kergonath

4 ms·

31.
by kergonath 1mo ago
Yeah. Billionaire techbros and neofascists love to mis-read Tolkien, but this is a much better picture of the future they want to bring. Down to the mystical doom cult of Peter Thiel and the techno-feudalism on Mars that Musk wants. Of cour
32.
by kergonath 1mo ago
Stuff that ends up on the home page was not just submitted: it was also upvoted, otherwise you would never see it outside of the news feed (which is full of noise and bad crap anyway. Seriously, go have a look and you’ll see that filtering
33.
by kergonath 1mo ago
I don’t think that’s really it. Plenty of engineers care about elegance and functionality. I think calling them engineering-led is a disservice to engineers in general. Everything out of Google is Rube-Goldberg machines held together with d
34.
by kergonath 1mo ago
(For those who did not get it, it’s the first line of Neuromancer).
35.
by kergonath 1mo ago
> We also have the classic example of PHP with numerous not safe stdlib ways to use mysql. I think it goes without saying that emulating PHP is rarely a good decision.
36.
by kergonath 1mo ago
:D (For the record, I read DF quite often as a Mac-minded techy weirdo, I just happen to disagree on this particular issue)
37.
by kergonath 1mo ago
I’m sorry, this is going to be a bit long but you made good points. > The EU mandate for AI watermarking is likely the first step in the direction of prohibiting AI for specific use cases. I am not sure how practical that would be. The c
38.
by kergonath 1mo ago
I have, and I still do this occasionally. I don’t believe the plant on my desk (I don’t have a rubber duck) is intelligent. I don’t need it to be intelligent, either. I also do it with a LLM every now and then and, while it’s feedback is mo
39.
by kergonath 1mo ago
I can’t speak for them, but I do this occasionally. Every now and then among the propositions there are one or two that did not come to my mind and that are actually quite good. I still write the whole thing myself, I just ask for advice oc
40.
by kergonath 1mo ago
> After I read this post, (seeing they introduced it in August) I think it has to do with the watermarking. The power of confirmation bias… > Try it on a paragraph … the connections between sentences feel clunky now. We might have a d
41.
by kergonath 1mo ago
I am sure he is quite happy to have people disagree with him on HN. He usually wears it as a badge of pride. We might even have a follow-up in a couple of days about how these techy weirdos lost the plot.
42.
by kergonath 1mo ago
Very intelligent people should be able to grasp that a LLM is not intelligent.
43.
by kergonath 1mo ago
> The exact words matter to people who people who don’t use it to write for them. Right. If the exact words matter, using a non-deterministic LLM is a terrible idea in the first place. I hope these people never try putting the same promp
44.
by kergonath 1mo ago
A lot of that rant is nonsense. Is Gruber also outraged that a RNG is already involved in everything LLM produce with a non-zero temperature? Surely it already leads to widespread use of “non-optimal words”. Simply the idea that there is a
45.
by kergonath 1mo ago
> It is also in the AI companies' own best interest to be able to detect AI generated text so that they can avoid training on it It’s also in their interest to demonstrate that they can be trusted and to show that they at least pay
46.
by kergonath 1mo ago
I know, right? I got the same feeling for WoW’s 20th anniversary.
47.
by kergonath 1mo ago
> And even that is not sufficient, as the text might have been generated with ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, MistraL I would think that these things would eventually converge and we’d get one watermarking algorithm as an industry standard. That
48.
by kergonath 1mo ago
> Small communities are much more alive than gigantic ones. My experience is that after a point it gets annoying, and then oppressive. The proximity in smaller communities can help when everything is right. Neighbours can check on you, b
49.
by kergonath 1mo ago
The article in Le Monde is actually insightful. The tradeoff is a bit more complicated, and "no AC" is not intrinsically a left-leaning position. It’s actually quite interesting to have self-identified right-wing people, who even
50.
by kergonath 1mo ago
> Nuclear and off coal/gas should have been priority for last 50 years. No argument from me. It would not have completely saved us but we’d be in a better position now. The absolute priority should be to avoid burning fossil fuels f
51.
by kergonath 1mo ago
I don’t know if you read beyond the paywall and you don’t present a single argument, so I struggle to see your point. The article has fuck all to do with actually getting shamed for buying AC. Regulations need to change with the climate, th
52.
by kergonath 1mo ago
> What he means is probably the idea of Earth Expansion. No, it’s probably not what they meant, because otherwise that would be completely inconsistent with the bit about "increased gravity" (whatever that mean). It’s also wron
53.
by kergonath 1mo ago
No they cannot, it’s just a right-wing strawman. And something that perturbs some Americans, for some reason. Another "proof" that Europe is a terrible place inhabited by clueless idiots.
54.
by kergonath 1mo ago
It’s the "it’s real, but we cannot do anything about it" rung on the climate denialist ladder. Yes, it is dangerous. It is also mainstream. There are several examples in this thread.
55.
by kergonath 1mo ago
El Niño does not really hit Europe in any way. It influences several things, like the jet streams, but the effects on Europe are very indirect and much milder than in the Pacific. They are also delayed by a couple of months.
56.
by kergonath 1mo ago
I don’t think el Niño affects Europe so directly. As a second order effect, sure, but here the heatwaves and el Niño are simultaneous. And this year is going to break records significantly. Again. No need to wait for next year, which could
57.
by kergonath 1mo ago
Right, I know that. But that’s not the point.
58.
by kergonath 1mo ago
What do you mean? The Earth does not "grow" and is not really bigger now than at any point in the past (since the creation of the Moon). On the contrary, it is losing mass through the escape of light atoms escaping, but even that
59.
by kergonath 1mo ago
> do the artificial structures humans use, like house frames or bridges' trusses recover strength:weight ratio? There is some improvement from computer design. We have better tools to know the margins that allow us to remove as much
60.
by kergonath 1mo ago
Up to now it’s basically that even when hardware gets more expensive, it also gets more powerful so the price per FLOP still improves. It might be debatable for mainstream GPUs, where generation gains are underwhelming, but the HPC versions

More ›