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tlogan

5,935 karma · joined August 21, 2011

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tlogan··on Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers
Meaning, it creates one more hurdle for businesses. I think that is an objective statement.

Is it bad? That depends on your point of view. If you are pro-business, then yes, the bill is bad. If you are not pro-business and you are pro-worker rights, then you will not see it as bad.

tlogan··on Michigan spent $1.8B and only created 602 jobs
Michigan has relatively business-unfriendly laws and regulations.

Apparently their tax system is quite favorable to businesses, but taxes are only one (small) part of the equation. The taxes matter more once a company is making a lot of money.

In short, tax incentives and random per company “investments” (bribes?) are not enough to offset certain laws and regulations Michigan has.

I am not saying those laws and regulations are bad. I am just saying that targeted tax incentives and investment for specific companies are the wrong way to solve the problem.

tlogan··on 'Careless People' author claims Meta surveilled her for 12mos to enforce silence
So she is trying to make money by selling a book about how Facebook is bad, meaning how the company only cares about profit and nothing else.

I can already tell it has to be one of the most boring books ever written, because there is nothing new there.

It is basically like writing a book that says: the sky is blue and water is wet.

tlogan··on How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?
I somehow deleted my original comment.

I actually made mistake. There are 16 fields:

* 12 matter fields (6 quarks + 6 leptons)

* 1 gluon field (an 8-component SU(3) field)

* 1 weak field (a 3-component SU(2) field)

* 1 hypercharge field (a 1-component U(1) field)

* 1 Higgs field (SU(2) x U(1))

We have 17 particles is because W+, W-, Z are combination on 2 fields.

I think counting particles is just going to confuse people because they are really not “balls”.

tlogan··on How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?
D
tlogan··on Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards
That is not going to help if:

- someone steals your card and PIN

- the merchant turns out to be dishonest (or some misunderstanding) and you want you money back

- you fall for fraud

- the merchant mistakenly charges you, causing an overdraft on your checking account

tlogan··on Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
I do not want to speculate too much. Sure, many things could have happened, even things unrelated to this project, that led to the firing.

But since this project is still on GitHub, I would say the project itself was probably not so bad that releasing it should be a fireable offense.

So my thinking is this:

Did the employee act with the goal of helping the company?

If the answer is yes, and the action did not cause serious harm to the company, then you do not fire the employee. At my old company, the employee would probably be sent to take a couple of courses related to whatever rule they broke.

In general, smart people should be encouraged to take initiative.

The real problem (and the reason why you have all these HR rules) is when you have stupid employees who take initiative. Actually, you should never hire someone who is both unintelligent and full of initiative. It is okay to hire someone who is stupid and lazy and has no initiative (You need those people too).

And OP is obviously smart and talented and should be encouraged to take initiative.

tlogan··on Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards
> Without those, why bother?

Peace of mind (that your checking account is not drained)?

tlogan··on Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
In any reasonable company (with common sense leadership), someone would not be fired for doing something (with good intentions) that does not harm company very much.

Releasing something like this did not really harm the company (the project is still on GitHub).

Any smart executive could have spun the release of this CLI into a win.

Even if some other team complained that this was encroaching on their work, a smart executive would say: “cool show me your work tomorrow morning so we can replace this with you work”

tlogan··on Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
That part is odd, especially the fact that his boss tweeted about it.

So there is probably much more to the story. My guess is that this is more of an internal fight, possibly with unwise executive involvement (meaning there were no grown-ups in the room).

His team was supposed to develop GWS API samples. And very good samples can become quite sophisticated and start looking almost like an official product.

tlogan··on Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
I never worked for Google, but I do have fairly extensive experience with these kinds of situations. From that perspective, I assume there has to be more to the story for it to lead to a firing.

In general, when a talented employee (like OP) does something like this, the response is usually something like:

“We appreciate and love your initiative, and we want to encourage you to keep doing this kind of work. However, this needs to be taken down, and you need to make sure this does not happen again.”

Usually, these things are not career-ending moves. Actually it might be even opposite. Sure one might get labeled as a “cowboy”, but there is always some executive who will support “cowboys” because they shake things up. So one can actually get a promotion.

So I think there is something more here.

Either Google handled this very badly (and organization is broken) or the OP did not act in the company’s best interest and intentionally refused to follow certain instructions.

tlogan··on Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring
I am not surprised.

AI works by learning patterns. So it will become bias by just learning from factors like education history, schools attended, employment history, ZIP codes, or geographic location. Those 3 factors alone are an easy proxy for race.

And if you add names into the equation (if the AI was trained without removing applicant names), the model can become even more bias.

tlogan··on Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards
Germany is very debit-card oriented (with no interest of switching). The Netherlands seems similar. Eastern Europe and the Balkans are also mostly debit-card oriented, but people seem more open to switching to credit cards (if they can get one - especially the younger generation).

Ireland and the U.K. seem much more credit-card oriented than rest of Europe. Turkey is also very CC oriented (kinda strange - was not expecting that).

tlogan··on Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards
I assume this is my “bounded rationality” / “bubble” bias (my impression was based on the people I know and not the full picture)

I checked the stats, and about 40% of purchases in Ireland are made by credit card. In the US, it is around 70%.

tlogan··on Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards
Yes, but the EU is quite diverse.

I have some Irish friends. And Ireland seems similar to the US when it comes to credit card usage (vs debit). I assume that is because Ireland is heavily influenced by US and UK banking habits. On other hand, Germans only use debit cards.

tlogan··on Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school
It is wrong to think kids should not use AI. They actually need to use AI the most.

Childhood is the age when you constantly ask “why” until you get to the bottom of the problem. It is the age of enormous curiosity. But schools, teachers, and parents do not have enough time or knowledge to answer every single “why.”

AI is here to stay, and I believe the future of AI is education.

But that also means we need to change how we test students. We should bring back more oral exams and in-person writing exams. But to learn things please use AI.

tlogan··on Americans express unease over SpaceX's influence on retirement savings
I have a feeling the article and the comments on this trend would be very different if Elon Musk did not support Trump, even if he were still just as crazy and rich.
tlogan··on AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
Ok. But where is the table of translations?
tlogan··on The UK's Teen Social Media Ban Is Political Theater, Not Child Safety Policy
The government’s job is to make sure we behave (and vote) properly.

Otherwise, as Bertolt Brecht said, the government might simply dissolve the people and elect a different one.

tlogan··on Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers
I think the only approach that might work here is to allow access only to certain pre-approved individuals.

Maybe something like TSA PreCheck.

Of course, that will not stop adversaries from getting access to the model, but it would at least create some level of control.

tlogan··on I Could've Rickrolled the FIFA World Cup. All I Needed Was My ID
My opinion is that this is a great story.

But the haters are going to hate.

If you had not used AI to fix your post, I bet the top post will be complaining about your grammar.

Some people will always find something negative. Simple as that.

tlogan··on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
I wonder what is ETA here.

Also, how are they going to enforce this?

I assume they will require you to send them a copy of your passport. Then they will enable your account. And you have state that only be used by you.

Are there any online identity systems that do something like this (verifying citizenship)?

tlogan··on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
Basically the future is thar you will need scan your ID to use the internet. Every time you login.
tlogan··on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
I am confused.

They told us this model is dangerous, and now they are complaining that someone with more guns than them said releasing something dangerous is not okay?

tlogan··on Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
AI is a threat to the livelihood of many people on HN. So, there is a portion of the community here (small but very vocal one), that is against AI.

That is the simple explanation.

tlogan··on United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert
And terrorists will:

- communicate in English (because apparently even ancient Romans speak perfect English)

- name the device “bomb”

tlogan··on MCP is dead?
Here is my vision: the future of AI is about truly understanding the real world. The world around us.

Not everything in the real world will expose an MCP server so AI can interact with it.

Eventually, AI will need to move beyond MCP and interact with the real world the same way humans do: by observing, interpreting, reasoning, and taking action in messy, imperfect environments.

MCP tries to organize our messy word to make interaction part with the world easier in the near term, and it will help accelerate very early progress. But ultimately, MCP is a temporary bridge. Not the final destination.

I give it max 3 to 6 years and it will just die.

tlogan··on MCP is dead?
I would bet that MCP is going to die.

The main reason is that it adds another layer (and human) that can, and probably will, get out of sync with the real-world implementation, whether that implementation is an API, web, or a CLI.

AI should not be using a protocol or set of instructions that is different from what humans have access to (know and use).

Sure, companies want to expose MCP servers because it is the cool thing to do right now.

So the current situation is basically that I used Claude to write an MCP server on top of our API. And then I need to occasionally tell it update it match the public doc.

And my reaction is: really? It is not like our API docs are not public. Claude Code created our MCP server with zero instructions beyond what is publicly available. I just told it to read the docs from the net.

So MCP feels more like a temporary workaround for current model limitations.

tlogan··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
So why is this article talking about Visa and Mastercard?

These are two different use cases. I do not think anyone in their right mind is using Zelle to send money to a party they do not fully trust.

tlogan··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
So this is basically the EU version of Zelle? Basically a way to transfer money between parties who already have established trust. Am I understanding that correctly?

But I am confused about how this relates to Visa and Mastercard. Those systems are used for payments between parties that have not necessarily established trust.

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