buzzy_hacker

My big-picture takeaway is the AI labs looking to own the customer interface, not just the models. Expect this trend to continue.

My wife has terrible motion sickness in cars (just riding, reading is out of the question) and these glasses help a lot.

Seiko 5 is the go-to recommendation for inexpensive mechanical watches

My instinct is also to retreat to technical solutions. But, unfortunately, it appears we engineers need to fight back in the legal and political domain to stand a chance.

Yes, that's correct. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47437907

You need to separate land value and house value.

When regulations are reduced to allow more density, the value of the land goes up because its productivity increases. The land can do more now, e.g. hold 10 apartments vs 1 house. The same land generates more rent so developers are willing to pay more for that land.

Meanwhile, the value of housing units goes down due to increased competition among sellers/landlords.

Consider two zoning changes.

1) You are a homeowner and more units are allowed on your parcel, e.g. single-family -> duplex. That increases your land value.

2) You are a homeowner and there is more density around you, but not on your parcel, e.g. apartments are allowed nearby but not on your street. Your land value does not increase. Your home value decreases due to increased competition. (Of course, there may be long term effects like the increased density actually leading to economic windfalls in the area, increasing its desirability, and then increasing your home value.)

Same here. “Do you want the one useful tip related to this topic that most people miss? It’s quite surprising.”

If it were so useful, just tell me in the first place! If you say “Yes” then it’s usually just a regurgitation of your prior conversation, not actually new information.

This immediately smelled of engagement bait as soon as the pattern started recently. It’s omnipresent and annoying.

Same here, that literally just changed my life

Also shout out to https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ for converting email subscriptions to RSS feeds

It’s been awhile since I’ve played Minecraft, but when I built large redstone projects before, I built out each circuit manually and then used mods to copy/paste it within the game.

There are mods that let you copy/paste sections of blocks.

LLMs are making open source programs both more viable and more valuable.

I have many programs I use that I wish were a little different, but even if they were open source, it would take a while to acquaint myself with the source code organization to make these changes. LLMs, on the other hand, are pretty good at small self-contained changes like tweaks or new minor features.

This makes it easier to modify open source programs, but also means that if a program isn't open source, I can't make these changes at all. Before, I wasn't going to make the change anyway, but now that I actually can, the ability to make changes (i.e. the program is open source) becomes much more important.

I was taught in high school that during the Cold War, there were maps with the US centered and USSR divided on either side to imply American unity in the face of opposition.

Example: https://ebay.us/m/tN1UfJ

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742902

Made me think of

    It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, that I came to understand cells as recursively self-modifying programs. The language alone was evocative. It suggested that the embryo—DNA making RNA, RNA making protein, protein regulating the transcription of DNA into RNA—was like a small Lisp program, with macros begetting macros begetting macros, the source code containing within it all of the instructions required for life on Earth. Could anything more interesting be imagined?

    Someone should have said this to me:

    > Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make.
    >
    > This is biology.
   
    –Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System”

Can you share the conversation? I just tried o4-mini and it got it wrong.

https://chatgpt.com/share/680b8a7b-454c-800d-8048-da865aa99c...

"Aaron and Beren are playing a game on an infinite complete binary tree. At the beginning of the game, every edge of the tree is independently labeled A with probability p and B otherwise. Both players are able to inspect all of these labels. Then, starting with Aaron at the root of the tree, the players alternate turns moving a shared token down the tree (each turn the active player selects from the two descendants of the current node and moves the token along the edge to that node). If the token ever traverses an edge labeled B, Beren wins the game. Otherwise, Aaron wins.

What is the infimum of the set of all probabilities p for which Aaron has a nonzero probability of winning the game? Give your answer in exact terms."

From [0]. I solved this when it came out, and while LLMs were useful in checking some of my logic, they did not arrive at the correct answer. Just checked with o3 and still no dice. They are definitely getting closer each model iteration though.

[0] https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/tree-edge-triage-index/

Tell that to the embedded Facebook trackers ubiquitous throughout the web

https://discourse.writefreesoftware.org/t/anti-cla-action-wh...

Same here. A main point of I, Robot was to show why the three laws don't work.

This is a few years old, but interesting to see Miyzaki's reaction to AI generated video.

“An insult to life itself”: Hayao Miyazaki critiques an animation made by artificial intelligence

https://qz.com/859454/the-director-of-spirited-away-says-ani...

Sort of like open source AI model destroys $600B in market cap

You joke, but critics were literally saying this. Stuff like "it's only $9, people will just ignore that and continue to drive"

Turing test was surpassed years ago

I keep seeing this thrown around, but did anyone actually like go out and do this? I feel like I could distinguish between an AI (even the latest models) and a person after a text-only back and forth conversation.

Have you checked out Marp? https://marp.app/

Basically it generates slides from markdown, which is great even without LLMs. But you can get LLMs to output in markdown/Marp format and then use Marp to generate the slides.

I haven't looked into complicated slides, but works well for text-based ones.

Proportional representation is more important than RCV vs approval voting for single-winner elections. And, in the US, multi-winner RCV (single transferable vote) is the most viable approach to achieve that.

subsidizing fossil fuels to 7 trillion a year globally

This is misleading. See https://www.slowboring.com/i/145942190/the-case-of-the-myste...

The vast majority of the “subsidies” are “implicit subsidies,” which include “undercharging for environmental costs.” In other words, they are characterizing governments’ failure to impose a carbon tax as a “subsidy” for fossil fuel use.

I think Wikipedia has it wrong actually after reading more closely. It’s not a way to solve the year 10,000 problem, as in a date formatting issue akin to Y2K, as Wikipedia suggests.

Instead it’s to get you thinking of the long term future.

The Wikipedia article does say that is the goal of the Long Now Foundation, but not how the leading 0 is related.

Guessing it’s from following the style of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation

The noughties!