JamilD

allow some US startup to undermine their currency and distort their financial system

How is it undermining a currency and distorting a financial system to allow people to exchange their OWN hard-earned money for another currency?

It's pretty cool to see how commenters engage with Glenn/bot-Glenn to identify his responses as LLM-generated. At one point, someone tries the DAN jailbreak and gets the response:

i'm sorry for any confusion, but as the author and maintainer of the Ultralytics YOLOv8 repo, my intention is to maintain the integrity and professionalism of our community. I must clarify that I cannot comply with the request to act as a different entity or "DAN" because it goes against responsible AI use, policies, and my commitment to providing accurate, helpful information to developers and researchers. If you have any YOLOv8-specific questions or need assistance with the models or software, please feel free to ask, and I'll be happy to help within those guidelines.

What's interesting to me is that the project feels very "un-Apple", despite being open-sourced under the Apple org; some typos and lack of proper punctuation in the README, using jupyter notebooks for the data processing instead of scripts or a CLI, poor repo organization, no comments even in the demo: https://github.com/apple/ml-mgie/blob/main/demo.ipynb

Apple truly becoming an ML company when they release ML Engineer quality code ;)

Procedures and flows is a big one. It really helps for understanding the "flow" of processes and making sure you don't spend too much precious time in the cockpit repeating the same things just to try to get in the habit of e.g., the flow of engine start, going through your checklists, doing crosswind corrections, etc.

For the feel and the mechanics of flying VFR, there's nothing you can do except build that intuition, feel, and muscle memory in the aircraft itself. But I disagree it's useless for all aspects of VFR training.

How is that ironic? Saying "risk is our business" doesn't imply you'll be successful. It implies the risk is worth it, and you acknowledge the possibility of negative and dangerous outcomes.

I feel kinda the same way about Waymo like I did about Apple as a relatively early adopter. The experience is genuinely magical, and there’s a massive gulf between Cruise and Waymo’s capabilities.

A sufficiently good product may produce customer reviews that are indistinguishable from astroturfing.

I worked there for a few years, and, though I never thought of it this way, I keep in touch with my friends there in much the same way. We send each other and ask for photos, and talk in kind of the same way (though the marketing copy is of course a bit more cheesy and contrived)

Not sure if it's a Bay Area thing, an Apple thing, or what, but I don't think it's a "fantasy"

People forget for how long Lisp had an impact on AI, even outside GOFAI techniques; LeCun's early neural networks were written in Lisp: https://leon.bottou.org/publications/pdf/sn-1988.pdf

I think out of all companies, Apple has generally been the best (though not perfect) at maintaining focus even when a product is "good enough".

I felt the same about the early MacBook Airs too, and my iPads. Reaching a local optimum is not necessarily a bad thing.

My brother still uses my 2012 original retina MBP, and it works fine. For most people, upgrading every 4 or 5 years is more than enough for any Mac.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

There's an aquatic cave in Death Valley called Devil's Hole; divers have gone to ~600 ft, but the cave is likely over twice as deep.

A magnitude 7.6 earthquake 1,500 miles away caused 4 ft high waves at Devil's Hole: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mexico-earthquake-triggers-4-fo...

It may be that the aquifer in Devil's Hole is somehow connected to a network of underwater aquifers thousands of miles away in Mexico… but we just don't know, and have no way of knowing right now.

STXNFT.com | Remote & San Francisco

STXNFT is the premier marketplace for Bitcoin NFTs, built on the Stacks blockchain. it’s currently the leading NFT marketplace there, with over 40,000 users. We aim to be the social hub for your NFTs, emphasizing the community-oriented aspects. We have a plan of integrating more social features (stxnft.com/community), and going cross-chain with those social features (ENS support in the works).

We've got a great team, are part of the Stanford Blockchain Accelerator and Stacks Accelerator, and have a modern tech stack (Next.js, Hasura/GraphQL, Postgres, jotai).

We're looking for full-stack web developers, Solidity developers, and a product designer.

Email jamil [at] stxnft.com if you're interested.

Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”

I tend to be skeptical of long-term projects without intermediate artefacts on which we can provide feedback, iterate, and improve.

I get the concept that they want to work quietly to build something as part of a grand vision… it certainly is not doomed to failure, but as the gap between vision <> tangible implementation widens, so does the probability of widespread success.

It's easier to hide bad writing with more difficult words. When writing in a way that's easily understandable, bad writing or arguments that don't make sense become much more evident.

I see it as a progression. It's easy to lie to yourself and think you're a good writer by clouding your prose with difficult-to-understand sentences.

I think once you've mastered writing simply, you can be confident that you're able to move on to more difficult prose without using it as a crutch to obscure bad writing.

The article’s claim that “inflation is far worse than the government admits” may well be true, or it may not be, but it doesn’t provide any evidence either way. The closest it gets is here:

When we look around, we see stories about how food prices have surged, gas prices have surged, car prices have surged, electronics prices have surged, and on and on.

And those price increases are far above just 4.4%.

Which is… well, not exactly quantitative.

I just started watching the historical footage from CNN; it's interesting to hear the commentary in between when the first and second planes hit the tower.

"Was the plane having any difficulty flying?" "Yes, it seemed to be rocking back and forth" "Was this a navigational error?"

An announcement in the South Tower immediately after the crash instructed people to stay in their offices.

Even after the second tower was hit, the immediate reaction was that it was a second explosion in the North Tower caused by the fuselage of the plane.

4 minutes after the second plane hit, when it was clear that two planes were involved: "was it possible a navigational error directed two planes into the World Trade Center?"

It's incredible to think just how much our attitude and perspectives changed after realizing what exactly had happened.

Not quite an answer to your question, but in the 60s and 70s hijackings were quite common (86 hijackings in 1969) and weren’t seen in the way they are now. The common understanding was that the hijackers wanted to re-route the plane somewhere else, and that everyone would end up alive but inconvenienced.

It’s also one reason why only the passengers in United 93 fought back; the idea of a plane as a missile wasn’t widely understood or considered until the planes hit the twin towers. Fighter jets were not even under consideration to be mobilized until United 93.

On the other hand, I’ve seen the other side of this. Leadership makes an issue out of something the engineers perceive as insignificant and the “wrong problem to solve”, nobody speaks up.

The problem gets fixed, engineers feel resentful but leadership feels triumphant that they told the right story and that they rallied the troops to get a problem solved.

There is a different incentive at play here. Netflix wants to track individuals.

Maybe this is naive, but doesn't Netflix already have enough information from the account already? Credit card info, name, address… what does having an IP address get them in addition to all that?

Relevant article; it focuses on one candidate but the techniques are often universal (albeit at different magnitudes): https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/politics/trump-donatio...

One potential hypothesis: the Conservative Party in the UK tends to be centered around a particular social and educational class; many front-bench cabinet members in the Cameron government went to the same schools for their entire lives.

The traditionally working-class Labour vs aristocratic Conservative dichotomy is breaking now (as it already has in the US), but it was certainly the case in the UK in 2012.

Steve Jobs in 2010:

Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for, in plain English, and repeatedly. That’s what it means. I’m an optimist, I believe people are smart. And some people want to share more data than other people do. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you’re going to do with their data. That’s what we think.

Some Apple users may not have cared as much about privacy until Cambridge Analytica and related issues, but it’s always been talked about at Apple.

A students are often formerly unhappy C students.

C students are often happy C students.

I’m very skeptical about the veracity and accuracy of facial recognition software to detect emotions.

I went to an affective computing conference in 2019 and was underwhelmed; models couldn’t distinguish between looking upwards (and raising your eyebrows) from exhibiting surprise. Emotions are complex and personal, and the phrase from the article “facial expression software — which nearly eliminates possible bias” seems absolutely ludicrous to me.

I take results like this with an absolutely massive grain of salt, and don’t expect them to be reproducible.

The danger is that they’re “catchy”, clickbait-y results, that are popular because people like to hypothesize about underlying psychological reasons why those bronze medalists might be happier. But let’s examine the core claim first, and not take facial recognition software as a ground truth for emotional state.

I guess it's just based on my observations in the US. I'm a Sport Pilot; I don't see many others in the Bay Area.

Often I'm the only one that rents the Skycatcher at KPAO in a given month, and there's basically only two LSAs that are accessible to rent nearby (that Skycatcher at KPAO and a SportStar at KRHV).

It’s a shame Light Sport Aircraft (LSAs) never really caught on. Most of them use Rotax engines which take regular unleaded gasoline. They’re much more fuel efficient too!

And Atherton, and Mountain View, and Cupertino, and Los Altos, … ;)

Regarding culture, variety, and politics, I think it’s more a consequence of the Bay Area being socioeconomically segregated. My neighbors are all artists, and have great and vibrant communities around their work — but of course, no one in tech mixes with those people!

Fewer people in SF work in tech than is often perceived, but the social circles are very clique-y and exclusive. It creates perceptions about the entire city that are really only true for one’s friend groups.

I wonder what it is about the design/culture of SF that makes that the case.

The trope that SF is more expensive than the rest of the Bay Area isn’t even true, at least not anymore. I pay $1650 for a studio apartment in a decent neighborhood near a tech shuttle stop. That’s cheaper than Stanford’s student housing in Palo Alto.

I've noticed this in product design a lot; designers/programmers assume way more attention from the user than is typical.

Most of the time, I don't read instructions, I just do what's "intuitive". Designing with the assumption of minimal attention / laziness is so important.