jameshart

4 ms·

31.
by jameshart 1mo ago
With computer generated maps, you can just always use a minimally distorting conical or polar projection centered on the exact point you’re focusing on. That also happens to be broadly what you would get looking straight down at the earth f
32.
by jameshart 1mo ago
The prime meridian being the least skewed area of the equal earth and Robinson projections, with their bulgy nature, actually serves to make them both offer somewhat inconvenient depictions of places like Alaska and New Zealand and Japan. M
33.
by jameshart 1mo ago
To test this, change the history in the context to indicate that the model did or recommended something completely different than it actually did, and then ask it to explain why. You’ll still get a plausible explanation.
34.
by jameshart 1mo ago
I learned this from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency , which I strongly recommend.
35.
by jameshart 1mo ago
Possibly an inevitability, since LLM text is specifically generated to be low entropy. It’s smooth, optimized for minimal perplexity. And if you don’t find any of the word choices a little bit perplexing, your brain can just gloss over it.
36.
by jameshart 1mo ago
Chicago is lowest for adjusted risk because it just scores very low for physical risk on their scale. Compared to other cities the adjustment to its risk score for resilience is about typical - not great and not terrible - which suggests th
37.
by jameshart 1mo ago
Joe said it right in Halt and Catch Fire : > Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing. That was that character’s take on Jobs’s ‘bicycle for the mind’ concept.
38.
by jameshart 1mo ago
A lot of professional skill nowadays is misdirected from ‘knowing how to do the thing’ into ‘learning how to use a computer to do the thing’. The role of music producer includes a large chunk of ‘knowing how to program synths and samples an
39.
by jameshart 1mo ago
Probably phoned Ballmer, and Ballmer told him who to send his rant to. The degree of overthinking going on in this thread…
40.
by jameshart 1mo ago
Lower level than the former CEO And President of the board . The point is this was not a round robin reply all buckpassing exercise with BillG and the senior corporate leaders still on the reply list. This is a specific downstream chain of
41.
by jameshart 1mo ago
Most of the thread is lower level staff specifically trying to address the raised issues. We have no idea what conversations this triggered among the exec team about the broader strategic issues Bill raised.
42.
by jameshart 1mo ago
This was an email Bill Gates sent in 2003. Not sure you can hold the ‘TikTok generation’ accountable for that.
43.
by jameshart 1mo ago
Really? You’ve got this guy Dave Fester on there saying he was going to own the website issues and was coordinating everything to do with how the products surfaced on the web. That seemed like pretty clear accountability and ownership to me
44.
by jameshart 1mo ago
This email was literally BillG sending an email to the people he holds accountable for this, pointing out to them that he believes his experience resulted from a systematic lack of attention to end to end user experience. I’m not sure why y
45.
by jameshart 1mo ago
Or the neuralese could be hidden steganographically in the chain of thought.
46.
by jameshart 1mo ago
If your issue is that if you already have some changes to some files staged, and you have made subsequent changes to your working directory, if you git add . then it will not be possible to revert the cache to the state it was in before… we
47.
by jameshart 1mo ago
Ah the classic programmer mistake when encountering the legal system of thinking ‘but surely this act, in and of itself, could not be considered illegal?’ When what the law criminalizes are not mere acts but actions carried out with inte
48.
by jameshart 1mo ago
The black market also prices in a risk premium for ‘this is illegal and you could go to jail for selling me this’. Google is only paying for the vulnerability; the exploit market is also paying for your mortal soul.
49.
by jameshart 1mo ago
git add . is nondestructive and reversible. I tend to do git add . and then run git status. I’m far more interested in confirming my mental model of what I am about to commit if I git commit right now than my mental model of what will be ad
50.
by jameshart 1mo ago
Yep, we’re all just putting one foot in front of the other, hoping we’re doing the right thing to bring about the outcomes we want, trying our best. But that’s the point: so is an LLM. Putting one token in front of another, hoping it’s doin
51.
by jameshart 1mo ago
But if you are an NFL coach and I ask you to decide your next action in order to maximize your odds of winning the superbowl , while yes that does involve you having some predictive ability to think about what impact your actions would hav
52.
by jameshart 1mo ago
I think it’s a disagreement about what ‘predict’ means. The OP is arguing against people who think that an LLM is ‘predicting’ what token would likely follow if the text preceding were found among the corpus it was originally trained on .
53.
by jameshart 1mo ago
There is no way Fermat could have fit that in the margin. Definitely vindicated.
54.
by jameshart 1mo ago
If you and the buyer know about the risks then you’re not making a trade based on material non public information, are you? If you make a hedging trade while having material knowledge that you withhold from the counterparty… well, that soun
55.
by jameshart 1mo ago
Same old story, on a whole new scale. Donny Junior has a piece the numbers game on the east side, so the family makes sure the cops don’t come round asking too many questions…
56.
by jameshart 1mo ago
Managed to roll a guy born in 1988 in the eastern US. He hasn’t married yet and he’s still alive.
57.
by jameshart 1mo ago
Golden rule of large scale software dev: any system you expose that allows other teams to write text to it will eventually be used by another team as an ad hoc JSON database
58.
by jameshart 1mo ago
In my experience these (configuration based feature flags and feature flag services) are actually two complimentary capabilities that solve two completely different problems but that happen to share the same name: feature flags. The config
59.
by jameshart 1mo ago
OHHHH! That explains it. Had not figured out why that false detection kept coming up.
60.
by jameshart 1mo ago
Billy bookcases though are just slabs of laminated engineered wood cut to rectangular dimensions, drilled with precision positioned and sized holes, plus a stack of dowels and camlock fasteners. That seems parameterizable.

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