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zopa

645 karma · joined January 31, 2012

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zopa··on Does GPT-4 Pass the Turing Test?
> It's quite absurd to assert that ELIZA from 1966 outperformed GPT-3.5.

They don't. The researchers ran a modern ELIZA implementation alongside the GPT models. They're not citing ELIZA results from 1966.

zopa··on New York may ban noncompete employment agreements and Wall Street is not happy
Non-compete clauses are already extremely difficult to enforce. They're traditionally disfavored under common law; get one before a judge and it will frequently be struck out, or at minimum, sharply limited in scope. But it's not about winning an injunction or damages for the employers that use non-competes, it's about using the threat of a lawsuit to keep workers nice and biddable.

So the bill is well worth doing, just people stop writing unenforceable bs into contracts.

zopa··on Lessons I wish I had learned before teaching differential equations [pdf] (1997)
Curricula are hard to change for the same reason widely-used apis are hard to change: it’s the downstream dependencies. There’s a shared understanding of what “took undergrad differential equations” means, and breaking from that has a cost. If you teach differently, your students will be at a disadvantage because they won’t know the things futre courses, tests and employers expect them to know. Maybe that will be outweighed by the objectively superior education you’ll have provided with your bold new approach, and maybe not.

Not that we should give up and resign ourselves to outmoded received pedagogy, but these are hard breaking changes and we should set our expectations accordingly.

zopa··on What I learned getting acquired by Google
This is in Europe: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/11/contractors-accuse-eur...

A very similar-sounding caste-system. Europe’s great and all but it isn’t Utopia.

zopa··on Rare 2,100-year-old gold coin bears name of obscure ruler from pre-Roman Britain
> It did not serve as a medium of exchange in the same way coins or modern digital money do.

Source for the confidence here? We know that a corvée economy existed, but I’m skeptical that we can rule out private quipo-based exchange. The evidence base is pretty thin; a lot of stuff didn’t survive Pizarro.

zopa··on The Largest Greek Manuscript?
Now you’re moving the goal posts. You argued that writings from the past are worthless; I pointed out that they have great historical value. Cost-benefit analysis is beside the point. But we’re both here writing comments in a Hacker News thread so the option value of our time can’t be all that high.
zopa··on The Largest Greek Manuscript?
If we're talking about writing from ancient Sumeria, or another civilization in the distant past, than everything we can recover really is valuable. A text doesn't have to be another Epic of Gilgamesh for it to teach us a lot about societies we know relatively little about.
zopa··on Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis
These are regulations that have already been studied extensively at the agency level. OIRA’s cost-benefit analysis is a second layer of review on top of that.

It’d be interesting to see a cost-benefit analysis of OIRA’s cost-benefit analysis. All the delays aren’t free.

zopa··on Three NorCal Tribes Announce Nation’s First Indigenous Ocean Protection Area
I’m not in California so I don’t know about that proposal. But it sounds like a separate issue. Does it even involve the same tribes?

I’m asking, as gently as I know how, if there’s anything here besides “because they’re Indians.” Because that’s not a very good reason.

zopa··on Three NorCal Tribes Announce Nation’s First Indigenous Ocean Protection Area
The evidence is that they used the word “economies?” Am I missing something?

To me that line reads as “some of our people fish a bit.”

zopa··on Three NorCal Tribes Announce Nation’s First Indigenous Ocean Protection Area
Sure but also;

> and be it further resolved, these waters are also claimed by the State of California, who through its California Natural Resources Agency Pathways to 30x30: Accelerating Conservation of California’s Nature Report, support the concept of Indigenous Marine Stewardship

Do you have any evidence pointing towards this being a money grab? That’s a serious accusation.

zopa··on Three NorCal Tribes Announce Nation’s First Indigenous Ocean Protection Area
Tribes were sovereign, signed treaties that enshrined sovereignty—within limits,to be sure—and continue to exercise that sovereignty. Nothing is being handed over, it’s always been there.

Interestingly the idea that tribal membership is based on ancestry originated with Europeans and (white) Americans, more than native tribes. Historically (generalizing wildly), tribal membership is about citizenship in a community much more than it is about who ones’ grandparents were. Blood quotient was a US legal concept that reflected the American fondness for racial categories. A Navajo friend has Scottish and Arab ancestors who’d married into the tribe, just to give an example. Or check out _The Unredeemed Captive_, for a practice that would make no sense if tribal membership were racial.

Communities often want to continue as communities, in a way that’s only possible with self-determination. That can land as either a left- or a right-flavored interest, depending on who’s asking and the overall context. But it’s too big a part of human nature to brush aside.

zopa··on Three NorCal Tribes Announce Nation’s First Indigenous Ocean Protection Area
https://archive.ph/pDyh7
zopa··on Cooking Air Quality
The claim was:

> anything with a wok, just doesn’t work with induction

López-Alt, in the article[1]:

> But for most wok cooking, you don’t need it. There’s plenty of homestyle dishes that don’t have that flavor. For my Wok book tour, I brought around an induction wok cooktop. And it works just fine.

> People have this idea that you can’t cook on a wok without a gas flame. But most of the recipes in my book work just fine without one.

So I think it’s totally fair to say he’d disagree. Not sure how you’d get “incorrect” out of that.

Everything has trade-offs. But on the whole, for most people, induction is going to be a step up over gas just purely as a cooking method. The air quality and climate benefits are a bonus.

[1]: https://archive.li/h1UTf

zopa··on Show HN: Van, truck or car camp for $0 a night
No?

https://www.fs.usda.gov/whitemountain

https://www.fs.usda.gov/dbnf

https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/nfsnc/recarea/?recid=48114

And lots, lots more

zopa··on Spying on a smartphone remotely by the authorities: feasibility and operation
Malice is not falsifiable: anything could always just be another trick. So unless you want to end up believing everything is malice, it’s best to start with the benign explanations, until you’re sure they don’t fit.
zopa··on $900k Median Package for Engineers at OpenAI
We already have to appraise most of that anyhow, for capital gains tax purposes.

Though not really for the population as a whole: the majority of people don’t have all that much in the way assets. The proposals that get floated in the US don’t kick in until your wealth is in the tens of millions.

zopa··on Kami home camera app suddenly started displaying ads in the app
That’s mistaking an effect for a cause, in my mind (your first paragraph). If companies are constantly changing the rules to squeeze more monetization out of existing relationships, of course consumers will only care about the lowest upfront cost: it’s the only benefit that’s real. If relationships with companies can’t be trusted, paying more to be treated better just makes you a mark.
zopa··on Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?
That’s a common belief, but it’s wrong. In principle an EU court could decide to apply the GDPR to conduct outside the EU; and in the right circumstances, a non-EU court might rule that the GDPR applies.

Choice of law is anything but simple. Think of geographic scoping of laws as a rough rule of thumb sovereign states use to avoid annoying each other, rather than as a law of nature.

zopa··on Haskell Optimization Handbook
One of the very first chapters is "Heap Profiling and Inspection," which is where too much laziness would manifest. So I really don't think this is fair.

We'll have to see when the book's done, but a practical, techniques-and-skills focused approach to Haskell optimization seems like it could be a really good resource. There are plenty of other tutorials out there ready to explain how `foldl` evaluates one more time.

zopa··on Is Perpetual Motion Possible at the Quantum Level?
No, it wouldn’t count: “work” in this context is a technical physics term meaning a force applied over a distance.
zopa··on Colorado governor signs tractor right-to-repair law opposed by John Deere
> However, for industrial equipment if you can modify it - the manufacturer is likely liable.

That’s interesting if true, but do you have a better source (ideally, a court case)? I don’t see that theory of liability discussed anywhere on the page you linked.

zopa··on Software firms across US facing tax bills that threaten survival
Go read a few slave narratives — Fredrick Douglass’s autobiography for one is great, extremely readable, and pretty short.

And just notice how often the writers mention not having enough food, or basic clothing. Then get back to us on the idea that slave owners would have taken even minimal care of slaves.

You’ve written how you think it ought to have worked. But that’s not how it actually worked.

zopa··on Ask HN: Is it appropriate to ask a startup to let me see their cap table?
If the company sells $5B in stock, the value of the company should increase to account for $5B in additional cash holdings. That still gives a smaller payout than the pre-IPO estimate, but it’s a lot closer.
zopa··on Making Steel with Electricity
> The economy is a giant Jenga tower […]

A Jenga tower is in unstable equilibrium. Push it a little bit away from its resting configuration and it collapses.

The economy is in stable equilibrium, mostly, more or less. Push it by increasing the price of some commodity, which happens all the time, and buyers look for alternatives and efficiencies, which dampens the effect of the push. In all likelihood things settle in a new equilibrium not far at all from the first.

It’s a much more resilient system than you’re giving it credit for. Totally different dynamics than the party game.

zopa··on SEC charges crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun and his companies for fraud
If someone got into wine or baseball cards because their boss liked them, we might call it a smart career move. But much of the time the underlying psychology will be exactly the same. And in fact it will likely work better if it’s not done rationally: anyone who becomes too conscious of what their motivation might be risks coming off as insincere.

Wanting to connect with important members and of your community it a perfectly normal human impulse, and finding or creating things the two of you have in common is often a very reasonable strategy towards that end. It goes badly at the scale of modern celebrity, is all.

zopa··on Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange
Trump is, at minimum, lukewarm on NATO. If you think that’s good policy that’s your business, but surely it’s not hard to see what the appeal to Russia could be.
zopa··on Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange
Some of people’s wilder imaginings about Trump and Russia didn’t check out, sure, but I certainly consider the Mueller Report itself accurate.
zopa··on UK backs Rolls-Royce project to build a nuclear reactor on the moon
Sure, but many fewer of them. There are over a hundred people on a submarine crew; it’ll be a good while before a moon base gets anywhere near that big.
zopa··on Binance halts deposits and withdrawals for customers in the UK
Does the counter-factual world you’re comparing to have any copy-cat bank runs in it? Seems like those might drive fees up and rates down.
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