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tonypace

105 karma · joined September 19, 2011

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tonypace··on Meta is inviting researchers to pick apart the flaws in its version of GPT-3
Is it unbelievable that pressing a bar will bring you long term happiness? Surely it is, but primates will press the heroin bar. This has happened before with humans as well. You cannot simply dismiss the effectiveness of well - targeted propaganda.
tonypace··on Meta is inviting researchers to pick apart the flaws in its version of GPT-3
If people are looking for news on the topic, they will FB or tweet you first. That has a snowball effect.
tonypace··on Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even possible?
Bitcoin institutions are objectively untrustworthy and most people involved in Bitcoin have no real choice but to rely on them. I trust, say, Citibank more than Bitfinex.
tonypace··on My Favorite Liar (2008)
Good lord, do not hold up Frank's dad as a role model. [but you should definitely read the Wasp Factory. Wild energy beats skill, i think, and this is brimming with that]
tonypace··on U.S. court rejects Tether’s bid to conceal reserve records from the public
The standard rumor is that it is largely Chinese real estate bonds from companies like Evergrande.
tonypace··on Shrooms: What You Need to Know
The link itself conflates them.
tonypace··on Excerpt from CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944)
You could readily add, "We need a more nuanced discussion of the situation," as another sabotage tactic.
tonypace··on Crises of Elite Competition in the East and West
Milton Friedman made a good career proving you wrong with his helicopter money. Dumping cash in human hands has real effects beyond increasing the price of everything.

(I agree that the parent comment is unconvincing.)

tonypace··on Reporter who told Missouri officials of website flaw did 'nothing out of line'
Exactly this. The ratio of equipment to staff is usually very high, the equipment is usually very old, demands are sometimes complex, and pay is governed by a formula developed for white collar workers without better options. The good ones normally leave after one year.
tonypace··on All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected
You have your enormous electric desalination plant, or metal smelter. It needs cheap electricity to be profitable, but there is cheap enough electricity during the day to be feasible. As a result, coal is now dirt cheap. You build a coal plant to keep working at night.
tonypace··on All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected
Coal based irradiation is slow and wide. It does not have the potential to render a concentrated area semi-permanently uninhabitable. There is nothing irrational about watching a relatable peer's life investment crash to a value of zero and deciding you want none of that kind of risk.
tonypace··on Sony to join TSMC on new $7B chip plant in Japan
Large areas of the west coast facing China are reclaimed land filled with very narrow roads and aquaculture ponds. Think of the bocage country in Normandy and then fill all the central fields with water. There are really only four coastal areas with the roads needed to move an army off the beach at speed.
tonypace··on Maryland nuclear engineer and spouse arrested on espionage-related charges
They had information to trade. He has nothing. His only value is as a head on the wall.
tonypace··on Disclosure of three 0-day iOS vulnerabilities
So, all of them.
tonypace··on Disclosure of three 0-day iOS vulnerabilities
You cannot claim that GDPR is a good law, not with the galaxy-sized loophole where you can track the vast majority of people just like before, as long as your annoy them first.

Better than nothing, sure, but not good.

tonypace··on Disclosure of three 0-day iOS vulnerabilities
Maybe some devs are allowed to do this. And that's why it wasn't patched.
tonypace··on Apple Won a Battle to Lose the War
That's what made the on-device policing effort so incomprehensible. Doing battle for privacy is their armor.
tonypace··on Apple Won a Battle to Lose the War
Remember the Templars. What Apple is in danger of becoming is a very wealthy Pinata that nobody feels bad for when you hit it. Developing that kind of reputation can be existentially bad for an organization.
tonypace··on Yt-dlp – A YouTube-dl fork with additional features and fixes
Don't forget the totally legitimate sites selling software licences.
tonypace··on Gmail is opening and caching URLs within emails without user intervention (2019)
Nobody remembers the exact moment they stopped thinking about something because it was easier not to.

Ragequitting is one way to exit a process, but just not going to the next step from distraction is surely more common.

tonypace··on M 7.2 Earthquake 12 km NE of Saint-Louis du Sud, Haiti
Your original is better, he is just emphasizing the loss in modern internet English slang.
tonypace··on The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
YouTube search is regressing quickly. They're losing there too.
tonypace··on Sigil – A free, open-source, multi-platform eBook editor
Thorium is astoundingly slow. I've started using Sumatra for ebooks as well as PDFs. It's fast and good enough.
tonypace··on OpenRAMAN – Low-cost, high-performance, open-source Raman spectrometer
I thought you needed to keep the sample very dark and only illuminate it with a laser so you can see the changes in reflected wavelengths. How does a handled unit with light all around get around that?
tonypace··on The Decline of Usability
Lubuntu is no longer on LXDE, having switched to LXQT on version 19.04. LXQT is pretty good from my perspective, minimal but intuitive.
tonypace··on Tell HN: Cisco WebEx on OS X uses the same pre-installer tricks as Zoom
That would be good, but it seems to take kids a few years to learn the ropes. I don't feel like older people have the patience or peer pressure. Would love to be proved wrong, though. I would have paid money to make that problem go away when I had it with Skype.
tonypace··on Tell HN: Cisco WebEx on OS X uses the same pre-installer tricks as Zoom
No company that has a choice is going to pay Apple their tax. That's why the MacOS sure is always going to be the same as the Windows store: a home of loser apps. Since another install procedure is available, only losers will use the app store. Ergo, any software available through the app store is a loser app.
tonypace··on Current Wuhan Situation
No, probably not.

There is evidence that there virus was not engineered. The spike protein is completely novel and existing techniques for finding bonding proteins do not see this virus as a good binding candidate.

It is conceivable that the lab was studying bat coronavirus and accidentally released it, but Occam's razor suggests that the market where most early patients contacted the virus, similar to the market where SARS evolved, is the actual source.

tonypace··on AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
Of course not, and some things would never be ported. But if they had a massive cost advantage for a year or two in data centers, a lot of things would get ported, quickly.
tonypace··on NLP's Clever Hans Moment Has Arrived
The standardized test organizations give briefings to teachers on the most common Hans cues for students. In order, they are differing answer length, answers that mirror the question's grammar, and the infamous letter C.
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