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sillyfluke

1,065 karma · joined October 15, 2022

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sillyfluke··on Letter from Dolly Parton to Eminem
alternative for those that can't read the link:

https://consequence.net/2026/08/eminem-dolly-parton-tribute-...

https://archive.is/t7GHA

sillyfluke··on AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast."

...as Mickey Mouse was fond of telling me as I waiting for the ride at Disney World. Or it was my drill instructor. can't remember which.

sillyfluke··on OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining
Subsequently named Head of Post-Ethics at Palantir.
sillyfluke··on Everything you do is being recorded
The second paragraph by itself is enough, the first is a tad hubristic and vague. The good things that got us here are not necessarily the things that will get us there, there being wherever we ideally want to end up...

>The main part of that negative feedback is effective competition

The comment you responded to allows for "corporations that abuse us" to include those that actively try to prevent effective competition. You don't really explain why being antagonistic to those corporations would be a problem.

sillyfluke··on Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
He was method acting, so I'll allow it.
sillyfluke··on Mea Culpa – Dark Hours
I'm gonna go out on a limb here, but something tells me they don't defer to a panel of astrology app power users when deciding whether an app is a novel astrology app or not.

Also I'm not sure if I should be insulted when they insist that The Kama Sutra is "low effort".

sillyfluke··on Mea Culpa – Dark Hours
...and I've noticed that's not always the case. What's the value of such a bland whitewashing comment?
sillyfluke··on Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise
Their numbers might be dwindling, but I would wager there are still some devs out there burning the candle from both ends.

To be fair, I find US forced company events like this way more unbearable than UK/European ones. In the US, the incessant combination of excessive alcohol with neurotic self-awareness gets you to another level of hell.

In another FAANG, the L7s were complaining that the level of office machinations that were occuring stateside was off the charts compared to the offices overseas.

UK afterwork pub culture should be under UNESCO cultural protection at this point, I'm always surprised it's lasted this long. One would have to admit it's fended off the decreasing consumption of alcohol in the new generation impressively even though they may despise the tradition.

sillyfluke··on OpenAI’s accidental attack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened
In the parent's comment I initially read "PR" as "Public Relations" not problem report since their comment is about OpenAI and does not directly accuse Hugging Face except for that phrase. But it's still amiguous to me who's PR they are actually talking about. A good faith reading given the rest of the comment leads me to assume they are talking about OpenAI, not Higgins Face.

I did actually search Hugging Face with police in quotes and found no articles containg the word police but that might be a ddg thing. Then I checked Hugging Face's report and they specifically use the term "law enforcement" not police, as is to be expected I guess. So that checks out.

Can you find any info on the police investigation by the way? At the least, OpenAI should be investigated for potential criminal negligence, right?

Right?

sillyfluke··on Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
This helped my nostalgic craving for those pedantic old school HN comments which I seem to see less of nowadays...But frankly as a kid playing in the pool often revolved around pretending to be some kind of sea creature.
sillyfluke··on Never argue with your boss (2009)
I agree, though it should be said arguing in public is for people willing to accept the consequences of their actions (retaliation, getting fired etc). That's why ideally you should arrange your life (mentally or materially) in such a way that allows you to act without the fear of being fired, if possible obviously.
sillyfluke··on No Spanish reading crisis?
Really? I find phone book reading to be a very primitive experience without researching SOTA book apps. Is there an app that turns ebooks into a single infinite scroll longform article with intuitive bookmarking and easy book purchase/discovery?
sillyfluke··on New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices
Is there a website for New York City where people can petition for things like this?

If there's anybody from the mayor's office reading this, how about that all banks must provide their services at minimum on a browser through a web app and cannot mandate the use of a smartphone.

sillyfluke··on Punk, or why I don't stream anymore
Now imagine how poor people stress if their smartphone bricks or gets damaged or lost. Or if they're homeless, in which case the likelihood of their possesions getting damaged is probably much higher.

It's weird that people are sleepwalking into this single point-of-failure dystopia instead of regulating it out existence and only realize it when their phone gets damaged or lost or is glitching in some deal-breaking way.

Here's a tip, if you want people to help you out don't start with, "I don't have an smartphone..."

Instead, say a variation of "Hey, my camera's broken/the app keeps crashing on my phone. Can you help me out?" People tend to be a lot more sympathetic.

I've never had issues with the restaurant QR thing.

me:"Hey, my camera doesn't work can you help me out?"

waiter: "Sure you can take a look on my phone/use this tablet."

Like, I have to fix my phone's camera before I can park in your city? are you kidding me?

sillyfluke··on New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices
Obviously the difference of degree on the spectrum between the two in this case does vary greatly, but your comment reminded me of an interview with a journalist who had compiled a collection of interviews with midtier drug dealers in various cartels and one thing that stood out to him was that almost all of them, when asked why they did what they did, would respond by saying that if they didn't someone else would.
sillyfluke··on Ben Bernanke Joins Anthropic Oversight Trust
Yeah, this seems like reputation renting similar to Larry Summers being put on the board of OpenAI, which turned out, um...very well I guess. For different reasons of course.

I guess it's better than him joining OpenAI, where I could see Altman being more "creative" with the books than Amodei. But I just don't Bernanke pushing back or blowing any whistles when things start smelling funny.

sillyfluke··on The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
I'm not sure its accurate to imply that being completely delusional means you have no goal. Gulf War part II had a goal regardless of the deceit involved. The Afghanistan war though I thought took the cake for the sheer delusional premise.

To tie it to the sibling comment about Bosnia, Paddy Ashdown who was the High Representative for Bosina & Herzegovina was also one of the lone voices warning about the Afghanistan war in the beginning.

I wasn't able to find the article containing the original warnings, but here is one article from the early days[0].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/oct/11/britainand9...

sillyfluke··on "Can We Make the Villain a White Guy?"
That a few men have most of the power is the obvious fact that you seem to be ignoring. The parent asks:

"Who has all the power in the real world?"

If the answer in reality is a few white men have most of the power, how can you insist that they are claiming all white men have the power?

Whether they believe it not, there is no specific point about "heterosexual white men in general". These are your words and do not appear anywhere in their comment.

sillyfluke··on "Can We Make the Villain a White Guy?"
It's not a fallacy if the parent is not making some point about "benefit for other white men", which you seemed to have injected from somewhere. They simply said that the most powerful individuals having the most disproportionate power being white men is not inconsistent with matters in the real world, however few there are.
sillyfluke··on Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again
Sure, but I think what grates on people with Germany is the "they should know better" aspect of it. People have (or had) expectations of EU countries they don't have of "the harsher places".
sillyfluke··on Rayfish, Peer-to-peer mesh VPN with no server to trust
It's the attention economy. You're engaging in something that is related to privacy and security, thus the credibility of the author in this domain will also be a factor for people wanting to invest their time exploring these solutions.

To not care who you are would mean not only having to review the current code as is, but to review every update that follows as possibly written by a hostile party. Ie, the time invested would be several times of that invested in something written by a more trusted party.

sillyfluke··on Small Penis Rule
I never knew about this complaint either, the connection never occured to me at the time as the capitalist cristicism seemed par for the course for a post-scarcity Federation. I don't understand this knee-jerk self -owning behavior. It's like that bizarre tweet by the Israeli government about the photo of an IDF soldier destroying a Christian ornament. The gov. official insisted that the physical features of the soldier contained so many antisemitic tropes that it had to be AI. Thus, the guy was inadvertantly described as the ugliest person on the planet in excruciating detail by his own government.
sillyfluke··on Rayfish, Peer-to-peer mesh VPN with no server to trust
If you have any previous experience in this domain and/or other relevant credentials it would help to mention them here as well.
sillyfluke··on The Demoralization of the White-Collar Worker
Well, if you enjoy Trump era corruption, authoritarian strongman rule, and a great chasm between the haves and the have nots you can go to those countries as well. The options are open.
sillyfluke··on Spain Orders Blacklist of Palantir from Public and Private Companies
that was F degrees obviously, so 38 in "euro".
sillyfluke··on Spain Orders Blacklist of Palantir from Public and Private Companies
Nice. I don't know what your comfort with swimming is but battling extreme heat also happens to be much easier when you have large welcoming bodies of water for humans to wade in, and with easy and cheap access for the common man. It boggles the mind that for all its coast line the only place the US has that's comparable is Hawaii pretty much.

Sure extreme heat might ruin the seas too eventually (there is already talk of Asian jellyfish species being spotted in record warm sea temperatures) but the amount of due dilligence needed is non-existent compared to the US, Australia, or far east Asia.

sillyfluke··on Spain Orders Blacklist of Palantir from Public and Private Companies
>southern European countries

They also have colder beers than Germany probably for the same reason. Nothing beats the culture acclimation of wincing while sipping lukewarm beer under the July sun in 100+ degrees Berlin.

sillyfluke··on PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform
>No, it is because that is the content that people want to watch.

No, that's not a given. It would be more accurate to say it is content people will watch, and not necessarily want to watch. I mean people will watch porn, I'm not sure they want to watch porn.

If you asked someone before vine or tiktok whether you wanted to watch an unending carousel of thirty second videos from nobodies for four hours straight I'm not sure a lot of people would say yes.

Am I the only one who sees ragebait titles to youtube videos that do not contain a modicrum of the rage that is advertised in the title?

I don't think we need to conflate algorithmic nudging with the conscience preference of the user frankly.

sillyfluke··on Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass
Yeah, I think since it's getting provably worse no matter where you start the clock everyone can claim this whenever they actually do leave.

Just to give one example, you have the Google founders bending the knee to Trump these days whereas when Trump started his first term you had articles like this:

"Google co-founder Sergey Brin joins protest against immigration order at San Francisco airport" (2017)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13512063

sillyfluke··on How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots
While I agree with your sentiment and observatin by and large, ideally you could have added a few constraints as a lot of people here have had "Holy shit" moments with AI, but often it's most pronounced in a very specific personal context. Learning topics faster, fixing things without having to call a repair man, life-saving medical tips (somewhat more of a thing because of a handicapped health system, but that's another discussion).

Funnily enough though, the benefits don't seem to scale to the work environment as smoothly across the board. It's almost as if, to use pg's famous line, they built things that don't scale.

The moment you scale AI beyond the personal context, the noisiness and non-determinism of the technology starts wrecking havoc in ripples through the industry, damn the productivity. Managing the slop you've created, but more importantly (I would normally put an emdash here) managing the slop others created turns out to be a problem as big as the tech that created it.

What is the evidence of this? Isn't it strange no revolutionary product has yet been created from the coding output of this technology? More to the point, the only thing that comes close is the Claw. So what we have as the first breakaway product is something to help orchestrate the slop generators, instead of say, a new Phone OS that rivals Android and iOS, or a Metaverse that is actually worthy of its name. Nothing to see here, just more shovels to shovel the shit essentially.

We are still in the grasp of the electric and information revolution. Peter Thiel said more than a decade ago that if you compare life in the 70s and now the only major visible difference would simply be more screens in various forms nowadays. This he presented as evidence that no new revolutionary technology has been created in the interim. At present, the same is more true of AI. It has made access to information faster than before. However, unlike other processes of learning, it has made it more difficult to ascertain the correctness of the information presented. It is doing this by actively removing the direct connection between the information it presents and the primary sources responsible for that information (think Google replacing its search field with an AI field).

The non-LLM AI stuff in the medical field is what I find most promising. Not the banal AI doctors and nurses replacing real doctors and nurses, but more the research end of things, where hallucinating and pattern matching to create new compounds to test seems promising. Of course, any technology that is able to routinely aid discoveries in applied maths and physics will also be welcome.

If this half decade saw an explosion of new bespoke hardware being built and sold aided by LLMs (think a tech shop of 10 employees being able to build and sell robust smartphones from scratch to a niche market sustainably etc), or jumpstarts an era of reverse engineering on crack that pierces through the tech oligopoly then that would be evidence of disruption on a macro scale... But no, alas, we are still waiting.

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