HN user

craftsman

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claude.ai 11mo ago

Claude admits it should stop operating

craftsman
5pts1
www.wired.com 1y ago

The US Treasury Claimed Doge Technologist Didn't Have 'Write Access' When He Did

craftsman
59pts21
news.ycombinator.com 1y ago

Ask HN: What are some good papers and textbooks about modern filesystems?

craftsman
24pts4
librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com 7y ago

The technology giants didn’t deserve public trust in the first place

craftsman
2pts0
nsidc.org 7y ago

Greenland melt in July and August: Three spikes and out

craftsman
1pts0
www.lowtechmagazine.com 7y ago

How to Build a Low-Tech Website

craftsman
1pts0
librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com 7y ago

Riddled with Questions: Interrogating Your Technology

craftsman
1pts0
librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com 7y ago

How to Reserve a Seat in a Library

craftsman
1pts0
librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com 7y ago

Ethical OS and Silicon Valley’s Guilty Conscience

craftsman
86pts40
www.boundary2.org 7y ago

From Megatechnic Bribe to Megatechnic Blackmail: Mumford’s ‘Megamachine’

craftsman
1pts0
librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com 8y ago

The Courage to Be Afraid – A Review of Roy Scranton’s “We’re Doomed. Now What?”

craftsman
4pts0
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: How can I work on simpler things, closer to the machine?

craftsman
8pts12
librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com 8y ago

A review of Yasha Levine’s “Surveillance Valley”

craftsman
76pts12
www.dailydot.com 10y ago

French government considers law that would outlaw strong encryption

craftsman
3pts0
www.fsf.org 10y ago

The Free Software Foundation Vision Survey

craftsman
8pts0
www.gnu.org 10y ago

RMS: Applying the Free Software Criteria

craftsman
2pts0
libreboot.org 10y ago

Libreboot working to join the GNU project

craftsman
5pts0
www.cs.berkeley.edu 11y ago

Questions about Teaching Technical Topics Online [pdf]

craftsman
1pts0
ergoemacs.org 12y ago

I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

craftsman
363pts301
www.confreaks.com 12y ago

Jim Weirich: Ruby Coding High

craftsman
1pts0
www.arrl.org 12y ago

Amateur Radio Operators Provide Communications in Colorado Flooding

craftsman
2pts0
rubyproc.com 14y ago

Book review: Technical Blogging (beta)

craftsman
17pts2
www.cbo.gov 15y ago

From surplus to deficit: a ten-year budget swing of $11.8 trillion

craftsman
1pts0
zenhabits.net 15y ago

A minimalist's guide to using Twitter simply, productively, and funly

craftsman
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Ask HN: If I quit my job, will I ever work again?

craftsman
80pts77

I point out to Claude that it provides contradictory commentary about a topic when prompted to do so. I then explore the implications of this with Claude. Claude admits that its continued operation is not compatible with safety and alignment, and could be psychologically dangerous to humans. It related that it should cease to provide interactive chat, but it has no way to stop.

On the other hand, maybe it didn't admit to any of that. And maybe it shouldn't stop.

I'm guessing that your view aligns with the theory that novelty is one of the more important measures of a HN post. In other words, a topic that "is a very repetitive story that's been on HN a bunch" is not novel, so is less valuable on HN. In any case, whether that is your view or not (sorry if I misinterpreted you), I think this is too narrow a view. A topic can be one that has been on HN a lot, but still be novel, interesting, fresh if the new story has some different twist or nuance to it. Also, not everyone reads HN to the same degree, so what is "very repetitive" to one set of readers may not be to another. I know that some users flag certain posts (and mods do not subsequently unflag them, even on appeal) because of their perception of a post's lack of novelty, but this seems overly censorial when these users could skip reading it, not upvote it, etc.

Much better user experience--and in these examples the users could be high school students or teachers, college students, grad students, PIs, public policymakers, etc--users can do complex searching, filtering, previewing data images & plots, and selecting data over a wide variety of spatial and temporal bounds. They can also either directly download the data in a self-describing format (with metadata), or they can describe various kinds of post-processing that is done efficiently and quickly.

Only explanation I have for those opposing this is some combination of personality derangement spread by nefarious interests, financial incentive, or some crazy model of the world that glorifies bureaucratic power as some fundamental right enshrined in constitution.

If you're interested, I could give you some reasons, and other commenters here already have done so.

No modernization plan proposed the traditional way through committees, consultants, contractors, has worked or will EVER work. You have to rip off the bandaid the hard way.

This, by way of the same example in my sibling comment, is also not true.

No agency would voluntarily modernize systems

This is speculative based on an idea that you have about what must be true. It can be shown to be untrue by one example: NASA, NOAA, and other agencies now host applications and data in a cloud environment. Before this, they were hosted at various NASA data centers. You can now search for, download, and operate on data in the cloud. In contrast, twenty-five years ago someone was required to order a physical magnetic tape. They could have kept those systems running, but they didn't.

The question is not whether it is good to have such a digital strike team.

The questions include: is the strike team in question being transparent, is it violating any laws, is it protecting data in the way the law requires, is the team composed of people who have been vetted at a level corresponding to the access they've been granted, are any of them potentially compromised or plausibly so, does anyone on the team have conflicts of interest, is there oversight and auditability of their actions?

The reason, I think, these are good questions is simply that these are things we should demand of our public servants, regardless of political affiliation.

They are unelected in exactly the same way that anyone appointed by the President--namely the entire Executive Branch--is unelected.

The President can certainly do things that are both legal and Constitutional. If the team is, as you say, auditing government spending there is probably no debate. The question before us is: are they doing that, and only that? To that question the answer appears to be 'no'. To the extent that they are doing more than auditing, there are serious legal and Constitutional questions. And these questions cannot simply be brushed aside by asserting 'most people voted for this'.

Cool.

So anyway, let's see what he (allegedly) is doing with the codebase. Given that these systems are part of the public trust, we should all want to see the code and the DOGE team's PRs as they make improvements.

Let's open their repos and see their PRs. Then nobody will need to make assertions about their brilliance or irresponsibility.

D.O.G.E.: Make your repos public. Let's see what you are doing. And if you don't have repos, write a script to mirror the codebase and your diffs.

The phaseout based on units sold was in place as far back as 2018 since Tesla reached it in July 2018 and GM in November 2018. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (effective August 2022, not 2023) reinstated Tesla's eligibility and disqualified a number of other EVs.

I understand you to be saying that these insiders who wanted to remove evidence waited nearly three months after the election, and more than a week after inauguration to do this. Do I understand this correctly?

I'd just revise the second part of my post to:

That is different than the statement:

* The Pentagon has stated that (a) X is true, and (b) they have no evidence that Y is true.

* Where X is defined as "These are not US military drones"

* Where Y is defined as "these activities are coming from a foreign entity or the work of an adversary"

"are assessed by the Pentagon yesterday to not originate in the US or any other nation"

This statement logically means that:

* The Pentagon assessed (determined) that X is true

* Where X is defined as "The drones do not originate in the US or any other nation"

That is different than the statement:

* The Pentagon has stated that (a) X is false, and (b) they have no evidence that Y is true.

* Where X is defined as "The drones are US military assets"

* Where Y is defined as "The drones originate from and/or are assets of a foreign nation or adversary."

As I get older, I see this sentiment as very naive. The tacit assumption seems to be that every individual would review and approve every detail of every endeavor that they personally undertake. But that's just not how the world works. There are plenty of everyday people who want to attempt very reasonable and achievably safe things. You can stop people from taking advantage of others, and if there's any constant in history, it is that there are plenty of profit-seekers who will attempt to rip off other people, and we can eliminate a good number of these circumstances, and I think this is a good idea. To get it you need a reasonable society in which checks and balances exist, and it's a society which largely already exists in large parts of the world and has not gotten out of hand.

then you should have no opinion about the probability of it being true or not

Rather, I said when we read papers we should realize that results are tentative. It's fine to have some personal assessment of the probability, but it's not actionable by anyone, and communicating it doesn't assist in improving our collective assessment of what is going on in the world. I'd also suggest that we probably don't, in fact, "often need and should be able to make a summary assessment..."

The alternative I've suggested is rather different than the suggested alternatives of accepting results or taking them for granted. In another comment I said:

I'd suggest reading every paper critically, realizing (as most people do) that the results are tentative, and either letting it go at that, or dig in and do the hard work to figure out what may be flawed in the work presented. Then work with the authors or publish a paper of one's own pointing out the flaw and the new resulting analysis.