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ptsneves

1,018 karma · joined September 4, 2019

Upvoting reasonable comments I disagree with is this account’s mission.
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ptsneves··on How Delhi cut electricity loss from 50 to 5 percent
It is very unfair you got downvoted. Your conclusions might be debatable but sourcing them with so many sources is laudable. I wish all my debate adversaries would drown me in data like you did.
ptsneves··on So you want to use OpenRouter?
The article mentioned they pinned the provider and model and the result was bad as well with their own shenanigans. That part was in the end of the article so maybe you missed it.
ptsneves··on Dutch central bank moves share of gold from U.S., Canada to London
The Spanish case shows how tricky it is to sell your gold. Suddenly other countries found out that Spain had money from liquidating its gold and milked it dry.

Given Spain’s history it is incredible that the gold collected over centuries was spent in a few years.

The wiki article is very carefully tip toeing that there is no evidence that the Soviets defrauded or abused the Spanish, but it is hard to believe that 72% of the world’s gold reserves were visibly spent in a few years.

I did not investigate further but I understood the documents are not completely public, and my conspiracy hat tells me that is because it is a national humiliation.

ptsneves··on Europe's last regular standard-gauge steam passenger service
Not sure from the page but I rode one coal powered steam train in Poland for “fun” and i wish i never did. It was an open carriage trip in koszalin and the pollution it did was such that coal particles rained on everyone. It was awful and I don’t get the nostalgia of riding such an obsolete vehicle. I was so outraged about it I told my wife the experience was like trying to experience a big pre industrial city without sewage system and finding it nostalgic.
ptsneves··on Some conservationists are helping to restore Africa’s wild dog populations
It is amazing the failure rate and how people working in these endeavours keep on working and do not step in to intervene deeper. The statistics are what matters even if whole days are wasted because some leopard or lion ate the work done. These are not cute animal lovers, they are the real deal. Much luck!
ptsneves··on Show HN: Lumabri – Run Moe Models on a P2P Swarm with Colibri
P2P inference sounds really nice and it would bring us back to the 2000s culture if not for the fact inference is already so cheap. Even so it is an insurance policy if the cloud providers or governments have ideas of further censoring and monitoring chats.
ptsneves··on Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones
On the movie Dolemite by Eddy Murphy, they go over the fact that black people absorb light and white people reflect, and how that changes the motion picture shooting process totally. Also how one size does not fit all. Cool project! I am not much into the humanities part of the project. For me this is as natural as having a localization framework, just in this case for skin tones.
ptsneves··on DeepSeek pause fundraise after comments on compute gap to US leaked (transcript) [pdf]
Actually history shows that despotism or power in one single figure is a concept that waned with the increasing complexity of the world. One single despot could govern easily over matters of a small tribe or kingdom, but as states became more complex power was delegated to court, bureaucracy and even the bourgeoise. As the sovereign demanded ever more power it eventually needed to distribute power to the people, so it could tap its numbers. Napoleon’s schools for the peasants were so he could have a better and more numerous corps of officers than his rivals, which had a smaller pool of recruitment.

The same way programmers gave power to AI as a tool, so they could be more powerful in effecting automation, politicians that do not give up power to AI will be at a disadvantage to those who use AI to achieve more complex and effective power. The only problem might be the despot no longer shares power with those pesky humans but with a god in a machine, which in theory is in a box and does not have conflicting interests with the despot.

As today is Sunday, God help us.

ptsneves··on Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration
With this [0] I find i read 2 pages and I fall asleep consistently and really with a will to sleep. My mind wanders into far away lands and empires and says, "I take it from here".

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691134952

ptsneves··on .self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting
Yeah, this goes back to the blind spot we technical people have: Solve people/social issues with technological enforcement.
ptsneves··on US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections
The whole Petraeus affair[1] is a wiki 'telenovela'. The only things missing are references to Corintian leather. I will share gossip tomorrow, even if old news.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petraeus_scandal

ptsneves··on Ending respiratory infections
Running requires resting for me, and I often do not have time to rest longer with the kids. Meals still need to be prepared, and kids need to be minded. Kids have a strict time to go to kinder garten so I still need to get up at 7.00 or 7.30AM. I don't have grandparents around, just me and my wife.

So if I am exhausted of a run and cannot rest or sleep, it is almost sure I get sick soon after. Just my experience.

ptsneves··on Ending respiratory infections
For me personally, I never was so sick in my life as when my children were between starting nursery school and 3. It was not just respiratory diseases: It was also the time in my life I and my wife had frequent digestive infections. Ohh my...How many times I could not move for 2 days. It felt like I was 80 years old, mixed with the hardest symptoms of food poisoning.

I got sick so often it limited a lot my general life: I stopped practicing sports regularly and started being very careful with sleep(sleep deprivation likely increased the chance of infection), because I knew if I did not lead a perfectly balanced lifestyle I would get sick. I am quite upset I stopped running 15km per week, even with snow. I never fully went back to it, due to fear of getting sick, and having to take care of toddlers while being feverish or nauseated.

In those years I think I was not disease free more than 3 months at a time. In a year where many people decide to not have children, it does not help the cause of having children seeing other parents suffer so much, in those early years. I have non parent friends that get sick after meeting us, resenting meeting us and asking if we are sick, because they spent all the night in the bathroom or with fever. Fortunately it feels we are already immune because we are not sick very often anymore.

ptsneves··on Chinas War on Female Delusion
That part hurt a bit, but i think it highlights the point of the author: do you want something extremely distasteful(even in words) but real or you would rather go for forced harmony?

I would say that word is so offensive that it forced me to think whether I am a fascist for wanting it to be toned down, just like the CCP. Articles like this are a good check on personal beliefs. From that point of view the article is really well written.

ptsneves··on Rent collections are down in New York
Why bother with such details? Class warfare is right, and details are details. /sarcasm

For example mixed income housing is really nice for “us” that have been in generational poverty. For “them” it is just living with signals of alcohol abuse, domestic abuse and more. All while their children get a good front seat into “empowerment”.

With sarcasm over, details matter, complexity matters, social assistance matters, a contingency plan for total failure to rehabilitate some people matters.

Many people would benefit from the Northern European style of institutionalisation where if incarcerated people would need to go to isolated communities and learn to buy groceries, cook a meal take care of personal hygiene (in Sweden they literally have prison islands where inmates have houses and must live as they would in the outside world. Then progressively move to temporary shelters to get their footing and then be released. If need be put those people in the countryside.

As a personal experience: Many German youths get sent to the middle of Portugal when their environment leads them astray. In the countryside there is a publicly funded host family or community to receive them and they have to learn trade jobs like being a painter or a plumber and get pushed into an normalised environment. There is no access to drugs as well in the middle of nowhere. There is alcohol but in the next morning there is work to do and people who are waiting for you. I met some of those youths when I was young and it always struck me that a good solution for failed communities in urban environments was to break them apart and scatter them into other more rural communities in such small units (family at most) that their habits would not impact the locals and that the habits could not be fulfilled as a matter of fact. Where are you going to hang out at night in a village of 1k? There is housing but you likely need to repair it; the locals will lend you a hand but they will exert peer pressure for you to normalise.

There is no need for class warfare. But there needs to be a warfare against antisocial self destruction behaviours.

ptsneves··on SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P
Matt Levine wrote that flouting the rules could be fine if there were market alternatives (he said otherwise it would be a market failure). I am pretty sure there would be market alternatives appearing, at least in the ETF tracking space, and that would erode the brand.

It would be a bad show to have SP500 (cheating rules) underperfoming SP500(proven rules). It would also be a bad show with many financiers and even influencers calling out the corruption.

I for one would be advising newer investments in the proven rules ETF trackers. I also think there might be lawsuits from people who had contracts tied to the old rules. After all if you need to sell to transfer to another vehicle there might be tax consequences.

PS: It is a shame that multiple classes of, non floating, controlling stock do not cause penalties in terms of market cap weight. I will research the issue. I know an ETF is not an index, but the relationship is tight enough for practical reasons.

ptsneves··on Sony Launches Bravia 9 II and Bravia 7 II with 'True RGB'
As some commenters pointed out, this is basically slowly adding a real RGB led panel behind the LCD, or an OLED with extra steps. I could not see prices but I would expect this to be significantly cheaper, or maybe the refresh rate is much better than OLED.
ptsneves··on The dead economy theory
> we rapidly moving to territory where you would need literally all your income from government, or else you would not survive.

Yes, I share the sentiment of dread don’t get me wrong. But this also has happened before, and it gave us communism. There are people that said it was ok to live in those times. I guess if the state actually delivered the necessities for people to survive as opposed to how it happened historically, I think many people would be fine with that status quo. Not all but perhaps the majority. I think it is worth seeing a shitty way out than a despairing wall…lol this came out more desperate than i thought.

> it is not about "open weights" or "free tokens". you can not eat tokesn, nor weights. it is about "food on the table".

The idea is that anyone will be able to use these new means of production to answer more demanding tasks that would not be possible to fulfil without the llms. If we are all hopelessly automated though, yeah, we will either be living in a slum or in a utopia.

Given history and my trusty Hobbes social contract I believe society will come up with a way to not predate on each other.

ptsneves··on The dead economy theory
If AI or any of the means of production are too concentrated, societies around the globe have found a solution: tax or nationalise.

Even taxing might be enough to tilt the scale in favour of labor. If whole countries have their socio-economic fabric damaged because the means of production are locked elsewhere this constitutes a sovereignty issue and it will be dealt with.

The Industrial Revolution had the same pains, and it took a few centuries to get societies where we are today.

Power generation is also instrumental to almost all labor produced today, and thus utilities were born.

I think the pope is right and the AI bros are wrong. I am currently rooting for the open weights to give the power back to the people. For teachers and artists to work for their neighbourhoods and communities.

ptsneves··on Using AI to write better code more slowly
I had the exact experience yesterday.

I have a performance problem and went down the path of optimising part of a pipeline that when benchmarked was not the bottleneck, even if it looked plausible for me and the llm. When I asked it to make a final benchmark for documentation I found most of the work I did improved 30% while another path would have improved a magnitude more.

Thankfully iteration is now faster than ever and given how fast it creates tests, previous tests created for the aborted optimisation were helpful.

ptsneves··on I benchmarked Claude Code's caveman plugin against "be brief."
People explore what tickles them. Others try to rationalise what they like, even when the reason is flimsy. It’s ok :)

It really releases the stress slightly to call bugs, buggas and generally role play a humorous setting than a purely tech me. I think I will make it speak out loud just to have a laugh at cavemen speak about default arguments in a method.

> I didn’t find bugga but others from tribe will scratch head. Leave comment.

> You clever. Fix it.

I predict caveman speak will be a fad, and people will jokingly speak like that. It also compresses human language.

ptsneves··on Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit
The US does not set out to capture civilians, while the hamas does. It matters. All the rest of the comment makes no sense in light of that.

Also you omitted the part where I said I disagreed with what Israel did. But as a human I believe we are evil like that, and I am really sorry about it.

ptsneves··on Chicago artist creates tourism posters for city's neighborhoods
How can someone talk about a trivial experience of exploring food while acknowledging that they had bodies thrown into their yards? In both countries in Europe I lived I have never in my life seen a corpse outside of a funeral and even then. I also never heard gun shots except for hunting and never in an urban setting.

I can’t imagine having my little children suffering seeing the corpse of a dead human being and I would curse and never set foot on a land where that is normalised.

ptsneves··on Migrating to the EU
Which is ironic because PR is definitely alien to git. There is no such git concept as a PR, nor git pr command.

Coming from a pure git workflow in mailing lists where branches, and commits(and associated diff and git am metadata) are the unit of work, I struggled to adapt into the PR concept in the beginning.

I liked to work with gerrit, where the unit of the review is the commit. This also ensured a nice little history and curation of the change set. The commit in github is not even in the main tab of the PR. It is like it is a second thought. Even in the review, reviewing by commit is awkward and discouraged.

ptsneves··on The American Healthcare Conundrum
> Self-control is, ironically, not usually within one’s self control.

Problem solved. Next!

ptsneves··on Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
This is true for Kalshi but not for Polymarket. Also Kalshi voided the bet and it got sued. By the way prediction markets are commodity securities where Matt Levine mentioned it should not allow death contracts. Here we are though..
ptsneves··on Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge
> I'm gonna claim that is based on nothing but vibes

Made me laugh. Indeed opinions seem to carry more weight if they are a vibe :D

ptsneves··on Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge
> if they've actually invented a new form of intelligence that can rival or surpass billions of years of evolution?

Human creations have surpassed billions of years of evolution at several functions. There are no rockets in nature, nor animals flying at the speed of a common airliner. Even cars, or computers or everything in the modern world.

I think this is a bit like the shift from anthropocentric view of intelligence towards a new paradigm. The last time such shift happened heads rolled.

ptsneves··on Portugal: The First Global Empire (2015)
Yes! The losses were due to independence loss to Spain. In a sense the loss of sovereignty to Spain destroyed the Portuguese empire.

Spain joined the Portuguese and Spanish armada and went on to fight the English (and Dutch to some extent), with catastrophic results for both Spain and Portugal fleets. When Portugal regained independence 1640 it needed to get back sovereignty of overseas territories, including from the Dutch.

The Dutch controlled a big part of north Brazil when Portugal and Spain were the Iberian Union, but the Dutch and were driven back afterwards at great cost. The damage was done, and 1755 earthquake was the final nail.

There were also terrible mistake in terms of state management up to the XX century where the natives, were not seen as full citizens, and naturally rebelled.

As a post colonial portuguese citizen, it seems like an incredible fantasy that our society descends from such a grandiose history. Even in this thread i see the name Henry the Navigator and am incredulous people know who he was.

A less known both inside and outside Portugal bad ass dude was Afonso de Albuquerque. This is from his English wikipedia page about Hormuz in the middle east:

> At the same time, Albuquerque decided to conclude the effective conquest of Hormuz. He had learned that after the Portuguese retreat in 1507, a young king was reigning under the influence of a powerful Persian vizier, Reis Hamed, whom the king greatly feared. At Ormuz in March 1515, Afonso met the king and asked the vizier to be present. He then had him immediately stabbed and killed by his entourage, thus "freeing" the terrified king, so the island in the Persian Gulf yielded to him without resistance and remained a vassal state of the Portuguese Empire.

Here came a dude that does both diplomacy and war in person, and moved on. Vasco da Gama was a bit similar. Portuguese were quite out of their minds and for me shows shows the pedigree of bloodlust[1] that Europeans must have gained after endless continental strife. That is why I am really afraid of the rearming of Europe, I believe Europeans have a genetic disposition for destruction, and history shows that.

[1] https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-storia-do-mogor-by-nicco...

ptsneves··on EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
As someone who had a company in Portugal I do not understand what you meant about requiring an employee to have limited liability company. You may be referring to the need for one of the owners needing to pay social security but it only needs to do so if it does not pay in any other form. It hurts but it is not unreasonable and may provide unemployment benefits.

The accountant requirement I confirm, but also true in Poland for example.

The really big offense is that one must pay taxes for the next year based on the previous tax payments. They give a small grace period but then it’s on. It was supposed to be an emergency measure but of course it was never removed. It is a free loan to the state.

You can open a single person business though and skip the accountant.

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