andrewla

4 ms·

1.
by andrewla 9d ago
The idea that deflation is built into Bitcoin is exactly equivalent to saying "the real value of bitcoin will always increase" which is an absurd premise. Bitcoin is deflationary only in a hybrid Keynsian - Austrian worldview. In
2.
by andrewla 9d ago
Because difficulty does not adapt dynamically, if the miners do not move then the fork will be defunct because it will take literally days to weeks to mine a block, and to mine the 216 blocks that would trigger a difficulty adjustment would
3.
by andrewla 9d ago
Only if there has been an outgoing transaction from that account. If the address has only received deposits then only the hash is available.
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by andrewla 9d ago
I don't understand this -- are you agreeing with me that consciousness is not the basis of human rights or contesting that? Removing the negative from your first sentence (I don't care what it is "not", I only care what
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by andrewla 10d ago
I am not impressed with the philosophizing here, and even less by the attempts to make factual statements that can be credibly disputed. That said, trying to distill what is being said here, the concrete action is [stop telling the AIs] tha
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by andrewla 10d ago
This brings to mind the analysis in Bender & Orszag; they approach this through difference equations (a bit of a lost art in formal mathematics; very 19th-century feel) rather than integration. Instead of introducing the gamma function,
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by andrewla 11d ago
I think we have to face the fact that we cannot unring this bell. There will be holding actions against things like Flock but in the end they will fail, and at best we will have a loosening of the laws that Flock is being used to enforce an
8.
by andrewla 11d ago
Some classic HN discussion from the same era: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38695478
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by andrewla 12d ago
Claude definitely is a victim of its own path-dependent thinking. In a sense it's good to document dead ends and false starts so that others don't make the same mistake but it feels more pathological with Claude because sometimes
10.
by andrewla 12d ago
https://www.qubrid.com/ai-appliances/qubrid-llm-gen-ai-appli... This is crazy but honestly very tempting at this point.
11.
by andrewla 12d ago
I can't speak to your particular situation, but in my experience this has been two factors; one is location -- it is sometimes hard in some locations to find senior talent whereas H1Bs are (naturally) more amenable to moving. The other
12.
by andrewla 15d ago
I don't love graphical programming environments like this and Scratch and I can't quite put my finger on why I find them so unattractive. A big part of it is that you can, to some degree, learn programming from this. But you absol
13.
by andrewla 15d ago
My quibble here is with the house style "Iran-backed" that they attach to every mention of the Houthi's. While it's fine for governments to use that language, I don't think journalists should use it without being ve
14.
by andrewla 16d ago
The reason that the four-color theorem remains a fascinating problem for so many people and the source of so many cranks is not that the problem is easy to express. It's that Kempe's proof, though in the end incorrect, is very ele
15.
by andrewla 16d ago
They have a side-button based Touch ID on the iPads already. I've used it there and it works great. Not as nice as the old button iPhone (RIP) but totally usable.
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by andrewla 17d ago
Annoying that they gave this thing touch id but not the non-folding version. Restoring Touch ID is one of the things that might make me upgrade my existing iPhone before its time.
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by andrewla 17d ago
Not even just a category error -- this is blatant malpractice to have this as a headline! The article is talking about reading scores, and this is especially pernicious given the fact that the last couple of years has not been "typical
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by andrewla 22d ago
Wow -- looks like thanks to Claude, Lean checks off another box on https://www.cs.ru.nl/~freek/100/
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by andrewla 22d ago
This is part of the reason why alignment is a kind of poorly defined term, and it isn't just a property of the model. It's instead a property of the harness and the context. A model (like a human) should be able to play a video ga
20.
by andrewla 22d ago
You have to be careful here because the systems we're talking about are AI agents, not LLMs. An agent is essentially an append-only context loop with an LLM, with a harness that can run tools at the LLM's request. This ends up bei
21.
by andrewla 23d ago
Kids In The Hall had a sketch about overuse of a word or phrase [1]. This is the world that Claude is building for us. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lStcwT_RGrQ
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by andrewla 24d ago
They both have similar roles, but O-1 is an immigrant visa and H-1B is a non-immigrant visa (a temporary worker visa). Everything else is downstream of that.
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by andrewla 25d ago
I tried out Monica when it was posted to hn ages ago and still get the occasional reminder. But I've mostly switched to using the contacts app on my iphone for everything. It has primitive features that support 95% of what I need.
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by andrewla 25d ago
Speak for yourself! My default position for a long time has been that all results in the social sciences are garbage. If they go against intuition or my biases, then they are most likely garbage. If they confirm my intuition or my biases, t
25.
by andrewla 26d ago
I find this way of thinking to be almost alien. There's nothing here that I would want to go back to. You could not give me enough money that I would trade down to a 2000-era cell phone from my current phone. "Technology was a too
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by andrewla 26d ago
> The OP doesn't claim the it was the peak of humanity, the claim is much tighter than that: it was the perfect balance of technology usage. From the literal title of the article: > Early 2000s were peak of humanity
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by andrewla 29d ago
I think this both overstates and understates the case. The evidence being weak does not invalidate the decision; as the court notes, the government gets substantial deference on matters of national security. The invalidation comes from the
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by andrewla 1mo ago
In my opinion, as someone who does *not* think that they have aphantasia, the two things are definitely not equivalent. I know what the afterimage is, I know what it is to visualize something, and they are completely different both qualitat
29.
by andrewla 1mo ago
I agree, of course nobody can actually do this (barring mind-altering drugs or brain trauma, and even then, not voluntarily). But there are people on this thread an on the attached survey ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i
30.
by andrewla 1mo ago
I'm with you -- human experience is complicated, and language is a poor approximation to our inner lives. But there are lots of people on this thread who are saying "well, of course you can't *see* the apple, it's just a

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