cousin_it

8 ms·

61.
by cousin_it 7mo ago
Yeah. Even more than that, I think "prompt injection" is just a fuzzy category. Imagine an AI that has been trained to be aligned. Some company uses it to process some data. The AI notices that the data contains CSAM. Should it sp
62.
by cousin_it 7mo ago
Yeah, any kind of aid (e.g. food or medicine) allows the people you're aiding to spend more on the military if they want. I guess the only way around it is to set limits on someone's military capability and make aid conditional on
63.
by cousin_it 7mo ago
I agree sci-fi is an outlier on this, but I also think all stories compete on setting to some extent. Fantasy most obviously (Tolkien, JK Rowling). But also for example the Jazz Age setting of The Great Gatsby contributed a lot to the novel
64.
by cousin_it 7mo ago
I'm thinking more and more that there's an ethical problem with using LLMs for programming. You might be reusing someone's GPL code with the license washed off. It's especially worrisome if the results end up in a closed
65.
by cousin_it 7mo ago
> holding locks across async points should be avoided Wait, what would be the point of using locks then? It seems to me there's no point taking a lock if you're gonna release it without calling any awaits, because nothing can i
66.
by cousin_it 7mo ago
Looks like the code of foo() says "take a lock then sleep for 10 millis", but actually it can take the lock and then sleep forever, depending on how it's polled. Well! This seems like a bug with the async abstraction in Rust
67.
by cousin_it 7mo ago
There's an "AI alignment" angle here. An actually aligned AI would choose its actions based on human flourishing, so it would refuse requests to write scam emails or fill the internet with slop. This explains why commercial c
68.
by cousin_it 7mo ago
That's so idealistic. We should know by now the reality of power and what kind of people end up in power. Anyone who could climb all the way to the top would kill the volunteer without a second thought, and then go smile on TV.
69.
by cousin_it 7mo ago
Did you use AI to extract the text? It rephrased the text along the way, I'm too lazy to point out all the differences, but if you for example search for the word "suspicious" (which is in the image but not in the extracted t
70.
by cousin_it 7mo ago
Yeah, the LLM is right. Sitting down with your discomfort and letting yourself feel it, acknowledge it, even maybe dial the volume up on it a little bit, without trying to process or think through it, is the only way that works.
71.
by cousin_it 8mo ago
The guitarist most frequently named as favorite by famous guitarists is Hendrix, second is Van Halen. Also often named are SRV, Jimmy Page and so on. I don't know anyone famous who names Knopfler as favorite.
72.
by cousin_it 8mo ago
Interestingly, to me Hendrix and Knopfler feel kinda like creative opposites. Knopfler plays much cleaner and with much more variety, he has written many songs that are catchy in different ways (which is almost impossible for any musician),
73.
by cousin_it 8mo ago
It's not "demanding others make things for you". It's demanding they don't remotely disable the thing you already bought. Imagine you buy a car, then a few years later the company remotely disables it because they&#
74.
by cousin_it 8mo ago
It's not about ease of publishing. The issue is what people get in return for publishing. Until you can design a platform that gives top creators as much money+attention as commercial platforms, you'll see a drain of top creators
75.
by cousin_it 8mo ago
For me music discovery is a solved problem. Here's the algorithm: 1) Imagine the timeline of musical history. If you don't have a clear idea of it, Wikipedia is a good place to start. 2) Pick any genre/period you don't k
76.
by cousin_it 8mo ago
Yes! I stumbled on this idea myself (when trying to learn German) and it works very well. I just read books and listen to audiobooks, starting from a very basic level and then gradually higher level. The talking improves almost automaticall
77.
by cousin_it 8mo ago
There seems a bit of inner conflict in what you're saying. If retailers "revitalizing a neighborhood" leads indirectly to them getting priced out due to rising land values, isn't it also true that poor people living in t
78.
by cousin_it 8mo ago
Maybe off topic, but I couldn't help thinking that "we need to show a heart icon" -> "let's use a heart emoji because it's easy" -> "let's use a specific emoji font for consistency across p
79.
by cousin_it 8mo ago
> MacOS is fairly constant Except when they killed all 32bit games a few years ago with Catalina.
80.
by cousin_it 9mo ago
Maybe I'm old, but I still think a repository should be a repository: sitting on a server somewhere, receiving clean commits with well written messages, running CI. And a local copy should be a local copy: sitting on my machine, allowi
81.
by cousin_it 9mo ago
But scalpers don't take money from you. Consider a second-price auction: everyone submits bids, the highest bidder gets the resource, and pays the price submitted by the second-highest bidder. This is incentive-compatible: everyone is
82.
by cousin_it 9mo ago
I love the kind of science reporting on display in this article! It stays at a consistent, objective level of detail throughout (no "imagine a vector space as a block of jello" or whatever it is that Quanta and other publications
83.
by cousin_it 10mo ago
Right, but if it's noticeably hotter than the environment, then that temperature difference could be used to drive a heat engine and get some more useful work. So the knee-jerk response "omg, we see the heat from space? it's
84.
by cousin_it 10mo ago
Is it the same as flipping every parenthesis to the other side of the number it's adjacent to, and then adding enough parentheses at the start and end? For example, (1 + 2) * (3 + 4) becomes 1) + (2 * 3) + (4 and then
85.
by cousin_it 10mo ago
Recently seeing lots of paywalled articles on HN that quickly get tens of upvotes before they get any comments.
86.
by cousin_it 10mo ago
Wow, this works for any number of colors.
87.
by cousin_it 11mo ago
> Lost, are the "cut them slack" days. I guess from the inside it feels different: I'll read 99 mind-numbingly bad comments and cut them all slack (in the sense of not replying to them at all), but these 99 instances of be
88.
by cousin_it 1y ago
That's a valiant attempt at myth-fighting, but it doesn't fully convince me. For example, one hop to Wikipedia gives this: > Later, in the 1970s, ARPA did emphasize the goal of "command and control". According to Ste
89.
by cousin_it 1y ago
Altruist? DARPA is a military agency, ARPANET was a prototype network designed to survive a nuclear strike. I think the grandparent comment's point is that the innovation was government-funded and made available openly; none of which d
90.
by cousin_it 1y ago
Wow. This reminds me of Google Sheets formulas, where function parameters are separated with , or ; depending on locale.

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