alphazard

11 ms·

91.
by alphazard 9mo ago
The thing that always trips me up is the lack of isolation/sandboxing that all of the AI programming tools provide. I want to orchestrate a workforce of agents, but they can't be trusted not to run amok. Does anyone have a better
92.
by alphazard 9mo ago
Programming a GPU in 2025 is complex, that might be because it has been made complicated, but regardless, it is not complexity that this project can control. The fact that it competes with PyTorch in so few lines speaks to the incredibly lo
93.
by alphazard 9mo ago
> To fund the operation, we have a computer sales division that makes about $2M revenue a year. What's the margin on that? Do 5 software engineers really subsist on the spread from moving $2M/yr in hardware?
94.
by alphazard 9mo ago
Yeah this is exactly right, if you can trust the contributors to not code-golf or otherwise Goodhart the LoC metric, then it's a reasonable measure of complexity. It doesn't work as well when you start mixing languages, or generat
95.
by alphazard 9mo ago
> All societies are dysfunctional, great and small, because human beings are dysfunctional. I don't agree with the 'because' part of this. It misses my point about why organizations are dysfunctional. Even if the organizat
96.
by alphazard 9mo ago
I don't know who this kind of cynic vs. idealist vs. optimist thinking works on/for, but it doesn't seem to give me any kind of conceptual edge. Instead of trying to frame things in terms of a mood or a feeling, it's bet
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by alphazard 9mo ago
It depends. Positive real interest rates do not necessarily mean deflation, and deflation isn't necessarily a bad thing. As an example, you could give a loan for $1 to someone for 5% interest. In a year they pay you back, so now you ha
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by alphazard 9mo ago
People want to be dollar debtors, not dollar creditors. When I said no one wants dollars, I was referring to people's willingness to hold actual dollars or obligations that pay them dollars in the future. Your other comment mentions th
99.
by alphazard 9mo ago
This seems a little pedantic, but sure, no one wants to be owed debt denominated in dollars.
100.
by alphazard 9mo ago
> Devalue against what is the main question though, isn't it? The real longer term issue is that the USD is devaluing against the Euro... I don't think that FOREX rates are the best way to think about this, but if you work in t
101.
by alphazard 9mo ago
Dollars are currently only in demand for short-term use in transactions. Most of the world still relies on dollars for transactions, because that is what all the banking and payment infrastructure uses. But no one wants to hold them because
102.
by alphazard 9mo ago
It's a fundamentally bad idea to have a single key that applications are supposed to look for in a particular place, and then use to sign things. There is inherent complexity involved in making multi-context key use safe, and it's
103.
by alphazard 10mo ago
> Why do you say it's rent seeking? Because that's what economists call it when you get something for nothing, as is the case with any subsidy. I'm not going to argue this point; interested readers can look up how these en
104.
by alphazard 10mo ago
Bringing up a map of wind power deployments tells the story; what you will see is a hot vertical strip in the center of the US. That is where it actually makes sense to deploy windmills, and people will continue to put them there even if su
105.
by alphazard 10mo ago
> when people trust and genuinely support each other it's not zero sum This is a clear non-sequitur. Whether or not the situation is zero-sum is dictated by the situation not by the actions of people, or how they feel about each oth
106.
by alphazard 10mo ago
> but you can establish trust with managers. This is technically true, but metaphorically false. Most readers, especially the younger crowd, are likely to be too trusting and not correctly recognize fundamentally adversarial relationship
107.
by alphazard 10mo ago
It's worth mentioning that career conversations with your manager are always bullshit. How could they not be? Your manager's incentives are to keep you around, keep you productive, and keep you inexpensive. It's ridiculous to
108.
by alphazard 10mo ago
This exactly. You have to be honest about why you are building something. If the answer is that you actually want to use it, then yes, quality and maintainability are important. It might even be a good idea to use no AI whatsoever. But if y
109.
by alphazard 10mo ago
Quality is not rewarded at most companies, it's not going to turn into more money, it might turn into less work later, but in all likelihood, the author won't be around to reap the benefits of less work later because they will hav
110.
by alphazard 10mo ago
Certainly it's more conspiratorial to assume that his death had something to do with his research, or that he was secretly a some kind of Walter White character? Being politically outspoken on an issue which is contentious in that ar
111.
by alphazard 10mo ago
"User" generated content on the internet is mostly bots, HN included. Opinions that seem too radical or stupid to be believed are often bots, or NPC humans repeating bot content that they read somewhere else.
112.
by alphazard 10mo ago
IMO the hard problem here is PoS consensus with the private transactions. It seems like the stakers have to come up from the depths of privacy to participate in consensus. Maybe there is a way to do private staking, but that makes the netwo
113.
by alphazard 10mo ago
I think this is a huge misconception. I certainly don't view this issue as grounded in 'rights' or what governments should or should not do. It's entirely an issue of what people can and cannot do with this techn
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by alphazard 10mo ago
> Ok, if that's really your thinking then you need to lay out: here's an impossible-to-ignore thing we can do with this, and this is how, and this is why this wouldn't be possible without this thing. These technologies can
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by alphazard 10mo ago
> no one has money and everyone cares and is tech savvy and yet no one can be trusted at the same time lol, you perfectly described a group of college students.
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by alphazard 10mo ago
> The problems with the technologies is that the "robust database" guarantee is often highly dependent on the currency mechanisms. They unfortunately go hand-in-hand. I agree that economic incentives are important for robustnes
117.
by alphazard 10mo ago
No one is going to run a database for you unless you pay them. If you want to write data to an existing public ledger, then you are going to have to get some of the token that allows you to write to that ledger. Paying for a token to use th
118.
by alphazard 10mo ago
It's good to know everyone here is weary of crypto scams, but I don't see anyone accurately describing the significance of these technologies. Bitcoin failed as a currency, and as that became realized, institutional investors pivo
119.
by alphazard 10mo ago
I've found that these incompetent folks (mostly in management as you say) really don't want to reveal their intellectual inferiority; they are desperate to hide it. If you started using this with your team, everyone adding value w
120.
by alphazard 10mo ago
Write-time understandings no, write-time language yes. You can always change it, which is what happened in the case of women and slaves. To be clear, changing the text is the correct way to handle that, we shouldn't have just relied on

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