shadowmanifold

It will make me a mac owner for the first time in 25 years.

I was just looking at a mac book air yesterday but I just can't get over the complete ripoff of a memory upgrade from the base model.

16 gig starting at $599. I honestly don't need to know anything else to buy one.

Murray Gell-Mann - "The quality of information" lecture on youtube from 1997 is also worth a listen.

Murray basically points out how much communication in general is really just exchanging errors for no reason.

I suspect this is where the idea of "Gell-Mann Amnesia" came from.

I would personally like to a join a breakaway HN for people who actually want to use these tools.

"AI positive Hacker News" or something like that.

There is just really not much point in reading anything on AI here. I get it, AI sucks. Next.

I have been deeply involved with monitoring my diet and nutrition for almost 40 years now.

My own metabolism and body is so different than when I started 40 years ago.

Current nutrition "science" is basically studying ensembles of weakly nonstationary processes and arriving at meaningless averages.

The whole method is completely stupid. It is why it feels like we have basically learned nothing in my lifetime in this field because I honestly don't think we have.

There is a problem too that scientism has a dual meaning.

There is the belief in science as the best means to get at the truth and then the pejorative of using science as a type of orthodox religion. So for the true believer in the pejorative you can't even use the term.

Personally, I think this is a lost cause. Scientism in the pejorative sense is a new religion and most likely we are at the very early stages. Even when it comes to lifting weights, every youtube video pretends to be "based on science".

I might be too old to see it happen but I fully expect at some point in the future instead of a movie getting 5 stars, the commercial will say this is scientifically proven to be great movie. A restaurant will claim to have the best tacos based on science.

This is clearly the road we are on and I don't see a way back. Actual scientist will have to be more and more certain in their language because that is what scientism in the pejorative sense is to the true believer and the cult of the true believer in pejorative scientism is growing.

"SCIENCE IS REAL"

You wouldn't have to be a professor of music for this.

Chopin has a unique style and it is a waltz.

This would have been a trivial question for any piano music lover.

The only reason I might not have have guessed Chopin first is it seems too obvious and easy if I had been asked. A new Beatles song might be harder to guess than this.

I think it sounds pretty good too but I would want to hear it performed by a pianist who I like the way they play Chopin to judge it better. It sounds quite good considering I don't really like the sound of the piano that is being used.

This latest update to Sonnet is super impressive.

We are really already past the point of being able to discuss these matters though in large groups.

The herd speaks as if all LLMs on all programming languages are basically the same.

It is an absurdity. Talking to the herd is mostly for entertainment at this point. If I actually want to learn something, I will ask Sonnet.

You can't run a 120 billion dollar bond trading operation with like 4 people.

That amount of money is a huge amount of work to manage no matter what you are trading.

The simple explanation of how they do this is that they don't have anything close to 120 billion to manage.

It is really a sociological and network experiment of how long fraud can persist when the fraud is in the short term interest of all nodes of the network.

I suspect the reason Bernie Madoff was able to persist for so long is that many of the investors thought he was front running trades because of his position with Nasdaq. People tend to be fine with fraud if they are directly benefiting from the fraud and only risking their capital in the process.

Time is not a good measure of non-fraud. That is just a rationalization because any crypto investor has to basically keep the idea of a tether fraud out of their head at this point considering the risk to the ecosystem would be so catastrophic.

What does actually grow in time is the risk to the network.

It is a ridiculous article but did you really expect more?

Journalism is really a type of opinion piece, social lubricant in 2024. The purpose is so you and I have something to talk about and connect when we would not have other wise.

Did either of us learn anything? Of course not but only an idiot would expect to learn anything based on the title.

If I want to learn something I will just browse arXiv myself.

You could even say it started with things like Thomas Paine's pamphlet propaganda.

It seems the problem is we have a system that was born from the printing press and this system simply doesn't work in the age of the internet.

All that really holds it together are these religious sentiments about the inherent good of democracy. Sentiments that have almost nothing to do with lived experience at this point.

It seems to me because of the scaling properties, the internet finds an issue free equilibrium of "vote for me because the other person sucks."

Then it is just a race to get the most views on how much the opponent sucks.

I think this is actually a deeper issue.

The CEO would trust the personal assistant to do this if they have a deep trust in the assistance competence. They would also need to know the assistant has a deep enough understanding of the their preferences to not do something they don't like. AI can mirror that.

More importantly though there will be consequences if the human assistant makes a big mistake and books the wrong flight. They would have to take responsibility for the mistake.

The LLM is always just going to write in text it is sorry if it makes a mistake. That is never going to be good enough for anything of consequence. The LLM would practically have to be omniscient in a way that is not going to be possible in a world filled with uncertainty.

So much of human activity is built around the network of trust that another human takes the blame if something goes wrong. So much activity involves coin flips and that someone takes the blame when the coin lands on heads but we bet on tails.

It is clear to me that people who make these comments, simple don't use the models much.

To say it is faster to get information from Google than the latest update to Sonnet is simply absurd to me.

I might have even agreed a few months ago but certainly not now.

These are basically narratives from Romantic fiction of the starving artist that are still being repeated as if they are not just fiction.

Of course, the starving artist can not be well paid. That would imply they are not a true artist, they are a sell out.

The starving artist is starving because they are misunderstood by society so naturally what they love is not going to have a lot of economic value.

None of this of course has anything to do with reality. Just the plot lines from 200 year old novels that we have forgot were just novels.

It reminds me when I was young thinking I couldn't get a date because I didn't have six pack abs.

Then when I got in really good shape I thought it was because I didn't make enough money.

When I started making money I thought it was because I wasn't tall enough.

There is no way having social media or not is mattering that much. It is just in your head.

It is rather comical.

Everyone knows that panning for gold is a fools game so we have a gold pan/shovel bubble.

It is like having a massive lumber bubble and calling it a real estate bubble because someday we might actually build those houses.

I would think there is some kind of information entropy and scaling laws at work.

It could all be represented by a graph but it is a huge measurement problem.

Minimize the variance of what with a business unit? It is not clear to me there is one measure that would apply across business units. I suspect that is part of the problem and something that gets amplified with scale.

This type of thinking is why we are ultimately doomed.

Yen is not the world's reserve currency. It won't matter until it does. Then the consequences are unimaginably devastating when it does.

It will be reflected in the 30 year bond first though. 4.3% is laughable compensation for the risk for my risk preference. That yield is already floored at some not great rate for housing here because of the debt without the Fed stepping in.

Exactly. I remember the first time someone had an iphone. It was with a whole group of people and everyone was simply amazed by it. The use cases couldn't be more obvious.

If you gave me an Apple Vision Pro, I literally have no idea what I would do with it. I would really love to get into something new like this but I literally can't think of what I would do with it. It is a technology that seems unreasonably useless. It seems like there should be many more use cases than there is.

An even better example is the city of Chongqing. Looking at pictures of Chongqing from when I was in high school, I would say what stands today is simply not possible. Yet there it is.

If you cut out consultancy firms, we would still not be able to do anything close to that in America. There are many reasons. None that I would expect to figure out and resolve anytime soon , if ever.

I think we need to stop making an argument about personal rights with the drug war and make it about what most of this document is about.

The drug war is empowering the most dangerous organized crime gangs ever created. They could be destroyed overnight by law makers with a pen.

At some point we are going to have to make the decision that dealing with kid's coke and heroin addictions is easier than dealing with thousands of Al Capones that will chop your head off.

We seem incapable of long term planning though so I doubt we will do anything for decades yet. We are like a cancer patient in denial that this cancer is growing and spreading.

I am an amateur but the reason I love React is because there is so much learning material. Robin Wieruch's The Road To Learn React book started with building a HN reader.

I think Claude/ChatGPT works exceptionally well with React code.

I tried to learn Svelte but React/Tailwind plus a language model is just incredible.

Much React hate I think is the way I view the band Metallica. They were way cooler in my head when they were not as popular.

Krita destroyed Gimp years ago. This debate is always by people who obviously don't even use these tools.

No one would compare GIMP to Photoshop in 2024 that has any idea what they are talking about.

I haven't used Photoshop in about 15 years. Gimp was never close to Photoshop

Krita on the other hand is basically everything I remember about old Photoshop. Even the keyboard shortcuts are pretty much the same. The price is quite right too.

What Adobe has done with generative AI has been really impressive though. I am going to probably have to give PS a try just to see what I am missing.

I think I have only been on camera 3 or 4 times since 2020.

The value has always been in the audio or what someone is sharing on their screen.

Video is mostly a distraction. If it is my meeting then video is going to be disabled for everyone.

My experience is that the people who love video is highly correlated with people who love useless meetings.

Absurd comment. No one is going into a hash bar basically to not smoke weed.

I love it. The only thing I would want different is to maybe give control for the number of stories on the page so I could only view 10 at a time if I wanted?

For me it seemed like more effort to skim than HN but I am not sure why that is.

My first impression though is this is better than anything I use currently for news. Really a testament to what complete trash "the news" has become.

I am on track to lose about 40lbs in 2024 and I suspect the main variable is really as simple as we have mastered the art of making really incredible tasting food.

It is so pervasive though it is hard to tell until you go on a really boring and restrictive diet. It is just hard to not gain weight on average when the food tastes this good with such incredible variety.

That is even if you buy something at the store. With our "foodie" culture, restaurants are an entire other level of choice and taste on top of that.