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vermilingua

5,129 karma · joined June 9, 2015

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vermilingua··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
If you enjoy The Expanse, definitely pick up The Mercy of Gods, also by James S A Corey. It, and the recent sequel (The Faith of Beasts) are some of the best sci-fi I've read in a long time.
vermilingua··on Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI
No, just the humans.
vermilingua··on Everybody's Lost Their Minds
Lots more people die in car crashes than horse accidents. Good analogy!
vermilingua··on Everybody's Lost Their Minds
The question most of us are asking isn’t “is it useful”, but “is it worth it”. Engaging with these tools involves no small amount of self-debasement and long term degradation of skills; do I want to sacrifice myself on the altar of productivity?

For me the answer is still absolutely resolutely “no”.

vermilingua··on Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to 'distill' frontier models, too
No, these are books that aren't online, which means not only are they not contributing to the commons, they are irrevocably salting the earth (irrevocably because let's be honest, anything going into their archives isn't coming out without legal or actual violence)

Also, permitted or no, they are definitely torrenting. I would be deeply surprised if they hadn't already leeched every torrent on public trackers. The only reason they (probably) haven't depleted all the private trackers too is that they would be required to actually contribute back, which as above is never going to happen.

vermilingua··on Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to 'distill' frontier models, too
Yknow, aside from the books they are literally destroying while scanning
vermilingua··on Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?
I believe that "have to" is a little strong, no? I think my case was made just as well by remaining one of the only people in my team able to critically analyse changes and plan complex work after three years of the rest of my company diving headlong into the vibe-pit.
vermilingua··on Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?
I don't touch LLMs for any purpose (when I can help it, they are frequently shoved in your face regardless); and up until recently was doing just fine. I was fired for this stance, not for performance reasons (officially stated that there was no concern with my output), only for political reasons (insubordination, refusing to use LLMs to do my work for me).

I have been seeing fewer and fewer job ads that ask for/require LLM use over the last couple of months, so I feel like the tide may be turning in our direction; but I am starting to feel the stress. This is the first time I have considered that I might have been "wrong" taking an absolutist stance against LLMs, though I think that's just the unemployment wearing me down.

vermilingua··on LLMs as a Cognitive Virus
I would love to hear more about this, could you expand?
vermilingua··on Creepy Crawlies
Sorry, no evidence for who's running... GPTBot and ClaudeBot?
vermilingua··on Interactive Warhammer 40k Galaxy Map
Fandom (40k's fandom seems less-terrible than most tbf) needs to die a faster death. Lexicanum is a much better resource.

https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/High_Gothic

vermilingua··on Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal
Yep I’m on XR, I’ve tried taking half my dose twice daily instead, which did smooth out the effects a bit but also made me much more likely to miss a dose. Not really any other solution other than tapering afaict.
vermilingua··on Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal
I also went cold turkey from escitalopram about a decade ago, and my experience was not as tame as yours; my ideation kicked into 6th gear, with paranoia, nausea, and insanely intense and vivid dreams every night. That was while on a 10mg dose.

I have been on over-max-dose venlafaxine for nearly a year now. I think it has been an enormous improvement in my life on nearly every axis, but if I miss a dose by even a few hours I get zaps, confusion, and dizziness. What happens to me now if I become unable to access my meds for more than a couple of days really keeps me up some nights.

vermilingua··on Tim Curry has died
The Colour of Magic! Tim Curry introduced me to Discworld, it’s a shame those movies are so overlooked
vermilingua··on Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
Sydney, a scaleup you probably haven’t heard of and that I am prevented by contract from naming
vermilingua··on Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
I am in exactly the same position; I don't feel left behind per se but I was just fired for my stance. Management is entirely deluded across the industry, and in my case it was even acknowledged and agreed that my output and the quality of work was not in question, simply the fact that I didn't use LLMs to produce it.

I reckon everything needs another 6-18 months to ripen, then those of us who haven't bet the farm on slop will be in big business contracting and consulting to drag companies out of the pit they're digging themselves.

vermilingua··on A Friendly Introduction to Racket
Another awesome Racket resource: https://beautifulracket.com/
vermilingua··on The August 17 outage
More than 50% of the recent commits are from robobun, jesus
vermilingua··on Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights
I never said the content was worthless, I said the distributors are worthless. If I can get the same content, at a higher quality, more efficiently and cheaper (free) through piracy than legal means, the distributors are by definition not providing value.

I absolutely pay for physical media, for which a much higher share of revenue goes to the actual creators of content than the leeches who extract rent from it.

This is exactly why Steam has and continues to dominate the gaming market, they made it easier than piracy, and didn’t fall victim to the terminal-stage capitalism that has turned every previously decent streaming platform into hot garbage.

vermilingua··on Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights
Sometimes I read these mental gymnastics comments about being leashed to half a dozen providers for “convenience” and wonder if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like a NAS.

I think the part they really dislike is the undermining of the moral superiority they claim by donating their money to corporations that contribute ~nothing to the actual evolution of culture. Inventing strawmans about how difficult it is to click one button in Jellyseer and have a max-quality, buffering free copy of what you want to watch in perpetuity is an order of magnitude more work than renting a poor-quality subset of the media that publishers consider it profitable to provide.

vermilingua··on Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub
You’re surprised? Really? I’m more surprised that they pushed a major change and the site is still up.
vermilingua··on Should you wash your solar panels?
This comment made me very sad
vermilingua··on Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now
Except that it hasn’t yet hit the real world, the live release is still 1.13.4, the last Zig version. Anthropic does not operate in the real world.
vermilingua··on What's the story behind the names of Cloudflare's name servers? (2013)
Fantastic, I have long used Culture Ship names [0] to name my devices but this is a far easier list to reference than others online

[0] https://namingschemes.com/Culture_Ships

vermilingua··on Scientists find molecular-level evidence for two structures in liquid water
You can be sure they’ll start using this paper as “evidence” all the same.
vermilingua··on My Mathematical Regression
I’m currently in the middle of this process. I’m finding refusing to be working remarkably well, though I am also in a country with worker protections. Join a union.
vermilingua··on Datasette Apps: Host custom HTML applications inside Datasette
My favourite Datassette is the electronic artist.

https://datassette.bandcamp.com/

https://musicforprogramming.net/

vermilingua··on Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call
I don’t see any there that are as focused as this one, perhaps except Talat which is considerably more expensive.
vermilingua··on GLM 5.2 Is Out
Actually many of us do see that, and have been saying so for some time now.
vermilingua··on If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
I’m conflicted after reading this comment, because I think I would be that personality in my workplace, largely because I believe that’s the only sane position to take as a worker with ~0 power over the decisions made that can entirely destabilise your life.

On the other hand, my priority isn’t maximising my personal career benefit, but the collective benefit of my team, so I suppose I either see it more as a 2v1 sorta game, or perhaps my “player” is an amalgam of myself and my teammates. Playing this way, outsourcing everything you do to an LLM is the worst move, because you lose the touchpoints that tell you where the friction is in your team.

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