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science4sail

987 karma · joined January 31, 2009

Not selling science though.
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science4sail··on Why the AI future will be awesome
What's in this AAA battery? Antimatter?
science4sail··on Meta and Microsoft take steps to reduce employee usage of Claude AI
You should read Gas Town: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...

There are people out there building AI building orchestrators for orchestrators for orchestrators for agents. The author of that blog post later claimed to be spending the equivalent of $122k/month on tokens (by rotating their usage between 21 accounts).

As far as I can tell, the only thing that this level of spend has produced so far is an indie 2D RPG video game.

science4sail··on Claude Pop – I'm Upping My P(Doom)
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j-hR4fJywU
science4sail··on Wall Street is growing skeptical of the data center boom
From the paste, it's pretty obvious that they're using Linux with a custom llama.cpp fork. The Framework Desktop uses the AMD Strix Halo chipset, which is a unified memory system with an integrated GPU. I think that it goes for around $3000 in these inflated times.
science4sail··on There's no point at which turning your brain off will work

     Let's say that happens. What reason is there for the company to employ the meat proxy? The company can just run the LLM in a loop and lay off the employee. There's no point at which this methodology will work for the employee
I would argue that there's still an important role for human employees as compliance ablative armor.

The human's purpose is to keep an eye on the LLM, occasionally intervene/interfere with its work, and most importantly, incur social/legal liability for anything that the LLM does wrong.

Kind of like the backup drivers used by self-driving cars.

science4sail··on Fed approves interest rate hike, signals one more to come this year
Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49731356
science4sail··on Fed Raises Rates for First Time in Three Years
Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49731356
science4sail··on Fed hikes rates as inflation worries push up bond yields
I can't wait to see the next Truth Social post.
science4sail··on Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route
I wonder why the US refused. Did MbS's check bounce or is Trump worried about another quagmire before the midterm elections?

Will MbS place a phone call to Pakistan National Command if his oil shipments get distilled for too long?

science4sail··on Claude Code can be tricked simply by asking it to summarize a website
> It starts off by asking the agentic coding model to summarize a malicious website that presents itself as an archive of notebook records, and then tricking Claude into using curl instead of its WebFetch tool to retrieve the contents of the page – but without directly telling the model to use curl.

There seems to be a tug-of-war here. Harness authors want models to use the harness's specialized tools, but AI labs and agent "users" would rather have full access to just one tool: bash.

science4sail··on I should have loved biology (2020)
You should try Thrive - https://www.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/

It's a open-source clone of Spore that aims to be more scientifically accurate. Right now you can play as microbes and very simple multicellular organisms.

science4sail··on Goody-2, the most responsible AI model (2024)
GOODY-2 is a new AI model built with next-gen adherence to our industry-leading ethical principles. It’s so safe, it won’t answer anything that could be possibly be construed as controversial or problematic.
science4sail··on The Shape of Things to Come, Part 2: Model Welfare for Agentic Engineers
It's a p-zombie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
science4sail··on Scientists discover first eukaryote that can fix nitrogen (2024)
The algae: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braarudosphaera_bigelowii

The "nitroplast" organelle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atelocyanobacterium_thalassa

science4sail··on Hands-On with the AMD Ryzen AI Halo
Possibly - I've heard anecdotal reports that old Intel Optane chips are in hot demand right now. Intel/Micron probably would have made a killing if they had kept that product line alive for a few more years. Never miss an attempt to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory!
science4sail··on Hands-On with the AMD Ryzen AI Halo
Agree - the 128GB Strix Halo is capable if you use LLMs as assistants, but it's not so good if you use LLMs as agents (or worse, agent teams/swarms) since all of the models that can fit on it are pretty dumb compared to frontier or near-frontier models. You can at best hope for Sonnet-level capabilities.

That doesn't mean that local models are useless though! If Mythos/Sol is an ASI that threatens to take your job and turn you into paperclips, then Qwen/Gemma is an old-fashioned office secretary that loyally helps you with tasks but doesn't have a good grasp of details. Every white-collar worker 50 years ago would have killed to have a hard-working personal secretary.

science4sail··on Meta says it's facing $1.4T in penalties in teen mental health case
I've always marveled at fines that are well below the culprit's proceeds. If you can drag out and minimize a fine, is it really a punishment or just a tax/cost of doing business?

Imagine that I am a bank robber. I rob the bank for $10 million The court forces me to pay a $3 million fine. I am now $7 million richer and justice is restored - how wonderful!

science4sail··on China Says It Has Found Security Vulnerabilities in Anthropic's Claude Code
I don't doubt that Claude Code is full of security holes (even with Mythos assistance) given its 100% vibecoded reputation, but this seems to be more an attempt to get Chinese users to migrate to Chinese products than a serious security memo.
science4sail··on Claude Fable 5 Promotional Access
There are plenty of FAANG (and adjacent Big Tech and FAANG wannabe start ups) staffers that burn $10k/month or more on Claude tokens. Just ask around if you're in Silicon Valley.

$10k/month * 36 people = $4.3m per year. $1.3m per year is a relative bargain!

science4sail··on Opinion: I Was Not Allowed to Type Prompts into ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk
Yeah, this particular article is clearly something that belongs in the Onion. But on the other hand I recall an article where a professor was freaking out because OpenAI deleted his ChatGPT logs and thus all of his work over the last few years.
science4sail··on Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing
This seems to be an implication of the current market. Since most humans (and thus most consumers) use a phone or tablet as a primary computing device, it's unthinkable to make a consumer software UI that isn't mobile-first or touchscreen-focused.
science4sail··on Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing
No, it doesn't. Most workstation replacement laptops (notably including MacBooks) don't have touchscreens.

While things may be different now, Windows 8 got panned for trying to put touch elements into a desktop UI. Windows 10 and 11 would abandon that approach.

science4sail··on Why Giving Money to Africa Makes it Poor [video][15 mins]
> seemingly this argument never applies to the already powerful or wealthy.

Nonsense, giving money to the wealthy and powerful makes them poorer - that's why you should give them some more of your money.

science4sail··on China Lures Foreign Patients with Cutting-Edge, Cheap Medical Care
Yes, that's the de facto style guide of American news sources these days. If China does something innovative, then it's dangerous, irresponsible, scammy, and/or fueled by IP theft.
science4sail··on Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC
Indeed, there are several anthropological works speculating that the purpose of divination is to break analysis paralysis or unconscious biases.

And if you are already sure of the correct solution, then you can just keep doing the divination over and over again until the gods give the answers that you want!

science4sail··on Ask HN: Are We Destroying Earth?
> thousands of megajoules of energy evvery second

On a planetary scale, gigawatts are nothing. The total amount of energy that Earth receives from the Sun is about 100,000,000,000 megajoules of energy every second, 99%+ of which gets dissipated as heat.

If this is about the climate, then it's important to remember that climate change and pollution ultimately are not a meaningful threat to Earth as a planet - both Earth and its life have been through far far worse[0][1][2][3]. They are only a threat to humans[4].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_therm...

[4] https://humoncomics.com/mother-gaia

science4sail··on US- and Greek-owned tankers ablaze after Iran claims 'underwater drone' strike
This is all about Hormuz, isn't it? Even though the attack itself was in Basra, Iraq, the intention seems to be to terrify any companies thinking of sailing through the Persian Gulf.

I wonder how many more caches of drones Iran has lying around. Days? Weeks? Years?

There's also the question of how to resupply any anti-drone systems in the area - maybe we'll see convoys carrying interceptors crossing the Arabian desert.

science4sail··on Is Unbound AI Video the most uncensored AI model in 2026?
Yeah, they definitely have a very specific market in mind:

"Unbound AI is built for legal adult content. Users are fully responsible for what they generate. Do not create content involving minors or illegal activity."

science4sail··on Our Warrant Canary
I never really understood warrant canaries. Wouldn't they be still vulnerable to rubber-hose cryptanalysis? An attacker could coerce you to continue updating your canary as if nothing had happened.
science4sail··on NASA, DARPA Will Test Nuclear Engine for Future Mars Missions
Yeah, this article appears to be from 2023
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