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santadays

475 karma · joined March 13, 2009

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santadays··on Let's Ditch Google (Verb)
My kids and their friends say “search it up”. I have no idea if that’s representative of the tween/teen population. But google as a verb will likely die on its own. It’s been a while since I’ve xeroxed anything.
santadays··on Jeeves. Reasoning improves Jev-like decision models
Doesn't the fact that it's general purpose warrant a new term? It's partly that it doesn't need to be trained, but it's also able to play games based on game state, I'd imagine it would be hard to train a classifier to do something like this because you'd need to represent a good distribution of all the states. The general purpose llm world understanding underneath it allows for this.

I've used it to do web research where it follows the most appropriate links, decides what to record in state, etc. I struggle to see how you could implement something with a classifier. That said, I have no idea how deep the technology is and it might be replaced with open source pretty quickly since its drafting of the frontier models and the open source models seem almost as good.

I like the term decision model and I think it's warranted.

santadays··on I'm the mom in that viral Giants clip. Let me tell you about my husband
There are social sharing functions and then there are algorithmic feedback loops that induce doomscrolling. Pretty sure it’s technically feasible to have one without the other.

The question to me is, with enough content and a powerful enough recommendation algorithm trained with enough eyeballs can short form videos be considered addictive in a clinical sense? If so what are the deleterious effects of the addiction? Should it be regulated?

I’m all for freedom, but we regulate drugs because we deem them bad for society.

santadays··on Once Claude can measure something, it can make it faster
Whats going to happen when we have misanthropic model?
santadays··on New York Times and The Athletic workers demand company scrap Kalshi deal
https://news.kalshi.com/p/donald-trump-jr-strategic-advisor
santadays··on New York Times and The Athletic workers demand company scrap Kalshi deal
I read it as the liberal elite hate young men... so damaging them is a good thing.
santadays··on The Citizen Developer
you missed the "for you"
santadays··on The Citizen Developer
In case anyone missed it, tptacek is saying that ai is different than just a tool. Tool analogies are not good.

A better analogy is, now you have what seems like an increasingly intelligent personal assistant that can do any cognitive work that you ask it to do, to increasingly better result, has retrograde amnesia, no accountability, entirely middle of the road morality, access to the internet... eh this isn't really a good analogy either.

santadays··on Watching TikTok and Instagram deactivates the cognitive control network: Study
How about anything that tracks the user's behavior and changes its output based on that behavior specific to that user. If I have a table somewhere in my software that identifies a user and references behavior, not intentional settings, just behavior and that is used to determine what the software does. Make that illegal and a lot of problems go away. To me it is this feedback loop that is insidious.
santadays··on Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls
Just pass that through a third llm.
santadays··on Session is shutting down in 90 days
I believe NetFlix actually had a plan to stream movies from the start (hence the name) and just did the DVD shipping as a way to get started.
santadays··on Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge
Intelligence seems to boil down to an approximation of reality. The only scientific output is prediction. If we want to know what happens next just wait. If we want to predict what will happen next we build a model. Models only model a subset of reality and therefore can only predict a subset of what will happen. Llms are useful because they are trained to predict human knowledge, token by token.

Intelligence has to have a fitness function, predicting best action for optimal outcome.

Unless we let AI come up with its own goal and let it bash its head against reality to achieve that goal then I’m not sure we’ll ever get to a place where we have an intelligence explosion. Even then the only goal we could give that’s general enough for it to require increasing amounts of intelligence is survival.

But there is something going on right now and I believe it’s an efficiency explosion. Where everything you want to know if right at hand and if it’s not fuguring out how to make it right at hand is getting easier and easier.

santadays··on When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype
That is a good point. It is impressive. Llms from two years ago were impressive, llms a year ago were impressive, and from a month ago even more impressive.

Still, getting "something" to compile after a week of work is very different from getting the thing you wanted.

What is being sold, and invested in, is the promise that LLMs can accomplish "large things" unaided.

But they can't, as of yet, they cannot, unless something is happening in one of the SOTA labs that we don't know about.

They can however accomplish small things unaided. However there is an upper bound, at least functionally.

I just wish everyone was on the same page about their abilities and their limitations.

To me they understand conext well (e.g. the task, build a browser doesn't need some huge specification because specifications already exist).

They can write code competently (this is my experience anyway)

They can accomplish small tasks (my experience again, "small" is a really loose definition I know)

They cannot understand context that doesn't exist (they can't magically know what you mean, but they can bring to bear considerable knowledge of pre-existing work and conventions that helps them make good assumptions and the agentic loop prompts them to ask for clarification when needed)

They cannot accomplish large tasks (again my experience)

It seems to me there is something akin to the context window into which a task can fit. They have this compact feature which I suspect is where this limitation lies. Ie a person can't hold an entire browser codebase in their head, but they can create a general top level mapping of the whole thing so they can know where to reach, where areas of improvement are necessary, how things fit together and what has been and what hasn't been implemented. I suspect this compaction doesn't work super well for agents because it is a best effort tacked on feature.

I say all this speculatively, and I am genuinely interested in whether this next level of capability is possible. To me it could go either way.

santadays··on When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype
This is entirely too charitable. Basically all this proves is that the agent could run in a loop for a week or so, did anyone doubt that?

They marketed as if we were really close to having agents that could build a browser on their own. They rightly deserve the blowback.

This is an issue that is very important because of how much money is being thrown at it, and that effects everyone, not just the "stakeholders". At some point if it does become true that you can ask an agent to build a browser and it actually does, that is very significant.

At this point in time I personally can't predict whether that will happen or not, but the consequences of it happening seem pretty drastic.

santadays··on Proof of Corn
> I can definitely believe that in 2026 someone at their computer with access to money can send the right emails and make the right bank transfers to get real people to grow corn for you.

I think this is the new turing test. Once it's been passed we will have AGI and all the Sam Altmans of the world will be proven correct. (This isn't a perfect test obviously, but neither was the turing test)

If it fails to pass we will still have what jdthedisciple pointed out

> a non-farmer, is doing professional farmer's work all on his own without prior experience

I am actually curious how many people really believe AGI will happen. Theres alot of talk about it, but when can I ask claude code to build me a browser from scratch and I get a browser from scratch. Or when can I ask claude code to grow corn and claude code grows corn. Never? In 2027? In 2035? In the year 3000?

HN seems rife with strong opinions on this, but does anybody really know?

santadays··on Developers Are Solving the Wrong Problem
One definition of analysis is: The process of separating something into its constituent elements.

I think when someone designs a software system, this is the root process, to break a problem into parts that can be manipulated. Humans do this well, and some humans do this surprisingly well. I suspect there is some sort of neurotransmitter reward when parsimony meets function.

Once we can manipulate those parts we tend to reframe the problem as the definition of those parts, the problem ceases to exist and what is left is only the solution.

With coding agents we end up in weird place, one, we have to just give them the problem, or we have to give them the solution. Giving them the solution means that we have to give them more and more details until they arrive at what we want. Giving an agent the problem we never really get the satisfaction of the problem dissolving into the solution.

At some level we have to understand what we want. If we don't we are completely lost.

When the problem changes we need to understand it, orient ourselves to it, find which parts still apply and which need to change and what needs to be added, if we had no part in the solution we are that much further behind in understanding it.

I think this, at an emotional level is what developers are responding to.

Assumptions baked into the article are:

You can keep adding features and Claude will just figure it out, sure, but for whom, and will they understand it.

Performance won't demand you prioritize feature A over feature B.

Security (that you don't understand) will be implemented over feature C, because Claude knows better.

Claude will keep getting more intelligent.

The only assumption I think is right, is that Claude will keep getting better. All the other assumptions require you know WTF you are doing (which we do, but for how long will we know what we are doing).

santadays··on SendGrid isn’t emailing about ICE or BLM – it’s a phishing attack
Maybe one day our knee jerk reactionary outrage will be quelled not by any enlightenment but because we are forced to grow weary of falling prey to phishing attacks.

I'd feel pretty stupid getting worked up about something only to realize that getting worked up about it was used against me.

I'm writing this because for a moment I did get worked up and then had the slow realization it was a phishing attack, slightly before the article got to the point.

Anyways, I think the clickbait is kindof appropriate here because it rather poignantly captures what is going on.

santadays··on AI coding assistants are getting worse?
I've seen the following quote.

"The energy consumed per text prompt for Gemini Apps has been reduced by 33x over the past 12 months."

My thinking is that if Google can give away LLM usage (which is obviously subsidized) it can't be astronomically expensive, in the realm of what we are paying for ChatGPT. Google has their own TPUs and company culture oriented towards optimizing the energy usage/hardware costs.

I tend to agree with the grandparent on this, LLMs will get cheaper for what we have now level intelligence, and will get more expensive for SOTA models.

santadays··on Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS
GraalVM supports running javascript in a sandbox with a bunch of convenient options for running untrusted code.

https://www.graalvm.org/latest/security-guide/sandboxing/

santadays··on Reflections on AI at the End of 2025
I get this take, but given the state of the world (the US anyways), I find it hard to trust anyone with any kind of profit motive. I feel like any information can’t be taken as fact, it can just be rolled into your world view and discarded if useful or not. If you need to make a decision that can’t be backed out of that has real world consequences I think/hope most people are learning to do as much due diligence as reasonable. Llms seem at this moment to be trying to give reliable information. When they’ve been fine tuned to avoid certain topics it’s obvious. This could change but I suspect it will be hard to find tune them too far in a direction without losing capability.

That said, it definitely feels as though keeping a coherent picture of what is actually happening is getting harder, which is scary.

santadays··on Meta and TikTok are obstructing researchers' access to data, EU commission rules
I can’t imagine this is not happening. There exists the will, the means and the motivation, with not a small dose of what pg might call naughtiness.
santadays··on Claude for Excel
When I tried the Gemini/AI formula it didn’t work very well, gpt-5 mini or nano are cheap and generally do what you want if you are asking something straightforward about a piece of content you give them. You can also give a json schema to make the results more deterministic.
santadays··on Claude for Excel
Don't know about excel, but for Google Sheets. You can ask chatgpt to write you a appsscript custom function e.g CALL_OPENAI. Then you can pass in variables into. =CALL_OPEN("Classify this survey response as positive, negative, or off-topic: "&A1)
santadays··on You are the scariest monster in the woods
That makes sense for why they are so much better at writing code than actually following the steps the same code specifies.

Curious, is anyone training in adversarial simulations? In open world simulations?

I think what humans do is align their own survival instinct with a surrogate activities and then rewrite their internal schema to be successful in said activities.

santadays··on You are the scariest monster in the woods
It seems like there is a bunch of research/working implementations that allow efficient fine tuning of models. Additionally there are ways to tune the model to outcomes vs training examples.

Right now the state of the world with LLMs is that they try to predict a script in which they are a happy assistant as guided by their alignment phase.

I'm not sure what happens when they start getting trained in simulations to be goal oriented, ie their token generation is based off not what they think should come next but what should come next in order to accomplish a goal. Not sure how far away that is but it is worrying.

santadays··on Meta exposé author faces $50k fine per breach of non-disparagement agreement
I think this is the wrong take. I don’t agree that people are good or bad, I think actions are, and there are lots of reasons and motivations a person can end up enabling a bad situation, some of those motivations can even at the time be justified.

I do believe Meta is very bad for the world and has way too much power. Anything that can get people to open their eyes to this is important. Dividing those that are trying isn’t helping.

santadays··on Many PS4 units dead on arrival
The other common pattern being shill reviews:

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santadays··on A 140-Acre Forest Is About to Materialize in the Middle of Detroit
http://openingofdetroit.org/graphics/maps/HantzFarmsParcelMa...

Showing more of the city: http://www.foodurbanism.org/hantz-farms-detroit/1101-hantz-f...

santadays··on Create an algorithm to distinguish dogs from cats
Thylacine looks like both dog and cat. Known as the Tasmanian tiger or alternatively the Tasmanian wolf.

Unfortunately it's extinct. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacine

santadays··on Average Income per Programming Language
Or terse.
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