marcus_holmes

7 ms·

91.
by marcus_holmes 2mo ago
I literally can't do this. I used to smoke a lot, and every time I went to smoke outside I'd think about what I was coding and find some stupid mistake just from thinking about it away from the keyboard. Now I go for a walk and 9
92.
by marcus_holmes 2mo ago
I think the downvotes are for saying positive things about AI. HN doesn't like that ;) And yes, messing about with skills is the new messing around with setup. It's a rabbit hole. I'm a massive, massive, believer in The Cult
93.
by marcus_holmes 2mo ago
This is so important. I've seen so many fellow technologists (and I've skated this myself) obsess about their setup to the point that they're spending more time on that than the actual thing they're building. The whole &
94.
by marcus_holmes 2mo ago
Is this the "AI startups blog about discoveries rather than submitting to journals" phenomenon that TFA noted? Are journals just too slow, hidebound, and predatory to be useful to this industry any more?
95.
by marcus_holmes 2mo ago
You're right, in that we would have said that. I wouldn't frame it as moving the goalposts in a bad way, though. We understand more now than we did then, so we have a better idea of what the actual goal is, and moving the goalpost
96.
by marcus_holmes 2mo ago
You know the British invented the concentration camp in Africa, right? We're told a relatively benign version of our history. You kinda have to travel to the countries involved to get the real version.
97.
by marcus_holmes 2mo ago
The war did not start in 2022, it started in February 2026. There were no clear objectives when the war started, but the Trump administration has waffled since about: Regime change - hasn't happened. The current regime is still running
98.
by marcus_holmes 2mo ago
Better for whom? Certainly not the colonised...
99.
by marcus_holmes 2mo ago
You may well be right, and it's really only that China has been more inward-looking recently, and given the chance it will spread its true colonial wings.
100.
by marcus_holmes 2mo ago
Yeah I saw this in Cambodia when I lived there. Sihanoukville had become a Chinese enclave almost completely. Different to the way that French colonialism worked, though. Less direct government, more influence of existing power structures a
101.
by marcus_holmes 2mo ago
Every single software engineer in the industry agrees with you. Every single project manager disagrees. Don't blame the engineers, we were specifically instructed and paid to build things fast and cheap, and every time we argued for go
102.
by marcus_holmes 2mo ago
One of their learnings from the incident was that they should have a local (i.e. not hosted), open, and capable model on standby that can respond to future incidents swiftly.
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by marcus_holmes 2mo ago
China is very inward-looking, though. It's not really interested in world domination in the same sense that Europe was or even the USA was/is.
104.
by marcus_holmes 2mo ago
I give them $200/month for Max. They give me a massive amount of tokens in return. Every time I fire up claude code they lose money. It's the same situation as Uber used to be when it lost money on every ride. I would cheerfully u
105.
by marcus_holmes 2mo ago
I know you're making a bad-faith argument, but it's a good question. So yes, kids growing up in areas where Oxycontin abuse is prevalent will be much, much, more aware of what that technology does (both the good and the bad) than
106.
by marcus_holmes 2mo ago
That's fascinating, have you got any sources for this? I'd love to read up more. I haven't experienced either of these effect when working with an LLM myself.
107.
by marcus_holmes 3mo ago
ok. fair. You seem to be saying that there is something in the training data that will cause them to "go rogue" and that once they start saying they are sentient, that that will cause them to push towards sentience. If that's
108.
by marcus_holmes 3mo ago
No, I'm saying I don't trust organisations with a profit motive to build things that benefit the rest of us, and don't trust the government to regulate them properly, and think that the better move would be to open-source the
109.
by marcus_holmes 3mo ago
I'm always wary of extrapolating from the few individuals who experience that harmful interaction with chatbots to the general population. We have the same thing with every new tech, that some people react badly/too strongly to it
110.
by marcus_holmes 3mo ago
Yeah I pirate my ebooks unless they can be bought DRM-free (which a few can). On principle, because I want to actually own the things I buy. I used to have paper books. But I found they were just a massive pain in the arse to carry around,
111.
by marcus_holmes 3mo ago
No, they wouldn't. An expert barista gets served the same coffee as everyone else, obviously. The analogy is bad for this reason.
112.
by marcus_holmes 3mo ago
I think we're anthropomorphising a lot here. There's no push to sentience, or evolutionary pressure, or even any urge to survive. An LLM cannot "go rogue" - it can do things that we didn't expect, for sure, but it i
113.
by marcus_holmes 3mo ago
I don't think the regulation and oversight capability of the US government is anywhere near what it needs to be to ensure everyone's safety. There are places in the USA where you cannot drink the tapwater ffs.
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by marcus_holmes 3mo ago
Usually an interest-paying loan is backed by a guarantee, so the lender can pursue the borrower for repayment by claims on other assets.
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by marcus_holmes 3mo ago
The bit that isn't rules-lawyered away is that the risk is shared. For the deal to be compliant with the religious law, the lender must accept the same risk as the borrower, equally. So I guess in this case if the house burns down and
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by marcus_holmes 3mo ago
I remember t-shirts with the DVD encryption key on them when the authorities tried to ban that. This shit always backfires. You'd think they'd know this by now.
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by marcus_holmes 3mo ago
We can see the same situation play out with manufacturing capability. The USA has recognised that it needs more manufacturing capability. But rather than just build that capability (which is what the Chinese state-planned economy would do,
118.
by marcus_holmes 3mo ago
I trust open source code more than I trust proprietary code. And I believe history vindicates me. Everything that you're saying can be done with open-weights models by bad people can also be done with closed-weights models by the peopl
119.
by marcus_holmes 3mo ago
They are trained and optimised to have plausible conversations. If the next plausible thing to say in the conversation is "I am sentient" then they will say that. That's not the same as actually being sentient.
120.
by marcus_holmes 3mo ago
Yeah that's adults, though. Unless we go down the McDonalds coffee warning path "warning: this LLM is not human and can harm you if you treat it as human"

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