hyko

"In 1839 [...] the United States had already defeated Britain’s navy in two wars"

This statement is wrong and trivially falsifiable. Perhaps the author meant that the U.S. had by that point won some naval battles against the British?

Backup snapshots of what though? The defects aren’t being introduced through code changes, they are inherent in the model and its tooling. If you’re using general models, there’s very little you can do beyond prompt engineering (which won’t be able to fix all the bugs).

If you were using your own model you could maybe try to retrain/finetune the issues away given a new dataset and different techniques? But at that point you’re just transmuting a difficult problem into a damn near impossible one?

LLMs can be miraculous and inappropriate at the same time. They are not the terminal technology for all computation.

Non-deterministic behaviour doesn’t help when trying to reason about the system. But you could in theory eliminate the non-determinism for a given input, and yet still be stuck with something unpredictable, in the sense that you can’t predict what new input will cause.

Whereas that sort of evaluation is trivial with code (even if at times program execution is non-deterministic), because its mechanics are explainable. Things like only testing boundary conditions hinge on this property, but completely fall apart if it’s all probabilistic.

Maybe explainable AI can help here, but to be honest I have no idea what the state of the art is for that.

The fatal problem with LLM-as-runtime-club isn’t performance. It’s ops (especially security).

When the god rectangle fails, there is literally nobody on earth who can even diagnose the problem, let alone fix it. Reasoning about the system is effectively impossible. And the vulnerability of the system is almost limitless, since it’s possible to coax LLMs into approximations of anything you like: from an admin dashboard to a sentient potato.

“zero UI consistency” is probably the least of your worries, but object permanence is kind of fundamental to how humans perceive the world. Being able to maintain that illusion is table stakes.

Despite all that, it’s a fun experiment.

I use em dashes—chiefly to express parenthetical thoughts—all the time. Sadly, there’s no foolproof system for identifying machine-generated text. Happily, it means one less thing to worry about.

Is the video captured using the dev kit?

It’s a reasonable hypothesis, but you’d need to experiment to validate it. It’s easy to imagine how prolonged exposure to bed rest or microgravity may trigger heart muscle remodelling in a way that intermittent bouts of lying down would not.

Leader/follower is only inclusive language if you’ve never heard of anarchism.

The really great thing about electric cars is that people are actually adopting them, in part because they are better than the machines they are replacing; therefore their environmental benefits can actually be realised.

If you think you have a real solution apart from the fact that nobody wants to adopt it, then what you actually have is a fantasy. It’s far easier to imagine a paradise than to construct one.

You’re probably already aware, but there are medical formulations of CA that are in theory less likely to irritate tissues than general purpose ones.

Yeah exactly, I’m saying it’s dangerous to use “who benefits?” as a heuristic, because it will be wrong far more often than it will be right.

I would caution against using “Qui bono” as a heuristic; you will end up believing in a lot of BS using that as a tool. It can only ever be a piece of evidence alongside others. I benefit immensely from sunlight, but that doesn’t mean I am implicated in the rotation of the earth.

In this particular case, there are many natural experiments we can conceive of that demonstrate why fasting alone is highly unlikely to significantly impede “normal” aging in humans in the lab. That’s before we get to how effective it could actually be as a treatment.

And while we’re following the money, there are many powerful entities that would love a “free” aging cure to juice their demographics…so why don’t they use it?

Sorry dang. I appreciate the work you do keeping HN on point, so you have my personal thanks for that. I suspect the job is getting harder and I don’t want to contribute to the problem.

I’ve been flagged twice now in one day. I’m not sure if my comments have become less substantive over time, or if the world has. But after ten years of commenting on here, I think the time has come for me to find a new hobby.

I don’t really see this as a controversial statement. All countries are likely to face the issue of shrinking population this century, and they’re going to have to try all sorts of schemes to keep the wagon on the road.

When China faced a population explosion, it didn’t create a complex mix of incentives and marketing to nudge people into having smaller families: it outlawed larger families. It seems reasonable to suggest that is a policy lever they will reach for again in the face of another demographic crisis. What am I missing?

Buying an ejector seat for your living room is quite eccentric, but I wouldn’t really consider it overkill. It doesn’t even have arms.

No it can’t.

Who is buying Amazon hardware at this point?

Yeah but we got a lot more stuff and experiences than single breadwinner households of the past. We’re not optimising for free time spent in material poverty.

Why is every paid for service called “Something Plus” these days? Who started this trend?

Wow.

Exactly, we should all have the freedom to choose how we work.

Never really understood people managers who don’t get this. You hired the best, right? Listen to them! They are experts about what makes them happy and productive.

I think the fear stems from the idea that people will try to be happy and not productive. To any managers out there: you have nothing to fear, just fire those people.

No it won’t.

Can anyone think about why this mass extinction event is unlike the last one? Anyone? Yes, that’s right: Homo Sapiens. If we want biodiversity, we’re not going to sit around smelling our farts for millions of years waiting for evolution to do it.

I don’t understand the amount of hate that Clean Code gets these days…it’s a relatively straightforward set of principles that can help you create a software system maintainable by humans for a very long time. Of course it’s not an engineering utopia, there’s no such thing.

I get the impression that it’s about the messengers and not the messages, and that people have had horrible learning experiences that have calcified into resistance to do with anything clean. But valuable insights are being lost, and they will have to be re-learned in a new guise at a later date.

Yeah, they didn’t get them from that photo.

Edited to add: where has this story come from? Why does someone want us to believe in CSI Stilton? And why on Earth do they think we’d swallow it?!

Wars have started over less than this.

How long the democratic nations of Europe permit an autocratic regime in their bosom is an open question…if I was Belarus I’d keep my fucking head down.

The thing about a destabilised world order is that it works both ways.

If you’re backing your phone up to iCloud.

We decided almost a century ago that universal telephone service was something that we wanted to have. We need to make that decision about the internet now.

YES!

Negative gravity is a confusing term because the problem wasn’t one of gravity, or even force, but rather of acceleration and inertia.

Negative gravity sounds confusing because the author is using the wrong word–what’s being described here is negative gravity equivalent (g-force). The aircraft is experiencing plenty of gravity, just in a different direction than it normally would. The problem is very much one of force.

Negative gravity is related to the concept of negative mass, which is a proposed form of exotic matter.

Plot twist: the person behind the screen is actually sat there, everything else turns out to be a hologram!

The poor you will always have with you