shermantanktop

If only we truly knew how much divisive online content was generated from geopolitical adversaries…LLM or not.

And if we go bust, bad things will happen when someone else uses my box-gun technology in an unsafe manner. Remember, unlike those scary other people, I'm really into safety and alignment; you can tell, because I eventually admitted that some bullets escaped.

Sounds like it was considered useful, but in a way that inconveniently didn’t line up with the investor pitch.

You can see it jerk up and down when one of the legs takes the load.

When one leg is moving the load is held on the other three, and if you define a triangle by the foot contact points, one side will bisect the center of gravity. That’s not a recipe for stability, but it probably helps with agility. What these design benefit from is lateral movement of the legs, but this one seems pretty stiff.

HN has a bunch of men of a certain age, and at some point people contemplate their mortality.

There should be a name for this phenomenon: geeking out about an overly literal interpretation of how a technical topic is presented, made by an artist/creator a long time ago who likely didn't intend to satisfy such a literal understanding.

It's like retconning... retgeeking?

I remember a notable triangular sandwich packed in a cardboard box and sold on the motorway in France. I ate it while my jet lagged toddler cried and cried and we tried to get to Provence before nightfall.

There is such a thing as a bad sandwich.

Turns out their marketing can get to you through HN posts…

But but but....I was told it was a stochastic parrot! I liked that idea because it appealed to my vanity, and it described the gibberish produced by older models with bad prompting, and that was enough for me thank you.

/s

Unless the organization really truly rewards that behavior. Which is rare.

The senior-most people (VPs, founders) often say they want it. But it’s the middle managers who will stab you in the front in revenge, while staring you in the eye. And if the VP doesn’t step in, they are endorsing the outcome.

With a permissions system that’s meant to enforce security? I hope not.

I’m not a FoxPro user and so maybe these are single-user/single-host installs, where the user can only destroy their own data, and permissions are a pretend feature. In which case, carry on.

I don’t understand why people are confused about the use of a launch flag, for this and for anything.

It’s a simple distributed systems problem. Separate the deployment of a new software feature (to umpteen hosts) from the triggering of that software with a lightweight switch.

If someone think that reading AGENTS.md is always benign, because they can’t imagine how it could be a problem…users are very creative.

You’re saying it’s not a 2 tier client/server app, it’s a one tier app with no intermediate API to define or enforce permissions. Fine.

But the filesystem access to read/write the db files creates a path to bypass half of that application.

Does the application checksum the db file and have any resistance to filesystem tampering? That'd be trivial to beat, I’m sure, but it’d be something.

Funeral services in the US got aggressively consolidated already, decades ago. Look up SCI - owns over 1,500 funeral homes and 400 cemeteries.

Improving efficiency and optimizing profit are two overlapping segments on the road to crap. It’s not easy to stop the car once you put the bean counters in the driver's seat. If a company is able to do so, it’s usually because there’s a strong leader or culture to resist the slide. But otherwise it’s a thousand small decisions that all seem reasonable on their own.

Is a programming language a language?

I think it probably exercises some of the same cognitive skills, but the vocabulary of a typical programming language is tiny.

I guess people are reading a lot into what I said. If the shoe fits, yadda yadda.

Others pointed out the meta, which is that if you want -ism to hate some people, a good way to do that is to say that their -ism hates you. I suppose that could be extended to third or fourth levels of meta.

-isms of all kind are powerful. But the most powerful are those that give the believer a distant group of people for them to blame for all their troubles, which are often self-inflicted.

Agree. Harnesses are effective because they interact with the underlying model effectively. If the latest models were fundamentally different, excluding them would be a miss. But I don’t think they are, at least not in ways that would affect these observations.

Each room is lived in by a few people, each building has an exterior which is looked at by thousands or millions.

I live in a hundred-year old house (old for the region I’m in), with rabbit warren hallways. I wouldn’t want it any other way. That might just be my taste in interiors, but (as with the article about exteriors) I suspect it is more common than all the modernist functional people would prefer.

> robots.txt is a service to crawlers to help them avoid wasting time

I doubt anyone edits robots.txt with a warm fuzzy feeling about how much they are helping crawlers be efficient.

Watches? Jewelry? Monogrammed clothes? Custom-printed shoes and t-shirts? Lots of examples, and of course it affects resale.

Apple was clearly thinking outside the category of “consumer electronics.”

Take a hard look at the people who are super into this stuff. Ignore the people who have a direct financial interest in it. Look at the people who are left, who are truly enthusiastic about AI-generated music as users.

In my experience they are inexplicably excited by how easy it is to make something shitty.

Not everyone is a born musician, just like not everyone is a born writer, sprinter or mountain climber. But it takes a certain kind of person to hit the "easy" button and still feel like they accomplished something.

Peak so far.

Maybe there’s a hype singularity where the hype is so strong that nothing can escape.

Do it twice to be sure

I suppose a 1 key piano can have unlimited notes, at least until the key wears out.

Some subjects are hard. Music notation is mathematical notation that is optimized for ease of consumption by notation experts. It is not optimized for learning.

Same with many activities. Pedagogy and real-world use are different goals. Result is a confusing and horrible learning curve.

Insurance and HMO CEOs salaries come from somewhere, and it’s not malpractice judgments.

Funny, my opinion is the opposite. Excel is a much better spreadsheet than Word is a word processor or than PowerPoint is a presentation tool.

Of course it’s got quirks and unfortunate relics of its long history, but I reach for it willingly, and I can’t say that about the rest of the Office suite.

Are you sure? I mean, yes of course tiny sample windows have this effect. But it seems at least possible that LLM is more prone to this effect when making estimates of human performance or behavior than when doing it for other topics.

In any case I feel the paper is interesting but almost begging to be misinterpreted.