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why_at

996 karma · joined March 3, 2023

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why_at··on America.gov
Yeah that's a fair point. We shouldn't have to rely on private companies for this kind of thing.

On the other hand this is just going through one or more of the big AI companies anyway. So they still get data from users, now we're just funding them with our taxes instead of using one of many LLM interfaces available for free.

The privacy policy actually looks OK though, I'll be interested to see what the EFF has to say.

why_at··on America.gov
I can see how LLMs might be useful for this kind of thing but I'm struggling to think of how this will be better than just asking ChatGPT the same questions.

The first suggestion I saw was "I just got married, how do I change my last name?"

It tells you to update your Social Security info first and gives you some helpful links.

ChatGPT tells me the same things with some of the same links. It didn't even have to ask if I was in America because it found my state based off my IP I assume.

why_at··on Solitaire Alone Together
And if you leave the tab alone for a while there's one of the classic Windows screensavers
why_at··on Things That Annoy Me About Cars
Sure but if we're comparing anecdotes all I'm saying is I've had a great experience.

The linked complaints are all for one specific car which I've never driven, so maybe there's some problem with that model or Volvo's software.

why_at··on Things That Annoy Me About Cars
I agree with most of these but

>Smartphones and NFC cards instead of keyfob with buttons

Using a phone as a key is super convenient, and having a little credit card sized NFC key works great as a backup. I've rarely had any problems with it.

>Turning on/off headlights, auto lights are good but I still regularly need to manually control them.

Why? Auto headlights work 99.9% of the time in every car made in the last 20 years.

why_at··on GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released
I just updated mine to try it out, it definitely looks nicer.

https://imgur.com/a/ZGpbqB7

why_at··on Trey Parker and Matt Stone Are Changing the Name of South Park to South America
I also watched it in its prime when I was a teenager, but have hardly watched any in the last 10 years. It feels similar to The Simpsons where they're mostly reacting to the latest news and popular culture, which I don't find as enjoyable.

I think it's hard to say how much they are responsible for modern politics vs just a reflection of the attitudes that created it. This piece[1] from 2020 puts it pretty well I think. Either way it's hard for me to look at old episodes like "The Death Camp of Tolerance" without seeing a precursor to "anti-wokism".

>Political correctness is itself a fascinating term. Its elastic, capacious usage has grown to encompass just about anything conservative political culture would prefer not to talk about. Like South Park’s own essential premises, it judges the crime of bringing things up—grand injustices or just hurt feelings—to be worse than any unfairness, inequity, or simple rudeness. It is a sort of singular and universal commandment: Moses gone up the mountain to return with a single tablet that proclaims, “Stop complaining!”

[1]https://newrepublic.com/article/157066/watching-south-park-e...

why_at··on Unusual Suspects
I'm not very inclined towards drawing, I had more fun trying to guess the characters based on the descriptions than actually drawing them
why_at··on Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT
I think it's hard for us to imagine what we could have if not for NAT.

Just as an example, any device on your home network could have a web interface which you could access from anywhere using a web browser. All the smart light bulbs and things which need some stupid account on some service could be made so they're controlled by the user instead of some company.

I've set up things like this on my home network but it's a pain because I need to deal with port forwarding, and if I have more than one device I need to use a reverse proxy.

why_at··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
I feel like there are plenty personally. I usually don't have to walk more than a block or two to find one.

That article is from 20 years ago by the way

why_at··on The entire city of San Francisco as a video game
I'm still holding out hope for a modern Fallout in the bay area.
why_at··on A portable, sensitive, low power, analog Geiger counter (2025)
I've wanted to build a geiger counter in the past but I've always been discouraged because it seems unlikely that I would be able to use it for anything other than maybe testing one or two things in my house like smoke detectors.
why_at··on Heart aerospace completes first flight of largest electric aircraft
I want this to work but this isn't enough to get anywhere. Aren't you supposed to have 30 minutes extra fuel minimum just as a safety margin?
why_at··on My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”
>an official app to report incidents of phone theft

I can't be the only person to see the irony here. Do they also have a drive-thru to report car theft?

why_at··on The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You
I think their anger is justified. Yes there's not a lot that individual engineers can do to help, but a big part of the problem is that they don't even understand the people they're "helping".

These tech gadgets are the annoying experience we've all had of someone taking a look at a problem from the outside and proposing unhelpful "solutions" that won't work because they don't fully understand it.

It reminds me of conversations I've had with people who suffer from insomnia. They say that everyone has some suggestion to just try melatonin, or not use screens before bed, or whatever. As though they haven't tried these things.

Yes they're just trying to be helpful, but it comes off as patronizing.

why_at··on Elevators
>Then you also run into visitors that assume it's a normal car and can hit a floor button when the get in, only to realize they've walked into a car without buttons.

I work in a building with Destination Dispatch elevators so I'm used to them. I have the opposite problem where I'll get into a normal elevator and just stand there without pushing anything.

why_at··on Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story
Respectfully, calling this misinformation is unwarranted.

The featured article is about exactly this.

>On 14 February 2019, OpenAI announced a language model called GPT-2

>OpenAI declared GPT-2 was too risky to release, citing concerns about safety and abuse.

>People with power and money took note: in July of that year, Microsoft invested $1bn in OpenAI.

It's not a 100% gold standard RCT or whatever, but the idea that this is good PR for AI companies is backed up by recent history. What evidence do you want to see?

>HuggingFace appears to have put out a press release about this before they knew this was a rogue OpenAI model

Huggingface's blog doesn't mention OpenAI by name but it explicitly mentions that the attack was by an "autonomous AI agent" and that they defended themselves with another AI agent.

If you have some disagreement with the premise of the article maybe you could share it in a top level comment?

why_at··on Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story
Well if you're looking for some kind of statistical analysis of OpenAI's press releases vs their valuation then I don't have anything like that. I also don't have this kind of evidence that running ads during the Superbowl is good for their business, but it just seems kind of obvious that touting their product's capabilities is something that they want to do.

Conversely if both companies involved thought this would be bad for the AI industry, they would be perfectly capable of keeping it just between themselves and not putting out press releases about it.

Do you disagree that this is good PR for them? If so I'm curious why.

why_at··on Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story
I think you are conflating skepticism about AI companies' motives with skepticism about their capabilities.

Even if OpenAI is being 100% honest in their reporting on this it's still good marketing for them. The fact that this outcome is good for their business and stock price makes me suspicious about how much this was a complete accident vs an "accident" that they allowed to happen by setting up the right environment for it. The company that was hacked is also an AI company, so they also have every reason to boost AI's presence in society's collective mind.

There is a conversation to be had about the possible dangers of AI, but skepticism is warranted when the companies making money off of it are the ones pushing the stories.

>a Cyberdyne Systems T-800 armed with a shotgun breaking down their front door.

For comparison, we've had the technology to make killer robots which automatically aim and shoot at human beings for 10+ years now, long before LLMs got big. But Boston Dynamics or whatever did not manufacture hype to anywhere near the same degree as AI companies are doing.

why_at··on Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
This is pretty nice, I might use this if I'm looking to learn more on a topic.

I'm always cautious when reading nonfiction because it's hard for me to tell if the author knows what they're talking about when I'm not an expert myself. Using awards is a good metric. Maybe.

I am curious what the "score" for each book means. Is it calculated by giving each award a certain weight and adding them up?

why_at··on Which streaming service was that on again?
>2. We've started expecting "must-see" shows and movies. You want to watch The Pitt, and then are mad that you need to get HBO or whatever and can't just watch it on Netflix. Perhaps you could browse Netflix and find something you'd like, but you have your heart set on a specific show.

>(2) is on us a little bit. Cultural monoculture is not good. Following the herd is not good.

I don't think this is it. People just want to be able to watch things without too much hassle and without paying too much money. Some people will enjoy following the latest trend, but there are always many more people not watching any particular show than are watching it.

The fact that torrents make it so much easier to find what you want shows that there's nothing technically difficult about this. It's all caused by stupid profit incentives which make the consumer experience so much worse than it needs to be.

why_at··on Designing emoji for the way we communicate today
>problems like "what the back of a smiling face looks like" sound entirely self-inflicted.

I think this is the funniest sentence I've ever read on Hackernews.

What are we doing with our lives?

why_at··on Decoy Font
This one seems much more likely to work for its intended purpose. Even if an LLM can be trained to read it, it will probably take much more processing to get the text out of a video compared to an image.
why_at··on The revenge of the philosophy majors
There was another article on this recently[1], if I didn't know better I would suspect this narrative is being pushed by some PR firm. Maybe it's coming from AI companies trying to imply their models are so advanced that they need philosophers to determine if they're conscious or something?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48662452

why_at··on Breaking the Bird Barrier: Scientist Decodes Zebra Finch Language
Yeah I think there's a lot of science news about how plants are capable of more than the average person thinks, but people tend to conflate that with some kind of conscious experience.
why_at··on Supersonic flight returning to US after half-century ban
I have a special seething hatred for leafblowers. The noise to utility ratio is so high.
why_at··on 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero
Maybe I'm being dumb, but I don't understand what the innovation is here.

I get that they're using liquid coolant at higher than usual temperatures, but why couldn't they do that before? Most of the comparison in the article is for air cooled datacenters but what about other liquid cooled ones?

Surely in all the previous datacenters that have been designed there has been someone doing the math and determining what temperature things need to run at, how much energy it will use, how much heat it all will produce, etc.

edit: just saw this:

>Previous liquid-cooled servers were hybrid: GPUs and CPUs got cold plates, but the rest of the system stayed air-cooled, with finned heat sinks designed to shed heat into moving air. In a fully liquid-cooled server, the cooling for these components needed to be completely redesigned to use liquid.

why_at··on Big AI labs are hiring philosophers
>Dr Floridi describes the scale of departures from philosophy departments as a “haemorrhaging”.

I wonder if anyone who is connected with actual academic philosophy can comment on this. I'm pretty skeptical.

This is a field where it is notoriously hard to get a real academic position, I would bet there is no shortage of people for these roles.

why_at··on Not everyone is using AI for everything
The comparison with meat consumption seems inapt.

70% of people report reducing meat consumption, but research has shown that these intentions have very little correlation with people's actual behavior.

why_at··on Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware
I agree LLMs can be harmful and that the companies behind them should be held liable to some extent, for example the recent news with Google being held responsible for their AI's defamation.[1]

This is a pretty different argument though. The comment that started this thread was talking about LLMs making potentially dangerous knowledge more available to bad actors, now we're talking about LLMs giving personally harmful advice.

You asked:

>If he had the help of Claude at the time, how much more dangerous would his bumbling have been?

Probably less? Even if you removed all the guardrails from Claude it would've likely told him his reactor plan wouldn't work and that he would have a high chance of poisoning himself and the environment.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48470248

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