tessierashpool

first, if somebody tries to cheat you, and you walk away, that's just not what losing looks like. that's the right move.

second, no, it's not good. it opens with clickbait, pivots to some other topic, so the first question is "what is it really about?"

they don't tell you what it's really about. they make you read the whole article to find out.

even if you're willing to accept people acting in bad faith, you still need to be able to assess if the article's worth reading. the only signal on that topic is the disrespect they showed to your normal process for doing so.

it would have been easy to fix with "here's what the article is about, and why the hyperbole almost works:" followed by a sentence which did that job.

they don't do that. instead they introduce a character without explaining who he is, so you have to click a link to find out (but again, no signal as to whether or not you should care). then you get a whole bunch of intricate code specifics, again without any signal about why you should care.

it's a very consistent theme. you're not going to get a good article out of an experience where you have to click external links and go several paragraphs deep just before learning "it's probably still going to be about enums" and "these people have no respect for either my time or the general principle that writing should be clear."

The author used an LLM. The first paragraph has two em dashes (turned into hyphens) and a typical overlong list. The second paragraph has an em dash the human author turned into a semicolon, and the third has one he turned into a colon. The fourth paragraph does the colon substitution several times.

The fifth paragraph is so obviously machine-generated I don't understand why people are even discussing this blog post at all:

This is the other cost - invisible to many, sometimes including the ones who handle the toil work. Every team has toil, and it is almost never prioritized. But you already knew this one, so I won’t spend more words to say that toil is an important signal that there is work waiting to be discovered.

If all you want to do is post prompt outputs on your blog, I think a) you should be honest about it and b) you have an obligation to write very interesting prompts.

Might even be more useful to just share those.

one is marketing.

the other is that you could make tiny datacenters and flood the sky with them. in effect, not datacenters at all, but some kind of dataswarm coordinating at literal lightspeed via lasers.

they'd still be wildly expensive to deploy, and probably litter the orbit zone with fast-moving debris.

There's even (disputed) allegations that Bush Sr funneled money and weapons to bin Laden in opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. If true, the big 2006 enemy was a 1986 ally.

That's a question any lawmaker has already had to ask about technology all the time.

I'm not saying they came up with great answers, but there's nothing qualitatively new about that.

The stochastic factor doesn't change the fact that companies have to be accountable for the harms their software causes. That's just basic liability law.

definitely a request to fulfill.

they literally published a manifesto. did you not know about that?

I guess google them, dude. read the paper you're posting on a thread about. good luck

edit: on reflection, I still think he's BSing

also, there was conflict between Jewish Palestinians and Muslim Palestinians long before the Holocaust. Zionists were trying to take over in the late days of the Ottoman Empire.

the purpose of propaganda is not to convince the ignorant or skeptical, but to exhaust and/or discredit opponents.

this conflation is extremely unhelpful

reason I hate to say it is because companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.

if Palantir and Anduril were observing the same strict separation between political and military matters, and the same strict separation between domestic and foreign activity, that the military itself observes, then the only thing happening here would be the Valley disrupting a poorly-run industry. I have no issue with that. that is what the Valley's supposed to do.

but that's not what's happening.

It's not some 4d chess play by VCs -- this part is just provably false. they're using military contracting as a Trojan horse for some truly crazy shit.

this is true but it's also kind of falling into a trap.

first, the weird endless hunger that man has for any and all spotlights draws attention away from the policy issues and rampant criminality, which are a lot more important than his personality problems.

second, he was causing chaos overseas with military in his first administration too. Silicon Valley wasn't all-in on that.

third, Anduril, Palantir, et al represent a consistent philosophy of how the Valley takes over the military-industrial complex. they come from the same financial backer, Thiel, who also put a lot of money behind Trump. so we got a paper here about the real issue, and if we're shifting our attention from that to this clown who kind of just works for Thiel (among other, even more dubious possible bosses), the risk is that the conversation transitions from substance to gossip.

Tailwind had a solid funnel and a good product. Now they only have a good product. That's enough to kill a business.

If (or more likely when) Google loses money because LLMs are replacing search, that's a story about moats.

Their funnel depended on SEO, and LLMs took SEO out of the equation. What you said about the value of pre-built components might also be true but can't be determined from a situation where consumers suddenly all stopped learning that the pre-built components exist. Occam's Razor says it's the funnel.

the post says: I wanted to start from scratch and learn music from first principles, and I began that journey by writing code.

but we know that's not true. you began that journey in Claude Code, or Codex, or ChatGPT, or whatever. you just want to demo your startup that embeds JavaScript in web pages.

the Mermaid diagram doesn't even render.

they probably weren't.

Meta lobbied heavily for this. The fact that they have not decided to use free speech to fight the move that they are lobbying for is not an argument that free speech is irrelevant here.

This is not legal advice but a personal request: please do not get your legal advice from Hacker News. Get it from a lawyer.

hating on OP for being AI slop is fully legit imo (sorry OP) but don't judge the concept on this example. the rotary sequencer model's actually quite effective. there's lots of niche software and Eurorack modules which implement it, e.g., Moskwa (and Moskwa II) from Xaoc Devices.

here's a YouTube video which shows Moskwa II in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-6n_E9WIfQ

btw the first rotary sequencer was probably Raymond Scott's Circle Machine from 1958:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110927232227/http://raymondsco...

ever since Elon did his "promise full self-driving every year" thing, entrepreneurs been on a weird sort of fiction escalator.

thought-to-text is incredible. imagine doing something that remarkable with your life and feeling the need to exaggerate.

But it also allowed me to extrapolate a difficulty metric. Wordle Bot gives you your "Luck," "Skill," and number of steps, compared to the average user, for every game. It's not a coincidence my personal number of steps goes up on the same days (generally speaking) that the average user's number of steps goes up. Nor that it goes down on the same days. Nor that the same happens with "Luck" and "Skill."

Anyway, I like the idea of copying the GitHub activity calendar/matrix design, but the colors are kind of meaningless for me as I play Wordle with the high-contrast colors. Tempted to turn my spreadsheet into an app so I can copy the design, but add a high-contrast mode.

anyway, the other way is I found it's helpful when prompting LLMs to use the same "it's not delivery, it's DiGiorno's" pattern that they're all so obsessed with. especially when the thing's misapprehended some concept, so you need to clarify. this hasn't yet generalized from the fake "conversations" I have with chatbots into my conversational style out in the real world, but the risk is fully there. (it's not an inevitability -- it's an occupational hazard.)

95% of the dogs in your home are okay with it.

this study from Psychology Today finds that 83% of dogs freak out when they hear loud noises:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/canine-corner/202202...

technically we have one, the Fourth Amendment, but SCOTUS defanged it completely, years ago.