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virgilp

4,169 karma · joined March 13, 2016

Factotum. Contact me via my username at gmail.
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virgilp··on Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah
> who I'm told aren't even considered people

EXACTLY. You are told.

If that was really the goal, I go back to my previous point - wouldn't thermobaric bombs be faster, more economic & more convenient? It just makes no logical sense. If you already declared them to be monsters, what exactly is holding them back?

virgilp··on Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah
you believe those were sniper kills? :o Where did you get that from, the Hamas "x-rays" where bullets conveniently lodged inside a child cranium instead of shattering the surrounding bones?
virgilp··on Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah
Only children matter? But, fine. How many were kidnapped? At least IDF can claim that they didn't intentionally target children - with kidnapping, that's harder. And the discrepancy in numbers can also be caused by how much Ukraine vs Hamas care about said children / how much they are put in harm's way.
virgilp··on Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah
> The cities being flattened are all in the frontline as there is no way to take a city by force without basically destroying every building.

It's exactly the same in Gaza! You basically justified Israel's actions here... Check the distance between Gaza City & Israel border, vs distance beetween Bakhmut & Russia's border. Tell me which one is farther away - I'll wait

virgilp··on Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah
No, Mariupol was just one (arguably not the best) example answer to the original question, "Does it look the same in the Ukraine? I haven’t seen any footage of entire cities leveled like this."
virgilp··on Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah
Red herring, my argument was not "everything IL army did was good", it was "RU army's behavior is so much worse, how can you even question that?". IL obviously was at the very least "not very concerned" about civilian population; but I don't think there's established evidence that they were actively trying to kill civilian population, just for the sake of it, with no military advantage. Whereas, e.g. "human safari" is a well documented thing in the Russian army.
virgilp··on Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah
(i can't edit apparently): why the downvotes? Serious question I don't understand, is there anything I said above false? The parent comment is questioning whether RU cruelty in Ukraine is anything close to what IL did - and the answer is yes, it's actually much worse, especially when you factor in that it's completely unprovoked.
virgilp··on Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah
Here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/TncezF72LxaWAKYY7
virgilp··on Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah
Seriouslly?

You can find lots of videos of Russia firing thermobaric weapons into populated areas - you will find none fired by Israel into Gaza. And I don't think that's because IL doesn't have them.

virgilp··on There is more to code review than (automatable) detection
> are there to give you confidence that future changes haven't broken things.

> They're not there to catch bugs

What's the difference between those 2 things? I genuinely can't tell. Are you saying "E2E tests are only useful if they are *always* green"? No - of course they'd ideally be always green - but it they would be guaranteed to be green, only then they would become completely useless.

It's like saying "ideally you shouldn't write code with bugs in the first place". Sure. Ideally we shouldn't. Now back in the real world...

virgilp··on There is more to code review than (automatable) detection
> The earlier you can find an issue the simpler it is to fix, so waiting until the last moment (e.g. PR) means you're spending far more time fixing issues than necessary.

Wait, does that mean that E2E tests that catch bugs are a strong signal that the team isn't doing well? How about component tests that catch bugs? Wouldn't they be better caught at the unit-test level? Do you see how your argument is flawed? - nobody is "waiting until PR to catch all bugs" but that doesn't mean that PR review can't/ shouldn't catch bugs! Sometimes even significant ones, yes.

You don't eliminate E2E tests because "you have good unit tests". You shouldn't just eliminate PR reviews because "we communicate inside the team".

virgilp··on Thinking fast and slow in AI: The role of metacognition (2021)
> That's because an LLM thinks in terms of language, while we think in a different way, then convert the ideas to language

Do we? I just learned from a speaker[1] that we literally need words to recognize emotions. People who have a poor vocabulary have lower emotional intelligence because without being able to attach a word to an emotion, the brain is unable to recognize & process it.

[1] Dude seemed to be knowledgeable about the subject. He's a specialized trainer, should be educated in this exact field. So hopefully I'm not lying to anyone here :)

virgilp··on Apple iPhone 18 Pro Camera test
If your assertion was true, it logically leads to "camera quality doesn't matter man, only photographers care about that, to most people it's just pictures"

There are details, all of these are details; but saying that "iphone5-level-cameras are good enough form most people" is both true (obviously it sold and millions were satisfied with it) and false (most people would notice today that iphone5s take worse photos than latest-gen). All the details add up to image quality that _is_ noticeable even to the laymen.

virgilp··on How to Write with an LLM
> Readers can detect LLM words in the parts per trillion. However much work you put into scuffing up and humanizing it, an LLM paragraph will register to much of your audience not as writing but as output. So, first the bad news: you have to write for yourself.

---

and then

> Those rethinks are load-bearing parts of your voice. Readers won’t put their fingers on what’s wrong, but they’ll sense that you’ve become artificially-flavored.

---

Are they wrong in the first paragraph? Or are they simply not following the advice they dispense to others?

virgilp··on GPT-6 Astra
What do you mean? Virtually all humans have access to the internet. That's literally "a significant cross section of human knowledge available in real-time".

Oh, the median human can't process that in realtime, you say? Looks like they can't compete with the capabilities of the frontier AI then.

virgilp··on Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users
> We can easily train a LLM to pass the Turing test if we wanted to, but then it would just sound dumb or biased.

Interesting idea. "This is not dumb and biased enough, probably not a human".

virgilp··on What I Learned from Reimplementing 40 Multi-Agent LLM Papers
The honest title is "what Claude learned from reimplementing 40 Multi-Agent LLM Papers"
virgilp··on A graph that should be front-page news
Well before I knew he was a nutter, it strikes be that the graph starts in 1991. Feels like we should should have more data than that, and that the same graph would be more powerful if it started in 1800 and showed the same thing (or at least, earlier in the 20th century, surely we must have data from the 1950s at least? probably earlier?)

Not saying that the data is not concerning, or that climate warming isn't real, BTW. I'm just saying this particular graph feels fishy.

virgilp··on Benchmarking coding agents on Databricks' multi-million line codebase
It seems that pass rate decreases with effort increase, on GPT5.5? This is highly counter-intuitive and I don't see any explanation, any idea why they'd get this result?
virgilp··on Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users
Perhaps you're a better-than-average driver? I unfortunately am not, and have had the opposite experience (people flashing me because I forgot to turn off the high beams, or couldn't do it fast enough due to e.g. a corner, or drinking water with that hand, or whatever). In long straight lines it's relatively easy to do it, on windy roads not so much. On the other hand, with current car I don't remember anybody flashing me.

Personally, I just developed a strategy for dealing with too-bright-incoming-lights: just focus on the right edge of the road - that takes my eyes off the lights, and it's where the danger lies anyway. With that, late-commuting vehicles are a lot less of a nuisance than people who just have poorly tuned low beams or simply keep high beams on always. And those problems/ people are unrelated to the "automatic commute" technology - arguably the tech improves things on that front, even in the not-so-great implementations.

virgilp··on Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users
Admittedly mine is somewhat high end, and I have seen broken implementations (which is what I think you describe; e.g. for auto high beam assist mine will redirect the beams around isolated cars, won't completely switch to low beams except in heavy /heavier traffic; and when it does, it takes at least several seconds to switch back - which makes it impossible to do the kind of "flash" you describe).

But I'm kinda' surprised by the cruise control, I don't think I ever drove a car, even a rental, where cruise control wasn't at least "genuinely useful". Even the non-automatic one. How does it "not take into account vehicles in other lanes"/ what makes it dangerous?

virgilp··on The 2-Year Apartment Rule
> If you don't call an exterminator with the proper poison almost any effort you make will be moot.

Nah, not true. I lived in a student housing that was positively _infested_ with cockroaches (and had stuff like wood paneling on the walls, just to get an idea - i.e. lots of places for roaches to hide). We managed to largely get rid of cockroaches in our room (you still get the occasional one, because well, you had to open the door, and hallways were infested as I mentioned).

It's not _that_ hard, there are a lot of solutions. You need to do 3 things:

a. seal all holes/cracks/niches (e.g. with silicone). cover ventilation holes with nets. Install sponge/rubber bands to make sure doors/windows close well.

b. kill them once when you move in (after doing the work at point a) using copious amounts of insecticides; then install roach traps (sticky ones are good) to catch the occasional one that makes it through your defenses. Keep occasional spraying in the corners/ behind the fridge/ near the pipes/ in places where they are likely to gather.

c. Keep it clean/ don't offer a lot of incentives for roaches to come over to you (no breadcrumbs all over the place, food in closed containers etc)

Do these well and you should be largely roach-free, regardless of the building. But yeah, it's an annoying fight if the building itself is infested.

virgilp··on Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users
So do other drivers that fail to switch to low beams - even my old car was better than me in switching to low beams.
virgilp··on Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users
How are all these "broken and dangerous"? In my car (Volvo) they work rather well. Perhaps sign detection sometimes misses signs, but so do I so I can't fault it. The others though, I rank them all somewhere between "genuinely useful" and "absolutely awesome"
virgilp··on How to Earn a Billion Dollars
He talks about 15% _per month_
virgilp··on The iPhone's Last Stand
You can still believe that the scientific method works; and might leads you to 2 conclusions:

(a) "I can prove earth is not flat" (using this methodology) (b) I cannot prove there is no God, though I may believe the prevalence of evidence does not support the hypothesis, there's no scientific test that I can design.

virgilp··on The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
To be fair, their control variables treat the first objection (wealth), not the second (brand preference; and yeah there's some correlation but one doesn't imply the other)
virgilp··on The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
That's the 4th option
virgilp··on The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
That's for the good studies. Let's not pretend that all published studies are honest. Unfortunately it is quite reasonable to be skeptical about extraordinary claims such as this one.
virgilp··on Cursor Introduces Composer 2.5
If we ignore cost (which is kinda hard to ignore), I feel Codex kinda' does it for me. Sure it's not really an editor but I find I don't need that _that much_ and it's easy to launch an external editor (they actually have the feature).

The ironic thing is that half a year ago, after trying factory.ai I thought chat-first interface was a stupid idea that will never work.

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