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queuebert

3,147 karma · joined March 12, 2021

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queuebert··on Tesla killing Solar Roof is leaving installers with six-figure losses
Is it? Modern roofing is pretty complex and is begging for innovation, even with materials that don't generate electricity.
queuebert··on Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics
Serious question: Are you sure solving abstract mathematical problems with AI is responsible use? You will likely put mathematicians out of jobs, and I doubt solving the Collatz conjecture is urgent or will save lives. It also robs a future Fields medalist of the pride of doing all by themselves.

All things AI seems to assume that more and faster is better, but there is no justification of that assumption. As a biological counterexample, a tree grown quickly will likely not be as healthy or strong as one grown slowly.

queuebert··on Mother convicted of: her 5 yo walks short way to pond alone in Virginia
It's not backward, it's too forward. No one got arrested 100 yrs ago for letting their kid walk around alone.
queuebert··on Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI
/loop ?
queuebert··on Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI
Yes, because no employee with million-dollar comp has ever been untrustworthy in the history of business.
queuebert··on Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates
That's impressive. I thought the NetHack wiki would be older, but it dates to 2005, although I suspect there was an earlier version somewhere else.
queuebert··on All 253 Patterns from Christopher Alexander's a Pattern Language Summarized
I highly recommend getting the full book. This should be required reading for every housing developer. If you ever felt like a house or community was uncomfortable or made you subconsciously unhappy, you might find the reason in this book.
queuebert··on Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode
I'm sure that was 100% secure, too. /s (I did the same thing back then.)
queuebert··on Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode
The link OP submitted appears to be a webpage displaying a screenshot of another web page, and the image aspect ratio has been altered. It's so comically bad it had to be on purpose, or someone is doing their web dev in MS Word.

Edit: I think actually it's a screenshot of a screenshot even, and this appears to be the entire design of spaceweather.gov. What in the holy heck is going on there? This has to be a top 10 worst website designs of all time.

queuebert··on Midjourney Medical
Statistically overdetection leads to poorer outcomes because interventions have a risk as well. That's why everyone doesn't get a yearly full body CT scan, for example. The current guidelines are based on optimizing for maximum good, and believe it or not some things are best not known about because the risk of dying from it is about the same as the risk of the treatment.
queuebert··on SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P
Markets are forward looking, pricing in future cash flows. No one should be thinking about SpaceX's present value when buying their stock. If you do that you'll always be too late to the party.

That said, I don't agree on the valuation, but I can see where some people could be coming from.

queuebert··on Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks
It's a joke about how fast it compiles. whoosh
queuebert··on Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks
Why is that?
queuebert··on Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks
> ... applying the same steps and rules n times

I do this too, with a document written for this purpose.

> ... a significant chunk of those runs involved the agent waiting for the compiler, linters, type checks, and test suites, as well as updating journals.

That is a good point. I'm mostly using C, which seemingly compiles in O(1) time, so I could imagine a large C++ or Rust codebase taking much longer to iterate simply due to compilation times.

queuebert··on Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks
I don't understand how some of y'all use these things. I get garbage unless I give them very specific concrete tasks with as much context as possible. Anything that takes more than 30 min is usually a waste because the scope was too large.
queuebert··on Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
Worth noting the cost of dealing with Treasury's absolute dumpster fire of a website, though.
queuebert··on SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P
I didn't say that at all. I said it was achievable for SpaceX eventually. It's not a $1T company yet. Reading comprehension, people.
queuebert··on SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P
Historically a $1T market cap with a PE of 20.0 would be achievable with a $50B/yr profit. That seems easily achievable eventually for SpaceX, as it has actual hardware and services and IP.
queuebert··on Uber cuts 23% of people division as new president takes over
"What would you say you do here?"

"A lot of things."

You still gave zero concrete information about why HR is necessary. Which is exactly the problem here.

queuebert··on Uber cuts 23% of people division as new president takes over
As we enter this era of far more qualified candidates than jobs, HR will die eventually the equivalent of index funds is for hiring. Just as most money managers didn't beat the market and lost out to Bogle's low-cost index funds, people will figure out that HR doesn't do any better than any other random criteria for hiring and firing employees, since most of the applicants for most jobs will be able to do the job sufficiently well. Probably the answer is some sort of AI, but I bet you could do just as well rolling dice.

If most of us are honestly with ourselves, we'd realize the marginal return on difficult hiring decisions is extremely small.

As for the CYA aspect of HR, an AI can definitely do that cheaper and more callously.

queuebert··on Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance
For me a TUI constrains the style of presentation to something reasonably good. In an era of websites with tiny light gray font on dark gray background, where scrolling is really a javascript page load, and the back arrow is not respected, I just want to simplify to something that works and is always the same and that I can read with my old eyes.

Somewhere along the way, GUIs seemingly went from economy of use to a graphical resume for the developer (or their manager).

queuebert··on Openrsync: An implementation of rsync, by the OpenBSD team
I don't know, Claude Shannon did okay.
queuebert··on Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored
We didn't know as much about possible nuclear reactions back then, so I think they thought there was a possibility that there was an exothermic chain involving N or O that could be ignited by the bomb and would be self sustaining. While an asteroid impact is very powerful over large scales, it doesn't create nuclear reactions, so Trinity was indeed a first at that scale.

But, and I'm not sure how much of this they knew back then, we do get bombarded by high-energy cosmic rays, so chances are one of these hypothetical N or O reactions should've already randomly occurred at least in isolated events over the last few billion years if possible.

queuebert··on Show HN: Auto-identity-remove – Automated data broker opt-out runner for macOS
Some chess sites make you solve a checkmate problem for a captcha. Are those automated now, or is that a good method?
queuebert··on ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline
You are quite correct. I'm also free to dislike him for his choices.
queuebert··on ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline
So Nate & Co sell out to a big corporation then are upset that it does big corporation stuff? I'm more mad at Nate here because 538 was my go-to for political coverage pre-sellout, and because of his greed it went away.
queuebert··on Explore Wikipedia Like a Windows XP Desktop
I did. I made my own custom start page back in the day with frequently used searches, along with headlines, weather, stocks, etc. Instead of menus, it just divided topics using horizontal rules, much like an actual newspaper.
queuebert··on Explore Wikipedia Like a Windows XP Desktop
This is why I frequently post about how I miss Gopher. It kind of forced this hierarchy.
queuebert··on I want to live like Costco people
EV motors can rev insanely high, so they don't need to shift gears, while most gas engines are limited to 6-7k RPM from factory. Thus the gassers need gears that essentially torque divide to reduce RPMs. You are very confused.
queuebert··on RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust
> TeX is "80s good"

Bingo. Compared to troff and what preceded, TeX was amazing just in its usage. But its real value was in the quality of its typesetting. Knuth put a lot of effort into the beauty and historical correctness of the output, so much so that it was solving optimization problems to calculate line breaks. MS Word still can't break a line properly in 2026.

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