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snakeboy

1,776 karma · joined November 18, 2016

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snakeboy··on Supreme Court permits states to use SAVE database for citizenship checks
Trump effectively poisoned the well against any meaningful bipartisan interest in election fraud through repeated endorsement of bad faith and ludicrous "investigative journalism" by his supporters in 2020.

So it basically does not matter what the heritage foundation did or did not find, or what other groups will find in 2026 and beyond. The entire country has made up their mind already. Thus is the price paid for Trump's first-order winner-take-all approach to everything.

snakeboy··on Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap
Yes, I can understand why absolute ratings are impossible to extract.

However, since the population maintains some continuity over time (players gradually enter and then leave over time), would it not be possible to reconstruct relative ratings between players that didn't play during the same era?

snakeboy··on New type of dice guarantees no tie when deciding who goes first
> The search was enormous — there were more possible designs than atoms in the universe

PopSci journalists must get so excited every time they get to write about a math result with a combinatorial flavor, letting them use their favorite "wow factor" phrase.

snakeboy··on Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap
> If you want to compare Magnus Carlsen's peak rating of 2882 in the year 2014 to Garry Kasparov's peak rating of 2851 in the year 1999, you have to know how strong the total pool of players (including all the amateurs who compete at lower levels) was in the year 2014 vs. 1999.

I imagine that FIDE has all of this data somewhere, right? They don't publish more in-depth distributional analyses of players somewhere?

snakeboy··on The asteroid currently hitting front end web development
> She was even able to change the text in one of their images to its new product name without having to contact the graphic designer.

Is that legal... ? I admit I don't know much about graphic design is contracted.

snakeboy··on I won't read LLM authored fiction
Fortunately, there are enough books out there to keep one occupied for a whole lifetime without reading anything published after 2022. The classics are classics for a reason.
snakeboy··on Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
Bad economic policy is subtly "evil", by way of allocating finite resources inefficiently. Usually this is unintentionally done by not appropriately taking second, third, ..., nth order effects into account.
snakeboy··on Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
> And therefore, if an AI had more data that mirrors that experience in some way would it be sufficiently creative to create something "truly original"?

An important distinction seems to lie in a human having original experiences to draw from, while an AI has only "data that mirrors" experiences.

snakeboy··on Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
Have you ever seen transplants to a colder climate trying to navigate icy road conditions?

This is a valid point that self-driving cars solving the issue once and losslessly deploying the solution to it's fleet is a massive improvement over humans each individually applying the "live and learn" strategy.

snakeboy··on DeepSeek v4
> Reform wasn't passed, it was forced via a technicality after riots made it politically unpalatable, and it has put France in a governing crisis ever since.

You can call it a technicality if you'd like, but, the article 49.3 mechanism is a legitimate tool for the government under the French constitution. It is arguably designed to allow the government to pass pragmatic, but politically unpalatable projects like retirement reforms.

As for the governing crisis, it is simply a matter of Macron having used up the rest of his political capital on this reform, and he will conclude his term next year.

You are giving the impression that France is some kind of failed state unable to correct its course, where in actuality, the democratic process literally worked as intended:

  1. Macron proposes a necessary welfare reform to start reigning in the budget
  2. People go out and protest (unsurprising, as welfare cuts are universally unpopular)
  3. Macron's government uses an unpopular mechanism to pass the reform into law, which contributes to his government becoming a lame duck.
> Also, retirement in North, West and Central EU is 67+, not 64.

This is simply moving the goalposts of our discussion, so I will not respond. France's reforms under Macron are real, and directionally-correct.

snakeboy··on DeepSeek v4
> Any attempt to change those results in the country being taken hostage by rioters, thus nothing changes.

Your theory doesn't actually match with reality, given that Macron's retirement reform was passed into law despite protests. As currently enacted, the age of retirement in France will progressively increase from 62 until reaching 64 in 2030.

snakeboy··on Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
I usually use free archived versions to read mainstream journalism pieces. Seeing this convinced me to subscribe. I've always loved The New Yorker, and am happy to support serious longform journalism (and I know that Ronan is one of the best).

However, it's a shame that the only way to subscribe to the print version is to pay $260 upfront for the yearly subscription. Meanwhile the digital version is $1/week ($52 upfront) for one year, or even just $10 for one month.

snakeboy··on European alternatives to Google, Apple, Dropbox and 120 US apps
I don't need any of these statements to be true to want to divest from a US monopoly on essential software.

It's about decentralization, always has been.

snakeboy··on Afroman found not liable in defamation case
I fail to understand why you cited ChatGPT in the first comment instead of just linking the sources in the first place. That was obviously the critique of your comment, and it seems bad-faith to claim it was because they "just don't like the numbers".
snakeboy··on The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ
The whole pitch of AI is that the model is going to be able to make exploit general knowledge outside of the local scope of the problem, just like a human would do. So I would also expect that it would be able to transfer his knowledge of classical music learned in language training, and apply that to the Spotify database.
snakeboy··on I don't use LLMs for programming
> All of this capability emerging from a company (Anthropic) that’s just five years old. Imagine what Claude will be capable of in 2030.

I don't believe VC-backed companies see monotonic user-facing improvement as a general rule. The nature of VC means you have to do a lot of unmaintainable cool things for cheap, and then slowly heat the water to boil. See google, reddit, facebook, etc...

For all we know, Claude today is the best it will ever be.

snakeboy··on EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
> I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking

I understand this argument in engineering and medical fields, but in clothing industry, does incentivising risk and innovation really matter that much?

snakeboy··on France's homegrown open source online office suite
It's the name of a french-developed open video conferencing software[0]. See the 1st prize result in TFA...

[0] https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/visio

snakeboy··on YouTube blocks background video playback on Brave and other browsers
Well, nobody needs Google-level money...
snakeboy··on [dead]
> Installation Process Enhanced by AI

Proceeds to use requirements.txt in 2026...

Old habits die hard for our LLM overlords. But at least it sure knows how to market itself!

snakeboy··on The guide to real-world EV battery health
I think it's more likely that Chinese EVs are banned in the US because they would absolutely obliterate the domestic car manufacturing industry.
snakeboy··on The U.S. Government Just Followed Through on Its Ban of DJI Drones
I feel like the normal reaction is to see it in both and maintain a distinction between these two entirely different contexts without ignoring the crimes of the lesser.
snakeboy··on European Commission issues call for evidence on open source
It's some utopian dream to think the death of the EU would decentralize power. It's currently a necessary evil to put pressure on the already centralized power of the US global hegemony. Without the EU, the world is controlled by the US and China.
snakeboy··on US Job Openings Decline to Lowest Level in More Than a Year
If you can't reason about the concept of 'price sensitivity' without a slippery-slope invocation of slavery, then I think capitalism isn't for you.
snakeboy··on What you need to know before touching a video file
It works if you know the person and have a baseline for how much confidence you give their opinions. If it's just a random person on the internet, they need to support their argument.
snakeboy··on The day I became a surgeon, I quit
The post is just about doctors, but I hear similar arguments about professors (in the US, at least). These two fields attract the greatest minds and most dedicated souls to do actually important work for society (compared to those great minds going to Silicon Valley or Wall Street), and we pile all kinds of extra busy-work on to their plates that could be done by any replacable wage employee.

It enrages me to think that a single second of Terry Tao's ~80 years on our planet is wasted to bureaucratic nonsense rather than teaching and researching.

snakeboy··on Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings
Makes sense, but how does this explain the fact that this problem seems recent, or at least to have worsened recently ?
snakeboy··on Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainfuck code results in an infinite loop
I personally prefer some grammatical errors or awkward phrasing over AI-assisted writing. It's a blog post, not a diplomatic transcript.
snakeboy··on How to run phones while being struck by suicide drones
At this point, is the most "effective ethical" career path for a software developer to work on LLMs to flood social media and ad-clicks to speedrun the collapse of digital marketing? And thus freeing competent but money-driven software engineers to work on something else?
snakeboy··on Adversarial poetry as a universal single-turn jailbreak mechanism in LLMs
No surprise that claude-haiku-4.5 was one of the few models able to see through the poetic sophistry...
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