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flashman

4,024 karma

Data analyst.

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www.theverge.com 6y ago

Conspiracy theorists are harassing and attacking UK telecoms engineers

flashman
10pts1
excel.uservoice.com 6y ago

In OS X 10.15, all Excel documents show text upside down and backwards

flashman
40pts4
waynehale.wordpress.com 6y ago

What to do if the Space Shuttle payload bay doors won't shut properly

flashman
36pts1
observablehq.com 6y ago

Twitter Emoji Race

flashman
3pts0
blog.bolt.io 8y ago

What cracking open a Sonos One tells us about the Sonos IPO

flashman
191pts182
github.com 8y ago

18th century-style painting in pure CSS

flashman
4pts1
mailchi.mp 8y ago

Single opt-in becoming the default setting for all MailChimp signup forms

flashman
2pts0
beyondhorizons.eu 8y ago

The longest ground-to-ground photo ever taken (443km)

flashman
1pts0
hughstephens.com 8y ago

Being a founder is a shit job

flashman
2pts0
comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk 9y ago

Computational Propaganda: Manufacturing Consensus Online [pdf]

flashman
3pts0
news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Ask HN: When was the last time you got a non-work related email from a human?

flashman
2pts0
redditblog.com 9y ago

View Counting at Reddit

flashman
11pts0
www.businessinsider.com.au 9y ago

Streaming startup Guvera shuts down after $185m in funding and blocked IPO

flashman
3pts0
www.bastille.net 9y ago

Dallas Siren Attack

flashman
2pts0
www.jacobinmag.com 9y ago

The UBI Bait and Switch

flashman
1pts0
www.theaustralian.com.au 9y ago

Organ transplants: the gifts that keep on living (2015)

flashman
2pts0
medium.com 9y ago

Facial recognition fooled into thinking Bill Murray is Tom Hanks

flashman
1pts0
www.wise.io 10y ago

ParaText: CSV parsing at 2.5 GB per second

flashman
152pts42
www.news.com.au 10y ago

New Tinder feature outs its users to their Facebook friends

flashman
5pts2
news.ycombinator.com 10y ago

Warning: Chrome extension 'User-Agent Switcher for Google Chrome' is suspicious

flashman
2pts3
rocknpoll.graphics 10y ago

Why polling results should be taken with a grain of salt

flashman
1pts0
github.com 10y ago

Detecting Match-Fixing Patterns in Tennis

flashman
3pts0
www.statisticalconsultants.co.nz 10y ago

The German Tank Problem (2010)

flashman
58pts52
news.ycombinator.com 10y ago

Ask HN: Machine learning options for binary image classification

flashman
2pts1
data.betaworks.com 10y ago

Beyond Trending Topics: identifying important conversations in communities

flashman
4pts0

You assert that, but can you prove it? Likewise I can say that the model is biased towards rating the Economist's claims as 'mainstream' and 'bang on' because as a high-profile publication those claims are repeated elsewhere and hence up-weighted.

I could be wrong - my point is, how would we know?

Claude and ChatGPT are not indoctrinating into the manosphere users asking about discounted cash flow formulae.

You're defining an extremely narrow case and then saying bias is irrelevant within it. At the risk of Godwin's Law that's kind of like saying it's okay if my accountant is a Nazi as long as they only ever have conversations about accountancy.

Maybe when the system can generate its own state, rather than that state existing as a deterministic output of its inputs, maybe then we can consider it to have the interiority and reflexiveness required to call something 'thought'.

A very convincing simulation of thought is not thought, especially without memory or any evidence of an independent will. LLMs have the same kind of consciousness as a nematode, albeit with less-complex behaviour.

I don't know what else you'd call the widespread and enthusiastic adoption of a technology that is designed to exploit people's trust in the veracity of images by mimicking reality as seamlessly as possible. I think it's both aberrant and abhorrent for the tech industry to be actively developing something that's permanently polluting our information environment.

Here's a local story published after I made my comment, about tour operators using AI images to misrepresent destinations in the area: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-01/ai-videos-spark-conce...

Increasing the availability of fake image generators directly enables more harms like these.

Twenty years ago, I don't think any of us were excited about a future internet where we couldn't trust whether what we were seeing or reading was genuine. I hope one day we'll be able to look back on this era as an aberration, like that scene in Mad Men where the Drapers fling their picnic rubbish onto the grass and drive away.

Apple is smart to avoid betting the farm on generative AI based on large language models, which is really what we mean by 'AI' here. It costs a lot to create and to run, nobody is willing to pay enough to cover those costs, and when that financial reality hits, it's going to take the knees out from under some major corporations.

Maybe Apple will buy Nvidia. That would be a useful vertical integration.

Googlebook 2 months ago

But we all knew what they meant and here you are being tedious about it

Misleading, because satellites are made of different materials to meteors. Satellites are the dominant injection source of 24 elements into the atmosphere, including Al, Cu, Ti, Nb, Co, Zn, Sn, Pb, Ag, Li, V, Hf, W, Ge, Mo, Zr, B, and Ba. This list includes many transition metals, whose catalytic effects on ozone and cloud nucleation are mostly unknown.

Copper in particular is a well-known catalyst for the destruction of ozone.

Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027311772...

It is essential then that the hardware deployed in data centers has not been physically tampered with. Without that the whole thing falls apart.

am i wrong or does this just change the threat from Chinese to US government tampering

and if third-party auditing can detect hardware tampering then why does it matter where the hardware is manufactured

Speaking of game loading, it is surprisingly slow. You plug in a cartridge and turn on the 7800+, which takes a moment, and then there is a “Loading game” screen that takes 15 to 20 seconds to actually load the game.

This would have been nearly instantaneous on the original console. You could hit reset and be back at the title screen basically before you'd leaned back from pushing the button.

It is very funny that as computers have become more powerful, we've lost the incentive (and probably the skills, outside of the demoscene) to make things run fast and close to the bone.

Also, I think "disappointing joypad" is faithful to the Atari experience, having used those spongy suckers for many hours in the early 90s.

"Making AI that is smarter than almost all humans at almost all things will require millions of chips, tens of billions of dollars (at least), and is most likely to happen in 2026-2027."

What an incredible claim to just slip in two-thirds of the way through! Where have I heard it before?

1965, H. A. Simon: "Machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do."