HN user

nyerp

73 karma
Posts5
Comments15
View on HN
Defamed by ChatGPT 3 years ago

I had a similar experience with ChatGPT: I asked it for articles written about me or my company and it happily produced a number of citations to stories in well-known newspapers. I was elated, until it turned out none of them were real.

Asking ChatGPT for citations seems to produce similarly-poor results to asking it to do arithmetic, perhaps at least when no citations exist.

The article states "More than 99% of NPR's funds do not come from federal sources" and yet elaborates "NPR ... gets the bulk of its direct financial support from two sources: sponsorships and fees paid by hundreds of member stations." How are those member stations funded? Through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which receives a $465 million federal appropration each year.

So can the Federal Government exert pressure through "financial resources" or "indirect political pressure", per the Twitter policy? You bet. Does the NPR model naturally align itself to bigger government with more grant-making power? Definitely.

I think Twitter could have come down on either side. It's a grey area. But how could the NPR story fail to mention the $465 million?

See also https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance... where NPR makes the opposite argument, namely, that "Federal funding is *essential* to public radio's service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR."

[dead] 3 years ago

I closed it after a few seconds. Was hoping to find out more in the hn comments. :)

They can choose between the individual products they buy, so it wouldn't be a problem if just some food items got expensive. But the price of food overall is inflating.

That is a false binary. You can still buy flour (or naan or pita), cheese and tomato sauce instead of pre-made pizzas, sacrificing your time against rising food costs. You can buy lentils instead of steak, sacrificing your preferences against rising food costs. Or you can travel further to a warehouse store and buy in bulk...

When enough people act empowered in the face of adversity, we don't have to sweat "greedflation". Retailers will learn their lesson.

Yes, I understand rising prices make life worse. But don't let anyone tell you there's nothing you can do about it. Learn to cook, change stores, eat differently, maybe even move.

"My Pizza Pops went up 25%, I am powerless in the face of inflation!" Just no.

That's not correct, based on my experience. Yes, you could copy-and-paste the "results" page, but that contains the answer, so it's no good for sharing. To get the actual "share" text (using Chrome on Windows 11), I had to open an email client when prompted and then cut-and-paste the text from the email the game created.

Love it!! But you've GOT to improve the sharing feature. This is a great, accessible daily game. Connect it with Facebook, or at least give people something they can cut-and-paste without having to open an email client!

And the information you provide below is good (it provides a bit of "braggy" info without giving the answer away) but I would make it more conversational, e.g., "I beat Dad!" and then "I beat Dad again!" and then "I'm on a roll... I beat Dad 3 times in a row!" and add a call to action like "Can you beat Dad too? Try here: https://dadagrams.com".

The "Dad" emoji is chef's kiss. Definitely keep that in the share message.

For reference, here's the current share message (minus the great emoji, which apparently HN does not support):

#dadagrams14

Today: Won by 2 points

All time: Winning by 2 points

Daily streak: 1

https://dadagrams.com

"Say you have a certain amount of time and money with which to make change – call it x, since that is what we mathematicians call things. The trick is to increase that x by multiplication, not addition. The trick is to take that 5 percent of people who really care and make them count for far more than 5 percent. And the trick to that is democracy."

That is, private individual actions don’t increase at a rate sufficient to affect the problem in a timely fashion; collective action seeking changes in policy and law can.

This is actually a description of the politics of "special interest groups" and it usually leads to horrible things. If an idea is only supported by 5% of the population, we generally do NOT want that 5% of the population driving the legislative agenda. Instead, ideas need to first gain broad support among the general population, at which point enacting legislation may be desirable in order to solve collective action problems such as preventing free riding.

This is half clever, but taking up the other side of that bet in a public market would immediately make you a person of interest to law enforcement.

"But a return on investment of 200 percent per year is not very exciting when you only have a few hundred dollars in capital."

Huh? Take $500, double your money every year, and in 20 years you have over $500,000,000. Not very exciting? (And if he truly meant tripling your investment each year, i.e., a 200% return, the numbers are much crazier.) The article strains credulity for a tragicomic punch.

If you can average even 20% annual returns, you can become a billionaire within your probable lifetime, with a few years of a frugal engineer's savings as your stake. (Although the most common "self-made" trajectory from salaried to $1B is to achieve far greater than 20%/yr at the start, and much less than 20%/yr at the end.)

I'm not saying 20%/yr is easy or even a reasonable goal; but the fact that the article contemplates "200 per cent per year" returns evidences a lack of familiarity with how fortunes are actually built. Read "The Snowball" for a far more realistic account of getting to $1B.

It would make more sense to compare carbon emissions using each crop's market value rather than its weight. No surprise that growing cannabis takes way more carbon output than growing the equivalent weight of corn, a low value crop which practically grows itself!

Facebook has been working on a clever solution to this kind of dispute: they have been installing a global network of indestructible monoliths with control panels which provide local governments complete authority to take down controversial content within a particular geographic location. Facebook no longer has to make a judgement call regarding whether a requester has a monopoly on violence within a particular region; control over the monolith implies genuine authority over the relevant area.

(jk... I think.)

What I Worked On 5 years ago

"When I said I was leaving, my boss at Yahoo had a long conversation with me about my plans. I told him all about the kinds of pictures I wanted to paint. At the time I was touched that he took such an interest in me. Now I realize it was because he thought I was lying. My options at that point were worth about $2 million a month. If I was leaving that kind of money on the table, it could only be to go and start some new startup, and if I did, I might take people with me. [...] But I really was quitting to paint, and I started immediately. There was no time to lose."

(As Goethe wrote, "Geniuses experience a second adolescence, whereas other people are only young once.")

A startup doesn't necessarily want everyone to know its pricing. They might be happy to let potential customers know, but not competitors, family and friends, customers' clients and suppliers, the press, etc. Making people contact the company lets the startup screen inquiries. And competitors aren't likely to have the gall to ask.

The survey population for this study was American Mensa members. I'm not surprised they found "those in the Mensa community had considerably higher rates of varying disorders" but I suspect this has more to do with who joins Mensa rather than high IQ.

As noted by Scott Adams, "It turns out that the people who join Mensa and attend meetings are, on average, not successful titans of industry. They are instead – and I say this with great affection – huge losers. I was making $735 per month and I was like frickin’ Goldfinger in this crowd. We had a guy who was some sort of poet who hoped to one day start “writing some of them down.” We had people who were literally too smart to hold a job. The rest of the group dressed too much like street people to ever get past security for a job interview. And everyone was always available for meetings on weekend nights."