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glenstein

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www.nytimes.com 3mo ago

Takeaways from Our Search for Bitcoin's Creator

glenstein
11pts1
asteriskmag.com 11mo ago

Why are there so many rationalist cults?

glenstein
544pts911
blog.nearlyfreespeech.net 1y ago

Terms and Conditions Update: Forced Assistance for Obstinance

glenstein
2pts0
asteriskmag.com 1y ago

Greening the Solar System

glenstein
3pts0
aeon.co 1y ago

Can computers think? No. They can't actually do anything

glenstein
3pts0
web.archive.org 2y ago

A Greener Google [April Fools 2020]

glenstein
1pts0
www.npr.org 3y ago

Hoax school shooting calls keep happening, and there's a pattern (October 2022)

glenstein
25pts13
en.wikipedia.org 6y ago

En Passant (Chess Move)

glenstein
2pts0
www.theverge.com 8y ago

No, Facebook did not patent secretly turning your phone mics on when it hears TV

glenstein
4pts2
www.technologyreview.com 12y ago

Why Google’s Modular Smartphone Might Actually Succeed

glenstein
1pts0
www.washingtonpost.com 13y ago

NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

glenstein
138pts135
well.blogs.nytimes.com 13y ago

Reasons Not to Stretch

glenstein
126pts91
my.opera.com 14y ago

Opera ending support for Unite and widgets

glenstein
1pts0
www.esquire.com 14y ago

I Think You're Fat (2007)

glenstein
219pts111
news.ycombinator.com 14y ago

Ask HN: Is Opera stagnating?

glenstein
9pts1
www.twitlonger.com 14y ago

Wikileaks: SSL is beyond repair

glenstein
3pts0
news.ycombinator.com 17y ago

Ask HN: Have you read Dreyfus's What Computers Can't Do? How did you react?

glenstein
4pts0
news.ycombinator.com 17y ago

Ask HN: Any "semantic web" programmers here? What is the future of the Semantic Web?

glenstein
4pts5

This is not at all what I would expect because it's trivial to change the training data to replace Claude with Kimi.

Wait what? The reason you wouldn't expect it is because if it was distilled, it would be easy to get rid of self identification? Is that any less true of a non distilled model? I suppose there's lots of ways to interpret it, but the idea that self-identifying as Claude is affirmative evidence that it's not distilled seems to get the weight of the inference exactly backwards.

Thanks for the link, and boy is that a whopper. Do my eyes deceive me or is there literally a shot of the computer looking at them from its computery perspective, through its screen, with some layer of visual digital artifacts over it at the 14 second mark?

I love this on a number of levels. First, a great question, and more than half the battle imo is asking the right kind of question. David Cain has touched on a version of this also [1]. And I very much am a person that can get lost in my own organizational overhead and know I'm being very out of balance between thinking and doing, and in search of an overarching framework or limiting principle.

And I don't know that this solves everything, but it does bite off a piece of it, in a way that I think I agree with. The further out, the more circumstances can change, and the closer up, the more practical reasoning matters (they seem to use reasoning to mean something close to practical logistics). There's probably more to it, of course, but it's a good question and good start to an answer.

1. https://www.raptitude.com/2014/02/keep-your-doing-and-your-d...

Odyssey Linux 11 days ago

I got the same impression especially from reading the about page. And it wasn't the em dash this time but the triplet of one word sentences.

But just to comment directly on it and offer something constructive I appreciate a non systemd option that looks nice and hope this gets enough of a user base that it counts as votes in favor of that kind of paradigm.

Wikipedia is just about the last bastion of institutionally vetted knowledge intended for and generally respected by the public, and in an age of maximalist misinformation, it was only a matter of time before people tried campaigning to undermine public trust in it.

If you think the 2020 election was rigged or that Covid is not real, or that climate change isn't happening, or that the earth is flat, or that the moon is made of cream cheese, chances are you strongly dislike the Wikipedia entries on those subjects and believe it's biased against you.

And these aggrieved parties can find each other online and start workshopping narratives of why their causes were unfairly targeted and propagandized, and from there you're off to the races with uncountably many whackamole narratives that create an increasingly self-sustaining alternative reality where it's just obviously the case that Wikipedia is evil. Which, I think is a symptom of Wiki's success in the face of failed pushes to spread misinformation on it as a platform.

I think fact checking sites had a good heydey from say 2008 to maybe 2016, but a combination of underqualified editors in some cases, Enlightened Centrists who have confused ideas about truth, and Bannon-style propagandists who flood the zone and argue that they are biased, were able to undercut those fact checking sites as a conventionally accepted model of information vetting.

Wikipedia continues to be resilient against those efforts because they have well defined processes for reliable sourcing that are strongly enforced and almost purpose built for a moment like this, so the misinformation campaign can't operate from the inside to the degree that it would like to. It doesn't mean there's no issue with intentional PR campaigns or other campaigns flying under the radar but it feels like a pound of grievance from misinformation spreaders for every ounce of legitimate complaint, banking on people not because able to compare the relative scales of the different categories.

I don't understand why you think your question in reply to theirs revealed that theirs was naive.

If anything, I think it actually reduces the quality of discussion because it tries to say that dynamics in China are equivalent to the next you would find in pretty much any country which is is vague and lazy as analysis goes, and goes against the HN recommendation that conversations get more precise over time.

Just saying I would buy a chat control legislation calendar, where each month of the calendar has significant meeting days of deliberation bodies, elections/nominations of people to relevant boards, as well as historical dates of previous attempts to pass chat control.

Just so the cycle is easily knowable.

There's evidence for stunningly intricate, marvelously impressive biological function, but there's no evidence whatsoever for internal mental states.

What's happening is we borrow from a pre-existing vocabulary with connotations to conscious activity and we use it to describe automatic biological reflexes, and then some people lose track of whether it was an analogy or whether it was literal and start claiming plants can "feel."

I think this is a huge error which collapses the most urgently important distinction at the heart of the entire issue. Plants do complex, interesting things, and we borrow from an already existing vocabulary to make analogies. So people will say plants "feel" or "communicate" or "see".

But those are automatic biological reflexes, and using words with connotations to conscious awareness to describe them makes people think they're the same thing. But a plant "feeling pain" is repurposing words about consciousness to mean new and different things. And I think people are seduced by it because it feels like being open-minded to new possibilities.

I'm also left to center and I agree with you on all three! I think left-wing examples are subtler and hard to identify. Even among among Democrats left of center types and liberals, the examples I cited are minority opinions, but likely to be systematically found on the left, a phenomenon which won't be negated by the self-report of one person correctly tracking the facts (and to be clear, I think you are correctly tracking the facts on each of these!).

Factuality is orthogonal to political leaning generally.

It certainly can be orthogonal, in some notional sense, and in many cases that explanation is good enough. But in practice there are too many contrary cases to ignore, and there's often an integral relation between factual veracity and polarization, especially with respect to American polarization of politics. Global warming, the results of the 2020 election, the percent spent of federal budget spent on foreign aid have factual answers and right wing affiliation can be predictive of (1) not agreeing with the facts and (2) treating factual corrections as "liberal bias".

I think left wing versions exist also but are less systematic: 2004 election results, efficacy of plastic recycling or dangers associated with nuclear power are cases where I think left wing partisan affiliation probably predicts being wrong on the facts.

And meta-narratives about the relation between factual information and partisan bias are themselves as likely to be polarized as anything, complicating the ability of people to do good analysis, or of accurate analysis to be trusted by people committed to certain meta-narratives that would deny the possibility of factual knowledge predicting polarization.

Amazing, and I love every pixel of it. We know the MLB is famously understanding with creative repurposing of their data, so I wonder what live data you are using and if the rationale for use is something like small scale hobby/fair use?

I know when it comes to historical data, projects like the Sean Lahman Database have to go through quite a bit of trouble to reproduce "clean room" versions of historical data that are legally fine to use. I have to imagine there's a lot of complications when it comes to live data for anything that even has a hint of being more than a hobby project.

Which is why it's not normal or standard to represent pay that way. The whole reason for it in this context is to address claims that people keep making over and over that they ran out of money to develop the browser because they gave it all to the CEO.

This is confidently repeated but extremely misleading claim that seems to pop up ad nauseam in the comment sections. They spend more now on development than they ever have in their history, and the CEO spending is something like 1.6% of the budget, which I don't love, but which is not enough to sustain the narrative of all the money being siphoned into executives.

They also break down spending into a pie chart of different types and development gets more than anything. If you look at their actual budget or the published changes to new releases it tells a different story than vibes based internet comment sections. But you have be approaching conversations in an open-to-new-information kind of way.

I think there was a huge missed opportunity with the recent Google monopoly case, which could have been used to give users a dialog box to select a browser from a list instead of starting with Chrome as the pre-installed default.

It's less drastic than forcing Chrome to be spun off, which I don't think was realistic, and it's almost an exact copy of an anti monopoly remedy used against both Microsoft and Apple. It likely would have a meaningful impact on browser market share and it would be very similar in spirit in terms of its impact to the proposed remedy of spinning off Chromium to a new company.

It would also be a convenient natural experiment testing the anti-Mozilla narrative that contends the browser market share decline had absolutely nothing to do with distribution defaults, but was instead exclusively driven by minutia of Mozilla's strategic decisions.

Goodness. Thank you for the clarification as this is leagues different than what I originally thought I was reading from the other comment.

Fox to buy Roku 1 month ago

Recently got a Google Smart TV for the first time, instead of Roku, and I hate it so much. Roku interestingly I think folded in ads in the most non-obtrusive way (except for the full screen ads which I think were quickly abandoned). But Google Smart TV is a completely intentional bid for sticky integration that fosters Google dependence (google login, google telemetry tracking what you watch inside of other apps, other streamers are google apps), which is not how I want to experience my streaming. It's also slow and sometimes glitchy. I had never had a TV capable of crashing before.

Roku at least felt non-evil or non-evil adjacent in its notional neutrality.

Time to dust off the Whataboutism Is Bad speech again: but don't glaze over yet, because I might say something new. Not only is it still as rhetorically fallacious as it has ever been to treat complaints about third parties like they are responsive to first order concerns, but also (wake up! here comes the new part!) the deeper problem with whataboutism is that it assumes people can't consistently object to both.

I don't expect this to persuade, to be clear. I don't believe that people engaging in whataboutism are unable to understand why it's wrong so much as they have a different approach to language that detaches it from accountability to any sort of conceptual coherence that people are normally searching for when testing integrity of arguments; commenting on it is more about revealing a difference in which background values inform the way you choose to communicate.

Exactly. If someone thinks this is a fatal flaw, they're kind of telling on themselves about the extent to which they check sources.

But also I think just as a fact of the matter Wiki is not frequently incorrect or manipulated (though there are exceptions). It's no coincidence that people who want to peddle misinformation are suddenly up in arms against Wikipedia's supposed bias.

I guess the way to optimize is to find an equilibrium between an extreme of specificity and an extreme of vagueness that's still actionable from a high-level policy perspective.

Something about this conversation is fundamentally broken if there's no space to iterate towards optimization and instead it's just swinging between maximalist extremes.

I would say I'm at a yes and no on this. Or maybe saying the same thing as you but in a different way: you could say that one side believes such nomenclature as we currently have warrants making the leap and declaring today's LLMs conscious. And the other side believes we don't yet have the info to go there with any reasonable confidence.

I wouldn't say it's impossible to make meaningful inroads to sharpen the question and assert boundary conditions for what counts, or what definitely doesn't count, or what kinds of research could reasonably speak to the issue. So I'm an optimist in that respect, but I agree with you that the argument for making the equivalence feels like meaningless word play.