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caeril

Apparently you forgot the WHO's catastrophic missteps during COVID?

At some point, you need to fire your under-performing partners.

Re:Ask HN: Can we just admit we want to replace jobs with AI? on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @03:49PM (#42785032)
Is there an argument here beyond armchair psychologizing?

GPT-3 is over 4 years old. The writing was on the wall then. FAANG status-strivers had plenty of warning to maybe stop blowing their TC on impressing other people, and choose instead to sock something away.

Most chose not to, because living the "right" lifestyle was far more important than prudence. It is for these people that just desserts are in store.

The Social Network and its consequences have been a disaster for the software engineering race. It marked the Eternal September when this profession was inundated with greedy normies who don't care about software, but rather their wealth and status. The end of this era could not come quickly enough.

These models are far better teachers for my kids than their actual teachers. they are far more engaged, able to go down rabbit holes guided by their own curiosity, and end up learning more.

I do my best to ensure they're not using these models to do their work for them, but they are invaluable teaching tools, nonetheless.

Hopefully this will be one more nail in the coffin for the sprawling public education complex.

Re:OpenAI Fails to Deliver Opt-Out System for Photographers on Thursday January 16, 2025 @01:25PM (#42728929)
Ah, so you subscribe to the Magical Jesus Box hypothesis of mind?

We are not magical Jesus boxes. We are evolved machines, that just happen to be based on a carbon substrate, not a silicon one.

There is nothing special about us.

Re:OpenAI Fails to Deliver Opt-Out System for Photographers on Thursday January 16, 2025 @11:26AM (#42727411)
Absolute F-tier reasoning, here. Your own biological neural net is trained on a huge corpus of copyrighted works.

How would you like to be sued by your favorite author because you wrote some fan fiction in a similar style?

No, training a model should be no more violating copyright than training your own brain.

Re:No Billionares at FOSDEM on Thursday January 16, 2025 @10:49AM (#42726879)
> elect a guy who believes climate change is a hoax, which will likely delay any progress we could make by years

No president, congressman, or other politician has materially done anything to effect "progress" on climate change, regardless of party. With China's emissions alone, we're on track for 450ppm in about a decade, even if the United States scrapped all vehicles and reverted to living in huts.

Elon is aware of the same fact that anyone who has seriously studied climate change is: the only solution is to science the shit out of it. We need technologies for carbon capture and renewable energy. No amount of retarded luddite degrowth policies will make a dent. I know you know this.

Re:AI Brad Pitt dupes French woman out of €830k on Wednesday January 15, 2025 @03:31PM (#42716509)
Not only is she deserving of endless mockery, but she is deserving of being sued by her ex-husband for this. She is no less evil than a man who blows the marital community property on prostitutes and cocaine.

The only "victim" in this scenario is the ex-husband.

Re:AI Brad Pitt dupes French woman out of €830k on Wednesday January 15, 2025 @02:29PM (#42715772)
Really? Let's hypothesize that some rando on the internet contacted you and said he was Jensen Huang, and he offered to sell his NVDA stock to you at $50/sh (currently trading at $135). Looking for a quick flip, you wire your family's entire savings to a random account number he sends you - or, even better, to some BTC address.

You later find out, SHOCKINGLY, that this rando is not actually Jensen Huang. You would, rightly, be a fair target of mocking for your S-tier gullibility.

This isn't "I fell for a well-designed phishing scam"-tier, or "SBF promised me 9% yields"-tier. This is a whole other level that is rightfully deserving of mockery.

The fact she wrecked her marriage in the process is just the cherry on top.

It depends on the complexity of your campaign. Back in the day when I played D&D, we had a DM who would throw together typical hack-and-slash-and-loot campaigns, in which you wanted to maximize your STR, CON, DEX, and INT( if you were a magic-using class ). Nobody wanted to assign points to anything else, as they would be a waste.

It takes a good DM to balance a campaign, especially for years. And I suspect most DMs are pretty bad (I'm guessing, haven't played in over a decade now).

> > which could include sexual assault or drug use

Wouldn't any potion, including potions of healing, be considered "drug use"? Howabout excessive drinking by dwarves at a tavern in the canonical DM party formation ritual?

> Well, unless public healthcare, then it 'hurts' all tax payers

No, it also hurts private insurance customers( in the US ). Healthy weight people, and those who exercise are subsidizing the premiums of people who refuse to put down the fork and move occasionally, because it's illegal to discriminate premiums based on obvious risk factors like bodyfat %.

My family pays $2700/mo in premiums for a shit-tier PPO in order to support the gluttony of everyone around us. We very rarely even use the insurance.

Re:The Trap of "I am not an Extrovert" on Friday December 27, 2024 @11:50AM (#42523717)
> take over the microphone and address a room with 500 people in it

I'm not sure this has anything to do with introversion.

Speech and debate clubs are filled with introverts. The notion of "stage fright" is completely orthogonal to introversion. You're speaking at people, with YOUR ideas, YOUR words - it's not a dialogue, with shared feelings, mood, etc, which is where introverts generally get drained.

Re:The Trap of "I am not an Extrovert" on Friday December 27, 2024 @10:54AM (#42523171)
That's exactly correct. An IQ 130 HackerNewser with solid critical thinking and reasoning capability and access to the psychological literature is far less qualified than the (average) 105 IQ psychologist who has been "educated" on a pile of studies that consistently fail to replicate.

Welcome to the world of gatekeeping.

Re:What can strong engineers do that weak engineers can't? on Friday December 27, 2024 @10:35AM (#42522963)
"Passion" is an overused term, but it's absolutely clear that developers who love what they do are nearly an order of magnitude better than those who are punching the clock.

In a very specific sense, I tend to perform reverse-age-discrimination, because a developer who was PEEKing and POKEing segmented address space with BASIC in 1984 as a kid is always going to be preferable to an aimless Zoomer who was "inspired" by Justin Timberlake saying "A million isn't cool anymore, you know what is cool? A Billion." in The Social Network.

Re:Why Are Men More Vulnerable to Depression in Fatherhood? on Tuesday December 24, 2024 @02:10PM (#42504136)
You might also be oblivious to what depression IS, because clinical psychologists are, as well.

Depression is a cluster of symptoms, for all intents and purposes. There is some evidence that SSRIs help these symptoms, but direct causal seratonin deficiency hypotheses have yet to be supported.

There's scant evidence that modern non-pharmaceutical therapeutic interventions (with the exception of niche interventions like CBT) are even effective, yet the advice "go to therapy" gets tossed around constantly as if it's Science(tm) with a capital S.

You can claim that the "depression is just a matter of perspective bro" is an ignorant take, but according to the literature, "depression is a chemical imbalance", or any other definitive "depression is X" claim is equally ignorant. We still don't really know. We're still searching.

Re:Why Are Men More Vulnerable to Depression in Fatherhood? on Tuesday December 24, 2024 @02:03PM (#42504086)
Men are overrepresented at both ends of nearly all bell curves. Men have fatter tails in most distributions you can think of. More presidents, but also more suicides.

You are effectively saying that because men are more likely to be president, CEO, Nobel Prize winner, etc, we should tell the men who are more likely to be homeless, murdered, etc, that they deserve it, and they should shut the fuck up.

She worked briefly at Amazon, and she was an accountant. She did not work on critical technology, logistics, growth strategy, design, or operations. There is no world in which she deserves, by dint of her contributions, anything more than $1B.

You're correct that she is LEGALLY entitled to half, but that doesn't make it right. People can LEGALLY traffic slaves in Yemen, but I'm going to guess you won't be advocating for the God-given right of Akhmed to sell laborers to UAE real estate development companies?

Denial policy should be very very simple:

If you're seeking coverage for lung cancer, but you chose to smoke, denied.

If you're seeking coverage for type II diabetes, but you weigh 400lbs, denied.

If you're seeking coverage for cancer because you got unlucky with a cosmic ray incident on your DNA, approved.

If you're seeking coverage for a liver transplant because you refused to put down the bottle, denied.

If you're seeking coverage for injuries from an auto accident that was not your fault, approved.

I will NEVER understand why this type of blanket policy is so controversial. Cover bad luck, do NOT cover personal choices. It will fix not only costs, but the moral hazard endemic to the current system.

Or, AT THE VERY LEAST, allow prejudicial adjustments to premiums for fatties, smokers, and alcoholics.

Re:Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era on Wednesday December 11, 2024 @02:44PM (#42391955)
Bear in mind that a "1 million token" context window isn't actually that. You're being sold a sparse attention model, which is guaranteed to drop critical context. Google TPUs aren't running inference on a TERABYTE of fp8 query-key inputs, let alone TWO of fp16.

Google's marketing wins again, I guess.

> Connections, social intelligence, and knowing how to work the system is what moves things in Washington

You're not wrong, but this is a normative observation.

The question is, is this how it ought to be?

Re:FBI Raids Home of Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan on Thursday November 14, 2024 @08:44AM (#42136073)
Yes, because Polymarket offers sports markets, which are still illegal in the US (for US users, anyway). Kalshi has been careful to offer markets in basically everything except sports.

It should be obvious what happened here: Polymarket has been offering grey or black markets to users, using only IP address as the discriminator, which is very easy to work around. They've operated under the Feds' radar for quite some time, and the Feds noticed them after they started getting significant press regarding the election.

The election is the reason they got noticed, but the likely crime itself is sports, not elections.

Re:FBI Raids Home of Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan on Thursday November 14, 2024 @08:37AM (#42136031)
These markets are no more "gambling" than other markets are.

A traditional sportsbook maintains a house vig anywhere from 5 to 15%, which is, indeed, a pretty fast path to ruin. They typically don't allow you to exit your position once you're committed.

Polymarket's sports markets, in contrast, have comparable bid/ask spreads to financial markets (maybe slightly wider), and the market is liquid such that you can sell your contract to someone else whenever you want.

Re:Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week on Tuesday November 12, 2024 @08:06AM (#42115183)
> Feels less combative than Twitter.

Echo chambers are, by default, less combative.

As Twitter becomes more hiveminded, you can expect it to become less combative, as well.

One would think, but it's an industry I'll never understand, either.

Coca-Cola doesn't need to advertise. It's delicious, everyone knows it exists, and yet they still spend ungodly amounts of money on advertising.

KO shareholders presumably wouldn't let them get away with this if it wasn't justifiable. So there's something I'm likely missing.

> based on traditional definitions

A lot of traditional definitions imply some degree of consciousness or sentience.

But AGI will ultimately be defined by capabilities, not similarity to humans.

If a GPT-style LLM meets or exceeds humans at a broad category of tasks, it doesn't matter that it doesn't "understand" the tokens it operates on. Same with self-driving systems or autonomous robots. It doesn't matter if the CNN doesn't have a conception of a "person" - if it can feed the identification vector into the control network, and the control network swerves to avoid the identified object at a rate equal to humans, then that's good enough.

Capability is what matters, nothing else. And right now, we have ALL the parts to do this, we just have to scale them up, and train them better, and connect them.

There's still a ton of room left in short error-correcting RLHF or fine-tune cycles.

I expect there will be, at some point, "trusted" or "verified" accounts that are able to flag a completion as wrong, and provide it with a correct completion, which will be collated and used (daily? hourly?) to fine-tune the weights. Active inference cluster would be switched as A/B/C etc.

Re:It feels like 2004 again on Friday November 08, 2024 @12:32PM (#42088684)
Sequoia, and others (who actually receive the quarterly reports) seem pretty happy with their position.
Re:Former President Trump is projected to win the presidency on Wednesday November 06, 2024 @11:09AM (#42064418)
> my understanding of the economics is that this would be terrible

Deflation is only "terrible" because we have collectively decided to build an economy on debt instead of savings (Keynesian instead of Friedmanian).

In a different economic order, prices declining would be a good thing for everyone.

But we're stuck with it, so inflation it is.

Re:New York Times Tech Workers Go on Strike on Monday November 04, 2024 @11:49AM (#42043379)
This stereotype was true up until 14 years ago.

My generation is the one that got mercilessly bullied for interest in science, engineering, and computers.

Gen Z watched The Social Network and suddenly decided that software development was cool. It is, by no means, a caricature, since these people graduated. The software profession is thoroughly infested by status strivers, at this point.

Re:New York Times Tech Workers Go on Strike on Monday November 04, 2024 @11:42AM (#42043290)
100% out of touch, yes, but not wrong. Before kids I had the same exact sentiment, and now, with kids, I still do.

Raising a family is a choice, and that choice should be made deliberately, considering all aspects, including financial impact.

It is no more the responsibility of the employer to consider the family of the employee anymore than for them to consider if the employee is a gambling addict, or spends frivolously on OnlyFans subs or funko pop collecting.

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