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rexer

84 karma · joined June 17, 2019

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rexer··on Too AI; Didn't Read
> If it’s not worth writing, it’s not worth reading.

Would you extend that approach to the conversations you have with AI? If not, why not?

rexer··on The Amazon tax
Are you saying that because it’s across company boundaries? Or would you be similarly upset if one result was for a Toyota Highlander? Or for a Toyota RAV4 XSE but not the LE trim

I gotta say, I think you’re in the minority. I suspect most folks appreciate the cross shopping suggestion

rexer··on There Goes the American Muscle Car
What would an EV muscle car look like? Tesla Model 3 seems to check a lot of boxes. Definitely not noise or muscle car power delivery, but those seems like unrealistic goals for an EV
rexer··on Building AI products in the probabilistic era
Truly appreciate the perspective. Any pointers to previous work on dealing with stochastic systems from the past? Part of my work is securing AI workloads, and it seems like losing determinism throws out a lot of assumptions in previously accepted approaches.
rexer··on Building AI products in the probabilistic era
I read the full article (really resonated with it, fwiw), and I'm struggling to understand the issues you're describing.

> Yes of course relationship questions don’t have a “correct” answer. But physics questions do. Code vulnerability questions do. Math questions do. I mean seriously?

Can you say more? It seems to me the article says the same thing you are.

> I don’t actually think the above paragraph makes any sense, does anyone disagree with me? “Instead of planning we observe and hypothesize”?

I think the author is drawing a connection to the world of science, specifically quantum mechanics, where the best way to make progress has been to describe and test theories (as opposed to math where we have proofs). Though it's not a great analog since LLMs are not probabilistic in the same way quantum mechanics is.

In any case, I appreciated the article because it talks through a shift from deterministic to probabilistic systems that I've been seeing in my work.

rexer··on Vendors that treat single sign-on as a luxury feature
Framing is everything, though. See complaints around Tesla pricing for the same battery hardware with different software.
rexer··on Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England
I think they agree with you. Did you read the second paragraph?
rexer··on Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say
You’re implying any real system can have a single top priority, which is equally false. There are always multiple priorities, and the one sitting at the top changes based on the context
rexer··on Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase
Some of the unemployment metrics do include folks not actively looking for work: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

> We really need better ways of measuring economic health.

What would that look like to you? It seems to me no single, measurable metric is going to tell you economic health. They're a bunch of indicators that need to be interpreted.

rexer··on The Journey of Bypassing Ubuntu's Unprivileged Namespace Restriction
> I've never not edited or scrapped it the next day.

There's definitely a balance. Showing a little emotion can be a good thing, necessary even

rexer··on U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites
Do you think Iran will have nukes in the near (20 years, just to put a number) term? Your position really only makes sense if that's not the case. By whatever means, the goal now seems to be to prevent that.

> I don't think we have a better option

I'd love help getting on board with this

rexer··on If you are useful, it doesn't mean you are valued
Certainly there’s a feedback loop, impossible to say which came first
rexer··on From OpenAPI spec to MCP: How we built Xata's MCP server
I think this downplays the security issue. It's true that scoping the token correctly would prevent this exploit, but it's not a reasonable solution under the assumptions that are taken by the designers of MCP. LLM+MCP is intended to be ultra flexible, and requiring a new (differently scoped) token for each input is not flexible.

Perhaps you could have an allow/deny popup whenever the LLM wanted to interact with a service. But I think the end state there is presenting the user a bunch of metadata about the operation, which the user then needs to reason about. I don't know that's much better; those OAuth prompts are generally click throughs for users.

rexer··on MCP is the coming of Web 2.0 2.0
It’s at least restricted to http servers. Certainly more once you include domain specific conventions
rexer··on OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive
Odd. Your take is the one I see most common on HN. My experience has been that Reddit has gone mainstream and most people find it quite valuable
rexer··on The Wright brothers invented the airplane, right? Not if you're in Brazil
> being aware of that is crucial in having the right perspective on inventors.

Can you go a step further on why the right perspective here is important?

Feels like you’re telling a kid Santa Claus doesn’t exist. Why kill the magic?

rexer··on Made a scroll bar buddy that walks down the page when you scroll
Maybe a raindrop? Anyone else cheer for raindrop races as a kid on long drives?

An apple falling on to Newton's head.

Fun to think about!

rexer··on Mexico issues legal threat to Google
> name more commonly accepted internationally

How do you determine this?

Does each country get one vote? One vote per citizen? Who's responsible for making that determination?

rexer··on The mistake of yearning for the 'friendly' online world of 20 years ago
This makes a lot of sense to me. As an individual, how do I help move along the transition to smaller communities?

The answer cannot be ‘you can’t’. Certainly what you said resonates with a fair number of people, and it only takes a small community to create a small community, right?

rexer··on Performance improvement plans are on the rise
I think the trouble is that most teams don’t need this level of performance. They don’t need the top .0001%. Those teams are the edge cases not even worth talking about.

And more importantly, not the ones you want to model your team after.

rexer··on Gladiator Style Interviewing
> Measured against what

Nothing I don’t think. The average is of the two scores: attitude and aptitude. The average of the two must be at least 7.

Unless you’re taking about how each interviewer calibrates. In which case it’s common for interviewers to be coached on how to rate candidates. Your calibration indeed seems too harsh for this parents system

rexer··on Is the Shoplifting "Crisis" Over?
Some qualifiers would be helpful to engage with you. Certainly threat of punishment shouldn’t be the only motivator in a healthy society, but it probably needs to be one.
rexer··on Amazon bans its drivers from moving their own lips too much at work
How do you find those comments erroneous?
rexer··on SF Mutual Fund Exec Front-Ran His Fund's Trades
The stock purchase occurred in 2015. Hoeft wasn't CIO until 2021 it seems:

https://www.dodgeandcox.com/financial-professional/us/en/new...

rexer··on Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Facebook over some Covid-19 content
There's a difference between saying "there are more important things (to you) to put your energy towards" and "the lab leak theory is wrong, stop talking about it"

The former is reasonable, the latter is not (assuming the theory is unproven either way at the time).

rexer··on Ozempic is changing people's skin, say plastic surgeons
I don’t know, I think that might be a bias of some kind. The free shortcuts are obvious and so the alternative sounds ridiculous. No one claims to be a genius when they save time by driving instead of walking. But at the margin, of course everything has a trade off.
rexer··on Why do electronic components have such odd values? (2021)
I think that was a typo and they meant 22 + 47, which equals ~70 Ohms
rexer··on Why do electronic components have such odd values? (2021)
Note that tolerance and uncertainty are different. Tolerance is a contract provided by the seller that a given resistor is within a specific range. Uncertainty is due to your imprecise measuring device (as they all are in practice).

You could take a 33k Ohm resister with 5% tolerance, and measure it at 33,100 +/- 200 Ohm. At that point, the tolerance provides no further value to you.

rexer··on Metabolism of autism reveals developmental origins
I’ve only ever seen “this ^” refer to the parent comment, not the one directly above it as you mention. So as long as the comment hierarchy is maintained (which it is on HN) then the reference is clear
rexer··on Feathers are one of evolution's cleverest inventions
That one doesn’t quite work for me. A thermostat has a purpose: keep a temperature. An ocean doesn’t really have a purpose.
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