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tovej

870 karma · joined September 24, 2020

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tovej··on GPT‑6 and Intelligent UI for everyone
What, you've never owned a cookbook?

The physical ones have indices, and the digital ones usually do as well (plus string search).

tovej··on What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
The source says wind is roughly 40-50% cheaper than the cheapest fossils. You think the difference in storage (and transport) cost is double the cost of renewable production? Because that's the only way your original claim would stand.
tovej··on 'Neanderthals Among Us' review
I see, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
tovej··on 'Neanderthals Among Us' review
Rh disease seems to me to be far from being the exact same issue as what was suggested in this thread. Rh disease is due to bloodtype incompatibility between the mother and the baby, and only sometimes triggers.

Even then, Rh disease usually only causes symptoms in the baby in subsequent pregnancies with the same bloodtype incompatibilities, when the antibodies already exist in the mother.

I'm not sure what exactly it means that Neanderthal women's uterus wouldn't be able to host HS babies, but that sounds different to me.

Unless you know more about this Neanderthal uterine incompatibility.

tovej··on 'Neanderthals Among Us' review
Yes, a separate species of humans.

Still humans.

HS are sometimes called "modern humans" to differentiate.

tovej··on 'Neanderthals Among Us' review
Yes, there are no distinct races of modern humans. Whenever people in the US describe ethnic groups as races I cringe and wonder how much damage this misinformation is still causing.
tovej··on 'Neanderthals Among Us' review
Psst. Neanderthals were humans too, just not HS.
tovej··on I stopped reviewing my agents' code. Here's what I do instead
This is an LLM-written marketing blog-post about vibe-coding and token-maxing.

I read big claims, no evidence.

"AI code is non-deterministic and has risk. But human code is non-deterministic too, and it has the exact same risk."

No, that's not true. LLM-written code has very different risks, like completely misunderstanding the requirements, adding in hallucinated features, and losing sight of what the codebase actually does (massive tech debt).

I should ask, who writes the unit tests? And how do you write the unit tests beforehand? What if you need to prototype in order to figure out the shape of the API? The setup used here is so far removed from any software safety or software quality concerns, it would be hilarious if it weren't sad.

Stop posting marketing content void of any real information, please.

tovej··on The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]
No, von Neumann does not deserve credit for stealing Eckerts and Mauchleys life work.

von Neumann deserves credit for many things, but not this.

He famously brought a lawyer with him to a meeting after they wanted to discuss the report and the rights of their invention. The whole ENIAC saga has made me reconsider von Neumann as a person. He was a talented mathematician, sure, but he seems to have also been a greedy scumbag.

Eckert and Mauchley did not try to conceal their inspiration from Atanasoff, although I believe there was a court case on this topic.

And it is completely ridiculous to claim that von Neumann would have been able to describe the computer better than its inventors.

It's eaually ridiculous to consider that they would not have published themselves. They were collaborating with von Neumann on the report after all.

Goldstine and von Neumann stole the credit from Eckert and Mauchley, that is documented history.

tovej··on AI needs $6T in annual revenue to justify data centre boom
If that white collar work disappears, so does most of the demand in the entire economy.
tovej··on The problem is not AI code, but not knowing about system architecture or intent
Can they really achieve similar results though? If quality suffers greatly, and velocity eventually slows down due to huge tech debt, isn't that just a worse outcome?
tovej··on What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
https://www.irena.org/News/pressreleases/2025/Jul/91-Percent...
tovej··on Feds Target AI Critics as "Foreign Agents"
How is it leveling the playing field if the big actirs have access to a million X (or something in that ballpark) the compute, and even more in terms of data?

Oh, and they are using consumers prompts to gather even more data. LLMs are creating even greater asymmetric information situations than we had before.

Also, the common person has no say in how these systems are developed, the big actors do, and these systems are already used to automate decisions. That's a totalitarian potential, not just authoritarian.

tovej··on What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
No, renewables are much cheaper.
tovej··on What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
Red v. Blue is not the issue here. Neither of those parties is doing much to combat inequality. You should be comparing the USA to countries that actually try (or have historically tried) to combat inequality and social precarity, like Switzerland, or the Scandinavian countries.
tovej··on What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
That's just due to issues in regulating gun ownership, though.
tovej··on Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route
Which ones?

You still didn't answer.

tovej··on GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher
Going through a list of possibilities one by one is bruee forcing.
tovej··on Monsanto's Cruel, and Dangerous, Monopolization on American Farming (2008)
Yes, and the focus on growth in general. There is a sustainable amount of goods and services that need to be produced. Capitalism forced the economy to go beyond that many decades ago.
tovej··on Monsanto's Cruel, and Dangerous, Monopolization on American Farming (2008)
Cancer is natural, "natural" does not mean good. This focus on things being "natural" is very strange when we're discussing artificial constructs like the economy or technology.

Technology and capitalism are not natural phenomena, they are political ones.

You are conveniently ignoring the comparison to cancer. Capitalism and cancer both demand growth at the cost of everything else. This is what leads to them destroying the systems they inhabit.

tovej··on Monsanto's Cruel, and Dangerous, Monopolization on American Farming (2008)
Growth is checked by balancing processes in nature. Every "exponential" in nature is actually a sigmoid. Growth is a means in nature, in shareholder capitalism, it is an end.

Shareholder capitalism explicitly ignores natural constraints in order to chase a constant rate of growth. That's what cancer does, it eats up resources from other cells in the organism in order to do nothing but grow, killing the organism in the process.

tovej··on Monsanto's Cruel, and Dangerous, Monopolization on American Farming (2008)
Capitalism is not the equivalent of life, it's the equivalent of cancer. It forces uncontrolled growth within the system.
tovej··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
I'm sorry.

The purpose was to underline that catering to the far-right and providing them with a space try out messaging is not a very hidden aspect of X.

I didn't mean to imply that you don't think in general.

tovej··on Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes
1100 is literally below the ELO you get by default as a beginner.
tovej··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
Then you are not thinking very much.

Media does report on far-right output on twitter sometimes, but not often. And when they do, it often boosts the message instead.

It's the same mechanism as how Donald Trump originally got elected.

...and at the same time, they are focus-testing extremist messaging.

tovej··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
Well, if one of the big social media platforms is now a far-right playground, that changes the political landscape.

Elon Musk is using twitter to create a global far-right platform that right-wing politicians can use to experiment with talking points before watering them down and bringing them to the public.

tovej··on Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted board ouster
Well, Rudi was an enthusiastic (card-carrying, german, literal) nazi.

The story is that Adi was less of a hardliner, but still a card-carrying member of the nazi party.

https://in.rediff.com/sports/report/adi/20051108.htm

tovej··on Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route
Which genocidal dictatorships is Chomsky in favor of?

The Epstein stuff is extremely disappointing of course, but his analysis is still quite sober and valid.

tovej··on Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route
I think the parent was pointing out that Israel's or USA's claims are usually stated without quotes, such as:

Israel invades Lebanon due to risk of Hezbollah attacks

rather than:

Israel says "risk of Hezbollah attacks" reason for invasion

tovej··on Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
The city of Kajaani's district heating (northern Finland) is already completely covered by datacenter waste heat from CSC datacenters (and maybe some other ones).
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