HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

rob_c

241 karma · joined January 27, 2021

submissionscomments
rob_c··on Microsoft guide to pirating Harry Potter for LLM training (2024) [removed]
The article author and the uploader should _BOTH_ be sentient enough to engage brain and not just ignore it because they feel "it's an abstract concept I'd not get in trouble for when not working in the US or EU".
rob_c··on Microsoft guide to pirating Harry Potter for LLM training (2024) [removed]
I... There are parts of the world where certain developers don't understand the way the west tends to work with regard to copyright, or not blindly copying anything that is out there.

This however is a very, VERY poor situation when you end up placing your employer at risk because you think copyright doesn't matter and everything on the internet is fair game.

This is probably the most polite way I would describe this to most, UG. For the rest, jus stop acting like cheating through a situation to get a step up is the norm, it's just dirty behaviour.

rob_c··on OpenAI should build Slack
Just for reference, teams is not an astounding success it's forced on the workforce by management who want to pay less. It's a classic management square peg into workforce round hole.

Yes I understand sometimes something is better than nothing but teams is _so_ bad it causes user communities to fracture when they would previously congregate on the same platform.

Sure if deployed correctly and not by ape sysadmins with a thump of "deny everything in terms of security" I'm sure teams is a reasonable product, but in the real world, no, it's a nightmare.

rob_c··on Text classification with Python 3.14's ZSTD module
So you just discovered pca in some other form?
rob_c··on Don't rent the cloud, own instead
And finally we reach the point where you're not shot for explaining if you invest in ownership after everything is over you have something left that has intrinsic value regardless of what you were doing with it.

Otherwise, well just like that gym membership, you get out what you put into it...

rob_c··on Common misunderstandings about large software companies
I think this is akin to x% of the worker ants doing all the work. Once you get to a big enough scale and have to delegate I'm sure every company hits this.

I just wish we didn't have to rely on hiring 100 on paper workers for 5 excellent people committed to the company...

rob_c··on A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease
Which when it leads to abuse it's saving face and when it's incompetence it's saving face.

For a competent doctor it's used too let a patient know they're doing their job and an acknowledgement of symptoms.

Unfortunately to a _lot_ of the field "catch-all" "diagnoses" (in intentionally separating these labels). It's the same as diagnosing someone with chronic fatigue. It's diagnosing via exclusion.

The difference between chronic fatigue and brain disorders being that you're more likely to get someone looking to make a "name for themselves" diagnosing or curing the latter vs the former...

rob_c··on The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks (2018)
This is basically just a rehash of "trained" DNN are a function which is strongly dependent on the initialization parameters. (Easily provable)

It would be awesome to have a way of finding them in advance but this is also just a case of avoid pure DNNs due to their strong reliance on initialization parameters.

Looking at transformers by comparison you see a much much weaker dependence of the model on the input initial parameters. Does this mean the model is better or worse at learning or just more stable?

rob_c··on Six Harmless Bugs Lead to Remote Code Execution
1) routing (mis-)config problem - key of remote exploit. This should always be something people double check if they don't understand how it works.

2) hard-coded secrets - this is just against best practice. don't do this _ever_ there's a reason secure enclaves exist, not working it into your workflow is only permissible if you're working with black-box proprietary tools.

3) hidden user - this is again against best practice allowing for feature creep via permissions creep. If you need privileged hidden remote accessible accounts at least restrict access and log _everything_.

4) ssrf - bad but should be isolated so is much less of an issue. technically against best practices again, but widely done in production.

5) use of python eval in production - no, no, no, no, never, _ever_ do this. this is just asking for problems for anything tied to remote agents unless the point of the tool is shell replication.

6) static aes keys / blindly relying on encryption to indicate trusted origin - see bug2, also don't use encryption as origin verification if the client may do _bad_ things

parsing that was... well... yeah, I can see why that turned into a mess, the main thing missing is a high-level clear picture of the situation vs a teardown of multiple bugs and a brain dump

rob_c··on Why I don’t root for the Many Worlds team
Outside the realm of the testable isn't worth discussing to experimentalists so might as well be a non quantifiable field.

Although sociology is perfectly quantifiable and measurable. Even though arguably the underlying relationships between the measurements are extremely difficult to extract.

A better example is pure philosophy and maths rather than sociology to particle theory. But then again, nobody ever accused QFT of being too simple, so maybe I'm arguing against my own point there.

rob_c··on Why I don’t root for the Many Worlds team
> a philosopher turned science journalist,

Interesting, I read it as the other way round.

I wonder which of the many worlds is correct :p

The moon example is painful, but I was assuming to be a "if the tree falls in the forest... yada yada yada..." Example to justify words on a page. Although at the time my brain was screaming about things like tidal forces and gravitational effects, asif I was about to start discussing the retrograde motion of Venus with a flat earther who doesn't actually want to learn anything with rigour...

Personally I'm more worried by the comparison of Planks constant in the small to c in GR. Yes they represent asymptotic limits in many regards but are certainly not equivalent imho.

rob_c··on Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality
> That's a year into its availability in France. Anyone who didn't have their first dose by then probably wasn't getting a dose.

You are aware of the "incentives" offered by the French govt?

Such wonderful options as the ability to go the shops without being arrested that came with, "take the mandated medicine".

rob_c··on Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality
Yes, a 1% mortality either way would. Yet for some reason we're focused on just one of the possibly results of the decision tree
rob_c··on Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality
Explain how? there is a right answer but you'll probably not get it by relying exclusively on the reported data.
rob_c··on Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality
NB: most people choosing not to take it in France tend to fall into the medically at risk, stubborn, or, "so far down the rabbit hole that you probably can't trust these people to make sensible life choices" groups. (This alone being a good reason why this 'control' group had a slightly higher all cause mortality at 6months)

Remember, France was one of the wonderful countries where you couldn't legally shop or work if you were deemed to be 'not at risk' && 'unvaccinated' and achieved a very high rate as a result biasing the control group. (This is a purely statistical statement)

And for reference, I do think the vax is dangerous in terms of massive populations and we don't have mass graves due to mRNA problems (although several large cancer blips). In the same way in countries with low vaccination rates we don't have mass graves at 10% population or higher. Cv19 was always going to kill and an untested treatment is likely to kill those who were at risk.

(I'm willing to bet in the case of cv19 the ones who were hit hardest would have been hit badly by either vector, virus or mRNA. But we'll pretty much never be able to prove or disprove that...)

I'm sure both extremes will jump to the rallying cry of "2 more weeks..." So yes of course I'm wrong, I only worked on analysing early 'data' and pulling apart the models so what do I know.

rob_c··on Most technical problems are people problems
If that's not obvious to you pray you're not over of them...

But in seriousness it's management failure to build up debt like that. Either self management, middle management or out of touch management. There's a reason that good managers are needed. And unfortunately most management is dealing with people and/or real-world, not a fixed in stone RFC or list of vendor requirements from legal.

rob_c··on Exploring the limits of large language models as quant traders
Exactly. If it can't distinguish between a basic repeat after me ordering how is it going to even get a simple output order correct? Let alone pull apart the strategies themselves
rob_c··on Looking Back at a Pandemic Simulator
Last time I sat down with one of the groups modelling national food availability their model _needed_ a scratch fs capable of dealing with >1M 4kB files per folder. When asked why not to use a db they replied databases don't work well with objects larger than 1kB in size and this would introduce network latencies into their code. Needless to say I walked away from that glad that I couldn't help.
rob_c··on Looking Back at a Pandemic Simulator
They're all awful. The ICL model used to "inform" the UK lockdowns had (probably still has) a serious race condition such that when running multi-threaded that meant all of the timelines had errors of +/-1week... (It's a miracle the code didn't crash)

After this was pointed out pandemic "planning" in the UK simply went from per-week to monthly plannings following the same broken model...

It still turned out to be crazily wrong and over predicted every, single, metric, by orders of magnitude that it was tasked with simulating.

Not too mention it couldn't load configs correctly. Work correctly on the national academic supercomputer. Or gracefully present any results/findings.

This was signed off _blindly_ by the cluster admins, academics, policy advisors and international "experts". And there was significant push back for over a week once this had been demonstrated that there must be a problem with the test methodology (simply running and *checking* the output multiple times). Ask me how I know there wasn't.

The whole field of pandemic modelling I'm sure has come on leaps and bounds in recent years, but it's a shocking sad truth most/all UG computing students with a 1st could have done a better job than these experts at the top of their field.

rob_c··on Python is not a great language for data science
Refuses to learn tool so tool is broken... There is no problem with python for this. If you hate boiler plate job the club, get llms to generate it for you and move on to doing real work (or get involved in improving the language or libraries directly)
rob_c··on The 101 of analog signal filtering (2024)
On the other hand it's literally never been easier. Seriously, don't so much spend the time learning a discipline as learning to learn with any of the free online LLM tools for any subject and if you've actually got the gumption you'll go far. The 2nd qualification in life is often the toughest but the 3rd and 4th are often the easiest.
rob_c··on The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
> "I’m living a life of unalloyed privilege"

How to scream I'm the worst of online discorse

rob_c··on What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality
> I worry about the damage caused by these things on distressed people

I worry what these people were doing before they "fell under the evil grasp of the AI tool". They obviously aren't interacting with humanity in a normal or healthy way. Frankly I'd blame the parents, but on here everything is b&w and everyone should still be locked up who isn't vaxxed according to those who won't touch grass... (I'm pointing out how binary internet discussion has become to the oh so hurt by that throw away remark)

The problem is raising children via the internet, it's always and will always be a bad idea.

rob_c··on What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality
the ultimate pebkac...
rob_c··on The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
How to scream I'm behaving badly online...
rob_c··on Exploring the limits of large language models as quant traders
Yes, but LLM can barely cope with following the ordering of complex software tutorials linearly. Why would you reasonably expect them unprompted to understand time any better enough to trade and turn a profit?
rob_c··on Exploring the limits of large language models as quant traders
> guessing 'they're poorly suited' is just that, guessing

I have a really nice bridge to sell you...

This "failure" is just a grab at trying to look "cool" and "innovative" I'd bet. Anyone with a modicum of understanding of the tooling (or hell experience they've been around for a few years now, enough for people to build a feeling for this), knows that this it's not a task for a pre-trained general LLM.

rob_c··on Exploring the limits of large language models as quant traders
At least a coin is faster and more reliable.
rob_c··on Exploring the limits of large language models as quant traders
Not just can i guarantee the models are bad with numbers, unless it's a highly tuned and modified version they're too slow for this arena. Stick to using attention transformers in better model designs which have much lower latencies than pre-trained llms...
rob_c··on Don't blindly trust what AI tells you, says Google's Sundar Pichai
and don't blindly believe a bbc headline these days...
← PreviousPage 3 of 34Next →