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tessierashpool

1,615 karma · joined July 28, 2013

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tessierashpool··on America.gov
reminds me of Minitel. France had online services for a lot of daily life back in 1982. Britain's equivalents weren't as good, but still miles ahead of America for about a decade, until the late 90s Web boom.
tessierashpool··on Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space
don't shoot the messenger, dude. I didn't say there were any good arguments.
tessierashpool··on A Staff Engineer's Guide to Inventing Work
> "Inventing work" is a strange phrase

The author used an LLM. The first paragraph has two em dashes (turned into hyphens) and a typical overlong list. The second paragraph has an em dash the human author turned into a semicolon, and the third has one he turned into a colon. The fourth paragraph does the colon substitution several times.

The fifth paragraph is so obviously machine-generated I don't understand why people are even discussing this blog post at all:

This is the other cost - invisible to many, sometimes including the ones who handle the toil work. Every team has toil, and it is almost never prioritized. But you already knew this one, so I won’t spend more words to say that toil is an important signal that there is work waiting to be discovered.

If all you want to do is post prompt outputs on your blog, I think a) you should be honest about it and b) you have an obligation to write very interesting prompts.

Might even be more useful to just share those.

tessierashpool··on Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space
there are two arguments for it.

one is marketing.

the other is that you could make tiny datacenters and flood the sky with them. in effect, not datacenters at all, but some kind of dataswarm coordinating at literal lightspeed via lasers.

they'd still be wildly expensive to deploy, and probably litter the orbit zone with fast-moving debris.

tessierashpool··on US troop deaths during Iran war exceed Pentagon count by at least four
This is par for the course for US foreign policy in the region.

There's even (disputed) allegations that Bush Sr funneled money and weapons to bin Laden in opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. If true, the big 2006 enemy was a 1986 ally.

tessierashpool··on OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
How can you certify something which doesn't behave the same twice, and more importantly we don't understand how it works 100%?

That's a question any lawmaker has already had to ask about technology all the time.

I'm not saying they came up with great answers, but there's nothing qualitatively new about that.

The stochastic factor doesn't change the fact that companies have to be accountable for the harms their software causes. That's just basic liability law.

tessierashpool··on Proposed Rule: Eliminating the Discretionary 60-Day Grace Period
the real practicality here is that the OP is a request for comments.

definitely a request to fulfill.

tessierashpool··on Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex?
are you being serious? honest question. I assumed you were BSing.

they literally published a manifesto. did you not know about that?

I guess google them, dude. read the paper you're posting on a thread about. good luck

edit: on reflection, I still think he's BSing

tessierashpool··on Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)
I disagree, but you could be right. however, if so, then they should have pointed out this distinction themselves.

also, there was conflict between Jewish Palestinians and Muslim Palestinians long before the Holocaust. Zionists were trying to take over in the late days of the Ottoman Empire.

tessierashpool··on Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)
you might wonder, reading this, how a person could say "I honestly haven't heard this before" about such a widely-discussed topic, in a thread about that topic, when the OP is a paper about a very closely related topic. it is, under the circumstances, a surprising assertion.

the purpose of propaganda is not to convince the ignorant or skeptical, but to exhaust and/or discredit opponents.

tessierashpool··on Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)
Judaism != Israel

this conflation is extremely unhelpful

tessierashpool··on Silicon Valley Is Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex
I hate to say it, but this is mostly true.

reason I hate to say it is because companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.

if Palantir and Anduril were observing the same strict separation between political and military matters, and the same strict separation between domestic and foreign activity, that the military itself observes, then the only thing happening here would be the Valley disrupting a poorly-run industry. I have no issue with that. that is what the Valley's supposed to do.

but that's not what's happening.

It's not some 4d chess play by VCs -- this part is just provably false. they're using military contracting as a Trojan horse for some truly crazy shit.

tessierashpool··on Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)
also the new war-profiteers are profiting from a war a certain family member started

this is true but it's also kind of falling into a trap.

first, the weird endless hunger that man has for any and all spotlights draws attention away from the policy issues and rampant criminality, which are a lot more important than his personality problems.

second, he was causing chaos overseas with military in his first administration too. Silicon Valley wasn't all-in on that.

third, Anduril, Palantir, et al represent a consistent philosophy of how the Valley takes over the military-industrial complex. they come from the same financial backer, Thiel, who also put a lot of money behind Trump. so we got a paper here about the real issue, and if we're shifting our attention from that to this clown who kind of just works for Thiel (among other, even more dubious possible bosses), the risk is that the conversation transitions from substance to gossip.

tessierashpool··on Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)
take these theatrics somewhere else, please. you're changing the topic and you're not arguing in good faith.
tessierashpool··on Shopify acquires Tailwind
What you said re moats might be true but can't actually be concluded from the Tailwind story. Traffic to the funnel dropped by more than half. That easily explains their problems, and says nothing about moats.

Tailwind had a solid funnel and a good product. Now they only have a good product. That's enough to kill a business.

If (or more likely when) Google loses money because LLMs are replacing search, that's a story about moats.

tessierashpool··on Shopify acquires Tailwind
I think this is reasonable but incorrect. Tailwind didn't say "our conversion rates went down." They said the traffic to their docs site went down.

Their funnel depended on SEO, and LLMs took SEO out of the equation. What you said about the value of pre-built components might also be true but can't be determined from a situation where consumers suddenly all stopped learning that the pre-built components exist. Occam's Razor says it's the funnel.

tessierashpool··on Music Theory for Programmers
yeah, this is robot garbage.

the post says: I wanted to start from scratch and learn music from first principles, and I began that journey by writing code.

but we know that's not true. you began that journey in Claude Code, or Codex, or ChatGPT, or whatever. you just want to demo your startup that embeds JavaScript in web pages.

tessierashpool··on Show HN: I made a Raspberry with Qwen my local car AI
I scanned this README looking for the part written by a human and gave up when I realized there wasn't one.

the Mermaid diagram doesn't even render.

tessierashpool··on AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
> If those were real people making those comments, there is no hope for us.

they probably weren't.

tessierashpool··on Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification
> If "free speech" was a valid defense for you, then Meta would be doing the same.

Meta lobbied heavily for this. The fact that they have not decided to use free speech to fight the move that they are lobbying for is not an argument that free speech is irrelevant here.

This is not legal advice but a personal request: please do not get your legal advice from Hacker News. Get it from a lawyer.

tessierashpool··on Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer
> In the end, the proof is in the pudding: How good is the music made with the tool?

hating on OP for being AI slop is fully legit imo (sorry OP) but don't judge the concept on this example. the rotary sequencer model's actually quite effective. there's lots of niche software and Eurorack modules which implement it, e.g., Moskwa (and Moskwa II) from Xaoc Devices.

here's a YouTube video which shows Moskwa II in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-6n_E9WIfQ

btw the first rotary sequencer was probably Raymond Scott's Circle Machine from 1958:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110927232227/http://raymondsco...

tessierashpool··on I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy
next they're going to set up thought-triggered Amazon purchases and say that moving the object from the warehouse to your home constitutes telekinesis.

ever since Elon did his "promise full self-driving every year" thing, entrepreneurs been on a weird sort of fiction escalator.

thought-to-text is incredible. imagine doing something that remarkable with your life and feeling the need to exaggerate.

tessierashpool··on Rebuilding and analysing 4 years of Wordle stats from WhatsApp chat logs
I've been tracking my Wordle stats too but only for maybe six months. I got annoyed by the Wordle Bot stats for "Skill" and "Luck" as I don't think they actually represent what they say they do. So I built a spreadsheet to track them, and compare my scores to the average scores. I found that I was consistently "luckier" than the average user, which a) nice ego boost and b) validated my hypothesis.

But it also allowed me to extrapolate a difficulty metric. Wordle Bot gives you your "Luck," "Skill," and number of steps, compared to the average user, for every game. It's not a coincidence my personal number of steps goes up on the same days (generally speaking) that the average user's number of steps goes up. Nor that it goes down on the same days. Nor that the same happens with "Luck" and "Skill."

Anyway, I like the idea of copying the GitHub activity calendar/matrix design, but the colors are kind of meaningless for me as I play Wordle with the high-contrast colors. Tempted to turn my spreadsheet into an app so I can copy the design, but add a high-contrast mode.

tessierashpool··on [dead]
yes. and that identification would have contained the current outbreak, to some degree, or at least mitigated it.
tessierashpool··on How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
Claude's affected my language in two ways. one is that, for a long time, Claude in particular responded more to feedback if I swore at it, which caused me to swear at it more. this vicious cycle generalized to the point where I now have to consciously remind myself not to swear when doing something as simple as buying a coffee or asking somebody what time it is. it was difficult to even write that sentence without throwing in an F-bomb just to emphasize the silliness of the problem.

anyway, the other way is I found it's helpful when prompting LLMs to use the same "it's not delivery, it's DiGiorno's" pattern that they're all so obsessed with. especially when the thing's misapprehended some concept, so you need to clarify. this hasn't yet generalized from the fake "conversations" I have with chatbots into my conversational style out in the real world, but the risk is fully there. (it's not an inevitability -- it's an occupational hazard.)

tessierashpool··on Delta flight hit by firework while landing at Midway Airport on Fourth of July
no, 95% of dogs are not okay with it.

95% of the dogs in your home are okay with it.

this study from Psychology Today finds that 83% of dogs freak out when they hear loud noises:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/canine-corner/202202...

tessierashpool··on The iPhone's Last Stand?
AI's not a technology, though. LLMs are a technology. AI is a marketing term.
tessierashpool··on Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit
this is false
tessierashpool··on The FBI Wants to Buy Nationwide Access to License Plate Readers
but we need to have some sort of law that creates a Chinese firewall between these mass surveillance data and the government

technically we have one, the Fourth Amendment, but SCOTUS defanged it completely, years ago.

tessierashpool··on WiFi signals can measure heart rate
seeing a theme here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45121617

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