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stevemadere

71 karma · joined March 10, 2014

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stevemadere··on AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
Reddit seems to me like the worst example for this.

Reddit does not create the content on their site, the users do.

If anybody’s going to get compensated for that content, it should be the users, not Reddit. Complaining that Reddit is losing out on the monetization of their users’ output seems problematic to me. It feels like shilling for a pimp.

stevemadere··on Cyberattack on vehicle breathalyzer company leaves drivers stranded in the US
Given Pete Hegseth’s history, this could be a huge national security issue.
stevemadere··on “Collaboration” is bullshit
This.

What everybody keeps forgetting over and over again is that software is super complicated even if it can be changed from a keyboard without the use of physical morphing tools.

People who do not themselves generate software are in the position of telling the people who generate software how to do it and what the constraints should be on the outcomes.

Accept that it is complicated and that you cannot know in advance when it will be done unless it is a super simple request.

It is indeed more like oil field exploration than it is like sweeping the floor.

You cannot really know where the solution to a complicated problem lies in advance and therefore you cannot predict how long it will take you to find it.

People on the finance side just need to face the fact that there is risk that cannot be eliminated in advance or even quantified particularly accurately.

If your investors cannot stomach this, they probably need to invest in something other than software development.

Good luck with finding that in 2026.

stevemadere··on A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch
Wow! That chair costs about $2000. https://store.hermanmiller.com/office-chairs-ergonomic-chair...

Nice back you've got there. It'd be a shame if anything happened to it.

stevemadere··on Engineers repurpose a mosquito proboscis to create a 3D printing nozzle
There’s a long history of using various organs from dead animals as parts/tools in agricultural and industrial processes.

This is one of the smallest scale cases I’ve heard of, but not nearly as weird or innovative as it sounds at first blush.

People have long been making analogous use of stomachs, intestines, even skulls if you go back far enough.

stevemadere··on How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?
It's definitely a cult for elected officials who join (according to your discriminating criterion)
stevemadere··on How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?
Why did the original post for which these are the discussions disappear from HN? I cannot even find it with a word search and it should not have been displaced from the top 30 yet.
stevemadere··on Interferometer Device Sees Text from a Mile Away
I suspect this was an easy way to test it without having to build a rotatable optical bench.

A practical device may be an array of light sources and telescopes on a rotating mount or a set of moveable mirrors that achieve the same effect.

stevemadere··on AI is stifling new tech adoption?
This is truly terrible.

What happened to a new JS front end library every week?

If this keeps up, we won't get to completely throw away all of our old code and retool every two years (the way we've been operating for the last 20 years)

How will we ever spend 85% of our time spinning up on new js front end libraries?

And don't even get me started on the back end.

If AI had been around in 2010, we probably still have some people writing apps in Rails.

OMG what a disaster that would be.

It's a good thing we just completely threw away all of the work that went into all of those gems. If people had continued using them, we wouldn't have had the chance to completely rewrite all of them in node and python from scratch.

stevemadere··on My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking
I guess this signals the end of focusing on testing to prove one's "rank" as a student and actually start focusing on educating students rather than evaluating them.

The whole problem with factory mass-education is the almost exclusive focus on evaluation. A little bit of education happens as a side-effect of the unrelenting soul-crushing evaluation so we've put up with it and called it education for 100 years.

ChatGPT will make it nearly impossible to cause any educating to happen as a side effect of constant re-evaluation.

That means we are going to have to focus on education directly. Probably just train ChatGPT to be a really good tutor and everybody gets a 19th century rich boy's education instead of the junk we've had in feed-lot-style schools for the last 100 years.

Note that Waldorf schools are kind of immune to this problem since the kids don't get to touch a computer until they are in 9th grade and heck, they don't even read until 2nd grade.

stevemadere··on Lots of people in education disagree with the premise of maximizing learning
Waldorf schools work. There is no testing, there are no grades until high School.

Lots of the silicon valley elite send their kids to Waldorf schools.

Are they all completely unaware of the effectiveness of deliberate practice?

I rather doubt it.

I think they are aware that motivation is what really matters.

My three kids all went to Waldorf School and never had grades until they entered high school at a public school.

None of them ever made anything less than an a+ in any class in a public school.

This was transitioning cold straight out of Waldorf with no testing to a public school.

They all got into very good colleges and are performing extraordinarily well at college. (My oldest daughter graduated from Stanford with a CS degree and straight A's)

Motivation, motivation, motivation.

stevemadere··on [dead]
This document is conduct unbecoming of a congressional committee.
stevemadere··on Launch HN: Greptile (YC W24) - RAG on codebases that actually works
Can you guys add huggingface transformers as one of the public demo repos? I have some very specific use cases where I've seen ChatGPT with GPT4 totally fall on its face Dunning-Kruger style.

I'd like to see if your tech solves those issues.

stevemadere··on Ask HN: What's the practical use of larger context LLMs?
So specifically, you are saying that LLM coding assistant currently gets confused when working on a large source file but if it had room for more context, you could get better help in writing code because it would have understanding of the entire module. Correct?
stevemadere··on Ask HN: What's the practical use of larger context LLMs?
No specific practical problems though? Looks to me a lot like "it's amazing. we want more amazing" rather than "if we had it, we could solve this specific practical problem people have been wanting to solve for a long time without considering a LLM as a possible solution"
stevemadere··on The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”
This is just one case the general rule of ambiguity.

At one of my jobs, a product manager came up with the idea of categorizing explicitly delineating everybody's selection criteria into a "normalized" form to allow for aggregating statistics.

I tried to point out up front what a fool's errand in this was. There is way too much ambiguity in the language.

I was overruled and the company then spent probably 7 to 15 million dollars chasing this ridiculous El Dorado dream. Eventually, after 3 years of wandering in the wilderness of normalized ontologies, they gave up and decided all NLP is bad.

This decision came out about 2 months before the release of chatGPT.

stevemadere··on Life in the time of superintelligence
I agree that humans are a blight on the planet. We need fewer of them and more resources for the benevolent AI overlords, I mean buddies.

Fortunately, naturally declining populations due to the apparent sudden realization of humanity that resources are limited may save the planet yet.

stevemadere··on The Odin – DIY genetic engineering
To all the folks who are so concerned about bad actors trying to develop organisms that will harm people:

Have you forgotten that the world is full of bad actors who are literally trying to eat people? There are not merely thousands of them but hundreds of trillions of them.

They spend all day long everyday trying to find a random path to something that can eat you.

It is the height of hubris to imagine that humans could outcompete that.

stevemadere··on The lab-leak theory is looking stronger by the day
At first when I started reading this it seemed rather compelling but the further I went along the more I could see they were making use of innuendo and psychological manipulation techniques.

If their thesis is supportable, they don't need to do that.

I'll pay attention when somebody writes a dispassionate article without all the propaganda.

stevemadere··on IBM's Asshole Test
Assholes who actually can learn to hide the fact that they are assholes are probably a lot less annoying.
stevemadere··on How should net metering affect your electric bill?
The vast majority of people are unwilling/unable to think deeply enough about the system to understand it. Thus, the simplified rule of thumb that generating electricity reduces your power bill is needed for them to even understand the general direction of what needs to be done. Perhaps the power utility could include an explainer page at the back of the monthly statement for those with the interest and capacity to understand it. Maybe 2% of people will read and understand it. The other 98% can just be smug about their lowered power bill and blissfully unaware of their part in accelerating the market shift to solar.
stevemadere··on Tinder just permabanned me or the problem with big tech
This is approximately half the plot of Terry Gilliam's movie "Brazil"
stevemadere··on The genius of John von Neumann
Is there a Kickstarter for that project? Asking for a friend.
stevemadere··on Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations
If you order one now, the factory in china will ship it to you as soon as they can get it through the port in Long Beach.
stevemadere··on What the Liberals have in store for Conservatives (part 1)
This is a very dangerous piece of propaganda. It takes a bunch of ultra-conservative movements' crimes against humanity (Nazis, Serbian nationalists, etc.) and falsely labels them as liberals and then encourages conservatives to 'save themselves' from the hidden and secret coming genocide of conservatives by liberals.

It just doesn't get any more dangerous.

stevemadere··on The matrix calculus you need for deep learning (2018)
The idea is great but the many notational typos are going to confuse the hell out of people who don't already know this math. (e.g. References to vector variables are often not bolded even as they are introducing bold as the notation for vectors, reusing x excessively as a variable in multiple contexts in the same expression, etc.)

I went to graduate school for physics so I know all of this math cold but reading this paper caused me much confusion until I figured out they had a ton of typos in it.

Caveat reader.

Upon closer inspection, I realized they are not so much typos as poor UI implementation of the rendering. The visual difference between bold and italic when this page renders in either Chrome or Firefox is so subtle, it's very hard to see. Many of the equations and in-line variable references are rendered with svg so one cannot even inspect the page source to determine the intended font weight. Regardless, it's very confusing to read because of that. Not exactly what you want when trying to explain vector calculus. :)

P.S. I'll try to submit some comments to the authors to see if they can get this cleared up before it causes too much confusion.

stevemadere··on Launch HN: H3X (YC W21) – High power density electric aircraft motors
Also, leaf blowers and trimmers. I'd pay to have my neighbors' gas powered ones replaced.
stevemadere··on Launch HN: H3X (YC W21) – High power density electric aircraft motors
As long as people are considering radically different markets, go all the way to the extreme. E-bikes, one-wheels, e-motorcycles. Something's got to carry you over the desert of waiting for aviation certification.
stevemadere··on Launch HN: H3X (YC W21) – High power density electric aircraft motors
Perhaps by the time this is viable (battery limited for now) carbon nanotubes will be inexpensive enough to use for conducting both heat and current.
stevemadere··on Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'
I am psyched about the prospects. Cannot wait to be a beta user.
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