Arubis

4 ms·

1.
by Arubis 8d ago
You are correct; I was wrong on this one! I’d read it so many times and far enough back, coupled with DHS’s general attitude of “we’ll do what we want”, that I’d taken it as true. Delighted not to be right here.
2.
by Arubis 8d ago
In broad strokes, I agree. You still have to make decisions and apply taste. It's _extremely_ unlikely that you'll have the full spec and shape and architecture of something large fully settled in your head before you start. It&#x
3.
by Arubis 8d ago
China probably has the fiscal firepower to replace Eurodollars, but while their financial system remains split between "internally used currency" and "currency for everyone else" and while external investment is treated
4.
by Arubis 8d ago
Note also that that 100 miles _is a radius around your nearest international airport_ and need not be what you think of as a border, i.e. a line drawn between two land masses.
5.
by Arubis 8d ago
Yes, and: the most important time to use your brain isn't in the loop. That _is_ valuable, and will remain so, but the temptation to turn it off is there because the loop is good and getting better at what it does. Once you're in
6.
by Arubis 8d ago
I took this advice and posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49757722 . Thanks for the nudge! Just generally speaking, I find Rao's writing to be a really good, well-informed counterbalance to...well, darn near
7.
EA Safety(contraptions.venkateshrao.com)
4 points by Arubis 8d ago|2 comments
8.
by Arubis 8d ago
I found this to be a much more nuanced, intellectually honest, personally balanced take than [Sex, AI and the Apocalypse]( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746654 ) from the other day.
9.
by Arubis 8d ago
Dedollarizing the world economy has more net losers than the US (though that's the obvious one). It's not without its benefits -- over the last couple decade, the US has found ways to weaponize access to USD, so if you're not
10.
by Arubis 8d ago
Probably best read with [Venkatesh Rao on EA Safety]( https://substack.com/home/post/p-216194276 ) as a companion piece.
11.
by Arubis 8d ago
I think that’s what most tripped me up. “North American” would’ve been clearer here.
12.
by Arubis 8d ago
This probably is the most succinct way to write the title, but assigning nationality to dinosaurs is _weird_.
13.
by Arubis 9d ago
Like we can prevent the rest of our society from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy: by treating individuals with respect and dignity and not as the ore from which resources can be profitably extracted.
14.
by Arubis 9d ago
Yeah, HN isn't going to be your target market by and large -- this is the home of the folks that would, at most, pull up a page describing a skill and dump it into a harness. I wouldn't take that as fatal. Most people aren't
15.
by Arubis 9d ago
Agreed here, though this product/marketplace may be able to be a landing site for precisely that.
16.
by Arubis 10d ago
Verbosity is, among other things, a cover-your-ass move. Stating something simply requires cutting details that might matter sometimes. If your counterparty or experience has made this painful, you'll likely write more.
17.
by Arubis 10d ago
This was already true (as sibling comments note) but it's _way_ sharper now. Even if you use an LLM to research or answer a question, editing it down for other people takes effort, and doing it well demonstrates understanding.
18.
by Arubis 11d ago
Historically it did, so long as the politically privileged class of USians were among the folks that would be advantaged by those treaties. Anti-nuke proliferation and CFC restriction treaties worked. Treaties with native populations were i
19.
by Arubis 11d ago
Sometimes. Depends who you ask. Some boomers are in glorious denial. Many are still in bloody office. The ones I’ve heard opine about embarrassment and failure are mostly those that’ve been trended towards fight-the-power for their adult li
20.
by Arubis 11d ago
Laws are for the little people, obviously.
21.
by Arubis 12d ago
Privacy is hard because it’s not merely a technical problem. It’s applied to individuals by systems that most individuals have very limited influence into—and those that _do_ have influence often stand to benefit from eroding the privacy of
22.
by Arubis 13d ago
A bunch of spherical bastards, the lot of 'em.
23.
by Arubis 13d ago
I've been working on building hyper-local services, sort of as a love letter to my community in Denver, Colorado. Before decent LLM harnesses, these would've been prohibitively expensive in time and resources to build out and woul
24.
by Arubis 13d ago
You're not wrong. We're talking about different eras--and it sounds like you may have been around a bit longer. The mostly libertarian/individualistic (I would dare say _left libertarian_, who seem now to be pretty much polit
25.
by Arubis 13d ago
It wouldn’t actually be _that_ surprising. Tech isn’t progressive or countercultural* anymore. And a lot of how people feel about gun rights/gun control stateside really comes down to whether people identify with the population they pe
26.
by Arubis 16d ago
One of these things was wholesale systemized actual state-run murder. The other is a range that encompasses big companies run by awful people and also a binary blob I can run on a GPU in my basement. Don’t weaken how awful the Holocaust was
27.
by Arubis 16d ago
I wish we could get past this debate. Different people have different feelings. Bucketing into binary "good" and "not good" based on whether they have the exact same framing as you do is dehumanizing. Stop it. Respect ot
28.
by Arubis 19d ago
So far, the best way I’ve found to improve code quality from LLMs that you’ve already produced is to read the output, throw it away, and hand-write it from scratch, usually with a totally different structure. This scales about as well as it
29.
by Arubis 20d ago
I’m not even sure that’s a useful question. It almost points at “what’s the other end of the continuum so we can discuss points on the axis”, which _is_ useful, but I’m not even convinced that “merely” treating those without income as deser
30.
by Arubis 21d ago
Yes, certainly: the ability to say “no” to abusive labor conditions without risk of irreversibly losing any source of income while living in a society that treats lack of income as deserving of whatever pains and suffering come with it. The

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