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quirkot

974 karma · joined March 4, 2016

Experiments in humor are sometimes failures. I used to work at a snowflake library.
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quirkot··on San Francisco Onion Futures Company
Legal defense is basically "nuh uh"
quirkot··on I had Gemini train its own replacement for $9
I think this is the way. An LLM is an expensive general purpose tool and for repeatable tasks, after it's clarified the process flow, it builds cheaper special purpose tools for each step
quirkot··on Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
it's also the set of incentives that produces not-technically-illegal pump and dump schemes when the startup is sold to the market via IPO
quirkot··on Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
a business makes money selling a product or service.

a startup makes money selling the startup

quirkot··on The "File" menu isn't about files
It's a real Chesterton's fence situation. There's a lot of latent information contained in a tradition of calling the first menu item "File" including expectations around what can be found there.

You could also say it pierced the metaphor and no longer refers to files on a computer, but to the concept of filing that computer files were named after.

quirkot··on Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
> At the end of the day, these communities don’t care if your code works at all...

I think the key word to all this is "communities." If you can make something alone, just do it. If you enjoy gathering together to build a bigger thing, often the bigger thing is 1/3 an excuse to gather together. In that way, the LLM is like revealing the answer to a murder mystery game too early and expecting it still to be fun for everyone.

quirkot··on That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing
I mean... they're called "agents," they must do what they're told and they don't get paid. Sounds pretty slavey.
quirkot··on That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing
> Thus, anyone who wants to corral that kind of entity and make it do their bidding? Yeah, they want slaves.

That's the horror buried underneath all the tech, policy, and gloss. The real, animal brain, desire that drives most of this is: I'd like a slave I don't have to feel bad about.

quirkot··on Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)
I cannot express how much I drank this kool-aid. When there were still updates every 2-3 years I would scour google maps to try and find the site. Based on Long Now promo images and local newspaper photos, this is my leading contender. The dirt roads were all gradually expanded and construction equipment was visible here in the 2009-2013 time frame. https://maps.app.goo.gl/3QWhyYGu7DrD8jQWA
quirkot··on Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)
banging on the door like a madman where's the clock? where's the clock we all donated money for? tell us about the clock you cowards!
quirkot··on Punch Yourself in the Face with Reality
Such a great synopsis. The things that are easy to signal (landing page, presentation deck, logo, etc) have never been the make-or-break aspect. The part that's always been hard, that remains hard, is that a business must solve a problem for people. Even B2B is solving business problems for specific people. And people are a difficult, difficult problem to solve.
quirkot··on Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
In terms of removing friction, I think of moving a boulder. Wheels = good. Ice slide = bad
quirkot··on Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor
you'll have to take that up with the folks from worldnuclearwastereport.org
quirkot··on Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor
Footnote has the backup. 2-3x is guesstimate, but it doesn't really matter. The answer is there's just not much waste to store
quirkot··on Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor
Europe has about 60,000 tons of nuclear waste storage[1], so lets say the global nuclear waste quantity is 2-3x or 120,000 to 180,000 tons. That sounds like a lot, however it's less than 2 weeks of coal deliveries to a coal plant (at 1 train of 115 cars each with 116 tons of coal = 13,340 tons delivered per day[2]). To take another approach, the average landfill size is 600 acres[3].

The "eh, just bury it" approach is really not a bad one. Its not even that much stuff to bury

[1] https://worldnuclearwastereport.org/

[2] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=16651

[3] https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/04/15/hidden-damage-la...

quirkot··on Daisugi, the Japanese technique of growing trees out of other trees (2020)
In english this is called pollarding a tree. Historically it has been used for smaller wood pieces (firewood, etc). It's fuctionally different [from daisugi] because you don't get construction grade timber from it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollarding

[edit: clarification]

quirkot··on Do we need billionaires?
If you want good checks against a government, one dude rich enough to field an army has historically been a bad way to keep the government in existence
quirkot··on Do we need billionaires?
Made $1 billion? Throw 'em a parade, put their name on a plaque on Wall Street, and never let them touch a new penny from here on out.
quirkot··on Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)
Gotta keep in mind that "you control what you can destroy" was expressed as the crux of a single-planet guerrilla group's maximalist negotiation strategy with an interstellar government, where the destruction was of the ability to travel between the stars. It's not a coherent theory of control outside of the razor thin application of "I'm willing to accept pain as long it hurts you much more." It is not a control that builds stability and infrastructure, it is the control of base extortion
quirkot··on We let AIs run radio stations
> do children have personalities if we left them in a dark room with no interactions with other humans?

Short answer: yes. generally speaking, personality traits range between 30% to 60% heritable

quirkot··on Music has scales / raagas. What about storytelling in movies and prestige shows?
Maybe there's some technical definitions for the words used to describe the films, but match between archetype and movie is incomprehensible to me. I'm not seeing a single one where the film is where I'd expect based on the descriptions
quirkot··on ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips
> But it boils down to having the vision, the belief and the strength to follow through over many years

And importantly, that vision being correct. The graveyard of history is full of the dedicated yet incorrect.

quirkot··on Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal
By that example, PostgreSQL itself is a form of intelligence relative to a physical filing system. It doesn't seem like your working definition of intelligence has a large overlap with a layman's conception of the word.
quirkot··on How to be anti-social – a guide to incoherent and isolating social experiences
"being yourself" means choosing to believe that the you that is true is competent and capable of growth while the awkwardness is a temporary barrier between that is not reflective of your true nature.
quirkot··on AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
regarding #2: how many serfs came home after re-digging the toilet hole to eat a meal of hand-milled grain bread and old vegetables with the members of the family that survived infancy and thought "life just doesn't get any better than this"? Probably almost all of them
quirkot··on Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat
Magawa cleared 1,517,711 sq.ft of land. He could work at a pace of 2,808 sq.ft (a doubles tennis court) every 20 minutes. If he maintained that pace, he worked 180.2 hours. Let's assume, with hazardous terrain, he worked 25% that speed on average. If that's the case he worked ~720 hours during a 5-6 year career. A different rat, Ronin, that found more stuff found a total of 124 explosive devices. So Magawa found no more than 1 explosive for every 5 hours and 45 minutes of searching. Or approximately one device every 17.25 tennis courts of searching.

Real needle in a haystack stuff, wow

quirkot··on “Collaboration” is bullshit
Money is the sledgehammer of incentives. Above a reasonable amount of pay, it's overkill and makes lots of collateral problems. The really effective incentives are status based and situational to the group dynamic
quirkot··on Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
i just actually read that and it is possibly the most morally abominable screed I've come across in a long time. Shocking that its acceptable to share in polite company
quirkot··on Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
observation a: Document title is about a minority's rightful supremacy

observation b: document says "this is not political" then dives into persuasive speech

conclusion: this document was written by the bad guys

quirkot··on Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
You're limiting the frame to an employment situation. Higher quality sources of knowledge are free: Wikipedia, public libraries, etc. Similar quality sources of information are also free: human relationships.
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