BrenBarn

42 ms·

961.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
> While I hate the taste, it makes sense to combine smart with powerful if you want to produce industry. What if you want to produce equality?
962.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
This is interesting because there can be a fine line between camaraderie and insularism. A feel-good atmosphere among workers is good, but if it doesn't include everyone, it can lead to favoritism towards those in the group relative t
963.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
AI didn't conquer the US economy. What conquered the US economy is a small number of large companies. If Apple started rolling out an iTurd app, and Google started offering gTurd, and Amazon started shipping free turds to everyone&#x
964.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
Despicable.
965.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
This would sort of work except that Harvard already built an endowment of $50 billion based on all that lying. Unless you're going to claw back that money, you're just letting them pull the ladder up behind them.
966.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
> If you remove the people born into privilege, from attending your college, all you succeed is in making your college irrelevant, not those people irrelevant. This is an argument for stricter regulation, not more lenient. It means that
967.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
The idea of branches of government being checks and balances against one another was never a good idea. A major problem is that the constitution doesn't actually encode any requirement that government represent the interests of the pe
968.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
Unless that "big" percentage is an outright majority of the citizenry --- not a majority of congressional districts, not a majority of electoral college votes, not a majority of the votes in the last election, but an outright majo
969.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
But this gerrymander would just be one more on top of hundreds of others. The fact that "congress" agrees with the president is just another symptom of the fact that the entire system is fundamentally nonresponsive to the will of
970.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
Those are all consequences of the same brokenness. All of the institutions are fundamentally broken.
971.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
If an executive order can put grants under political control, they were already under political control. We just didn't know it. That is the case with so much of what is happening now. If these things are possible, the system was alr
972.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
If "thriving" means "moving quickly towards being bought by one of the big companies" then that's an illusory diversity.
973.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
And let's not forget that these LLMs are made by companies that could if they so choose insert instructions nudging the user toward services provided by themselves or other companies that give them some kind of kickback.
974.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
> For those of us who care about improving how we work and, specifically, about making better software, is there even an audience out there that both cares about doing things well and has the ability to change their practices? Most of th
975.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
I would say it is very high. In my experience password managers are rarely used by nontechnical people.
976.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
> For example, to train an AI to fully assume the role of an infrastructure engineer, we need RL environments that comprehensively test what’s required to build and maintain robust systems. Or we could just, you know, not do that at all.
977.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
> And the final product must be consumed within 10 minutes after emerging from the oven. I like this requirement because it means I could go into a place, order a pizza, sit there starting at it for 15 minutes, and then report them for a
978.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
My mom grew up in New Jersey and often mentions how there was a pizza place in her hometown called "Vic's Tomato Pies". I guess early on a lot of places called it that because people wouldn't know the word "pizza&q
979.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
> The browser should be doing most of the heavy lifting by providing a full suite of minimally themed but capable widgets that require little to no JavaScript and can be skinned entirely with CSS. Well, I'd prefer if it provided wid
980.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
Reality isn't always good.
981.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
> "Web apps" should have been standard desktop apps with a network connection. This is the way I lean too. So much of what web apps do is just reinventing the wheel of desktop GUI toolkits, only worse, because each one does it
982.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
Maybe you could say the increase in traffic increased your hosting costs by a penny or whatever.
983.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
> I unironically believe if you tell all the kids they don't have to write the essay at all, much more will choose to write it. I seriously doubt that. In my experience many students won't do anything that doesn't directl
984.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
It's better when the way it works is "this is format is good, therefore we will support it" rather than "people support this format, therefore it is good".
985.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
It's really sad how law in the US is caught in a three-way game of ping-pong between "let people do whatever they feel like doing", "let shady governments and law enforcement use law as a trap to fleece people", and
986.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
> Even under an ideal situation where Trump authoritarianism is conquered and some sort of sensible alternative takes office, restoring oversight of companies like Comcast and AT&T — both bone-grafted to our domestic surveillance net
987.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
Yeah, I would say that my time in academia disillusioned me somewhat, but not to the level that some people here are expressing. I never got the sense that people were falsifying data, directly (but covertly) backstabbing one another, or a
988.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
Well, the amount of money being wasted is generally smaller, and often the results are not harming hundreds of millions of people around the world. (But it depends on the field.)
989.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
It's another form of the "How to Get Rich Quick" book where the answer is "Write a book about how to get rich quick".
990.
by BrenBarn 1y ago
The problem is that the motivation from above (i.e., administration, state legislatures, employers, etc.) is no longer really about learning. We could have an entirely learning-motivated university right now and it would be considered a ba

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