group is harder.
polio··on Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society
In sports betting contexts, you're often just betting against other players, I believe. If they're anything like prediction markets, the exchange isn't going to care how successful you are, as long as you're betting.
polio··on Why Exercise Is a Miracle Drug
It's more that the military's goal isn't to produce adults that are indefinitely healthy, but rather a robust geopolitical deterrent that only requires its employees to be physical capable for about twenty years, after which their service life is over. Running is not the issue. Even a car designed for driving can be driven irresponsibly.
polio··on In the past year my illustration business has dropped more half
Yes, but how much of a market will there be for this kind of creation?
polio··on Resident physicians' exam scores tied to patient survival
The idea is that the stress and sleep deprivation are not sources of permanent impairment (even though they are), but rather a filter that selects the strongest candidates.
polio··on Plane crashes, overturns during landing at Toronto airport
This is also available via VASAviation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiUC8h4pkcs
polio··on rr – record and replay debugger for C/C++
You can, but that makes the type system worse. Also depending on how these few bytes are used, they can add up and drag down performance.
polio··on Has Llama-3 just killed proprietary AI models?
The corporate charity will not dry up. AI makes it easier to generate content, and Meta's in the business of facilitating the sharing of that content. Content is surface area for ads. AI will also make the virtual realities of the "metaverse", as defined by Mark, easier to reify. It's also a giant marketing and recruiting strategy.
polio··on Xz: A microcosm of the interactions in open source projects
This is a non-sequitur.
polio··on Xz: A microcosm of the interactions in open source projects
The more money we give, the more viable it becomes for maintenance to become their day job. It's very likely that more money here would've mitigated the burnout. Aside from just being able to quit their actual job and focus on their passion project, it's acknowledgement that the world finds this work valuable. In many cases, burnout comes from a lack of recognition, or the sense that you've done all this work and nobody really cares.
polio··on XZ backdoor: "It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable."
This could've happened to anybody, frankly. The attacker was advanced and persistent. I cannot help but feel sympathetic for the original maintainer here.
polio··on Jasmin Paris Becomes First Woman to Finish Hardest Race
Fitness is specific to an activity, but yeah, the Barkley Marathon is probably the hardest form of ultra running.
polio··on The return of the frame pointers
Profiling is a pretty basic technique that is applicable to all software engineering. I'm not sure what a "normal" service is here, but I think we all have an obligation to understand what's happening in the systems we own.

Some people may believe that 100ms latency is acceptable for a CLI tool, but what if it could be 3ms? On some aesthetic level, it also feels good to be able to eliminate excess. Finally, you should learn it because you won't necessarily have that job forever.

polio··on You are what you love
I agree with both statements you've made, however I don't see why offering food and housing security would necessitate mass murder, if we were to try it from a less ideological fervent posture. It wouldn't be described as a proletariat revolution or seizing the means of anything. It would just be another social program that I hope would be administered efficiently and ambitiously, and which would replace some of the other legacy programs we've built. I'd hope we'd test it at a small scale and then go from there. The scope of the communism you're identifying in my suggestion would be limited.

I'm generally a supporter of capitalism, but I think present conditions could be improved to facilitate that competition. Workers need to be able to use public transit in peace, which means getting homeless people out. We need to be able to offer shelter so that forceful removal is justifiable. Children need unequivocal access to nutrition so that malnourishment doesn't impair their ability to compete in the arena of idea-generation and in the knowledge economy. I think if the government were in the business of offering floors on quality of life that people could spend their time more productively instead of solving the same hunter-gatherer types of problems individually over and over again. Food insecurity may have been the impetus for work in the past, but I believe that status insecurity can replace it going forward. Nobody needs to starve for the West to prosper.

polio··on You are what you love
I think we're at a point in the history of Western civilization where we should strive to guarantee non-painful survival for all our citizens. This doesn't necessarily mean comfort, but nobody who grew up legally in the United States should have to wonder about finding nutritious food; clean water; and a quiet, warm, and secure place to sleep. I only restrict this tentatively to citizens because I think these programs would fare better politically if limited to citizens.

People of all backgrounds will find that non-painful survival is still profoundly unfulfilling and will continue to innovate, create, work. I think the fear of succumbing to the elements in America is too real and that that fear is a massive drain on the economy and the spirit of our people.

polio··on Vision Pro Teardown – Why those fake eyes look so weird
The external component is meant to fit in one's pocket, so the added size, heat, and moving parts would make for an awkward fit.
polio··on 95% of OpenAI Employees (738/770) Threaten to Follow Sam Altman Out the Door
The AI industry seems to exist in order to make it possible for there to be value without labor.
polio··on The Myth of AI Omniscience: AI's Epistemological Limits
I agree that it's a big change in the economics of getting art (e.g. a single game dev can now plausibly get assets this way), but I'm not sure that it's a change in the "cognitive" process of creation. This is in response to the original comment that suggests that novel combinations are interesting.

The machine is clearly good at realizing novel combinations, but I think that has more to do with the lack of interest of human artists in rendering these combinations, rather than the lack of ability.

I am also of the opinion that a human realization would produce better art. A machine might literally depict the bear in a pool, but a human could imagine a logically consistent context for that to be happening and decorate the pool with details like the leaderboard of the Teddy Bear Olympics and have reporters and spectators that are other stuffed animals. There might be a rivalry in progress. The distinguishing feature for me so far has been that human art is a snapshot of a much more sophisticated simulation that draws from the experience of having lived, felt things like fear, tension, joy directly, rather than having to approximate the aspects that give new art its electric nature indirectly as the machines do.

I'm sure a machine will be able to do that someday, but most of my experience with Dall-E 2 has been for the background to be vague, blurry, and weirdly unintentionally surreal. The prompt itself is maybe rendered accurately 95% of the time.

polio··on The Myth of AI Omniscience: AI's Epistemological Limits
How much of the "novel ways which have never been considered before" is just the novelty effect of having your very own artist? A human being could certainly produce any of the works of Dall-E 2, given the same prompt. The change here is the cost, and not the capability. Of course, this is still significant, but it doesn't suggest to me that Dall-E 2 "thinks" differently or would be able to seriously alter the nature of our cognition, except to the extent that it allows us to realize the same ideas faster.
polio··on Why do cloud providers keep building datacenters in Phoenix?
Would it make sense to build a datacentre underground to help with cooling?
polio··on A profit-price spiral in Germany
Yes? Why is that hard to accept? Jobs with positive externalities are by definition undercompensated.
polio··on The Guide to Sleeping in Airports
How did he manage to keep everyone else awake? Was he snoring? I also agree that earplugs and a sleep mask are essential while traveling, just due to how much more important sleep becomes as a means of recovering from stress as well as the unpredictability of the circumstances in which one will be sleeping.
polio··on More startups throw in the towel, unable to raise money for their ideas
A spatial game where you can drop virtual turds on sidewalks and spread your virtual feces on walls. These are persistent and shared, so you can see the art that other people have wrought.
polio··on Why does a plastic-wrapped turkey sandwich cost $15 at the NYC airport?
It's also a perverse incentive for the airport to not improve security times. The less predictable the security experience is, the earlier people have to show up, and the more time they spend getting hungry airside.
polio··on The military loved Discord for Gen Z recruiting. Then the leaks began
I don't see how the ratio of dead Ukrainians to dead Russians is relevant to the utility of winning this war. It can also be construed as an argument for increased funding, because the Ukrainians are losing so badly.

In my view, curtailing Russian expansion is the point of the war, and Ukrainian lives are unfortunately one cost of doing so. It's important that Ukrainians are participating in the war of their own volition; the US is not paying Ukrainians to join the battle, unlike the scenario with the ANA in Afghanistan.

Even if the leak produces good outcomes, it should still be prosecuted as espionage, since there was no good faith motivation for the leak.

polio··on Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me?
I see a lot of people buying the C2. Is this the undisputed winner for a new 4K television? I am vaguely in the TV market but am mildly intimidated by the variety.
polio··on Bob Lee, former CTO of Square, has died after being stabbed in San Francisco
Where does it indicate the identity of the decedent?
Page 1 of 6Next →