ndriscoll

4 ms·

1.
by ndriscoll 5d ago
Also to fix bugs. Someone recently ran Shadowrun (Genesis) disassembly through chatgpt and discovered that weapon upgrades were completely broken (using the wrong value as an index and ending up reading character stats as upgrade flags), de
2.
by ndriscoll 5d ago
Don't excuse poor actions by saying these sorts of people just normally act poorly. It's their choice to act unethically.
3.
by ndriscoll 5d ago
It's such a bizarre attitude. Like I think this stuff deserves decade+ long prison sentences for everyone involved, and they just don't care. Like imagine if mugging were legal and the people doing it just said "hey, if I don
4.
by ndriscoll 6d ago
I'm a copyright abolitionist, but I think Oracle should be required to release the source code with their binaries as a basic consumer protection. I also don't care about attribution.
5.
by ndriscoll 7d ago
I'm aware of the meme, but it's not obtuse or pedagogically inept. Like if someone says they're familiar with groups and Fourier transforms, but not what it means to say wavelets are the Fourier basis for the affine group, an
6.
by ndriscoll 7d ago
Evidence doesn't point in that direction though, even if we establish correlations. Like the education effect is pretty obvious: most people will use it to cheat on their homework and avoid learning. Some people will use it to learn ne
7.
by ndriscoll 8d ago
You keep assuming that LLM usage is automatically harmful with literally zero reason to believe that, and several anecdotes from people on how they use it positively. There's simply no reason to even draw a weak analogy to smoking. You
8.
by ndriscoll 8d ago
On the other hand all aircraft are tracked (we are surely not trying to account for the possibility of a stealth aircraft transporting illicit goods across the border and secretly landing somewhere), and they can decide what they're go
9.
by ndriscoll 8d ago
On the other hand there's the consensus bias where you believe that everyone else is like you, when in fact they are not (which is why I said this is something I've had to learn to accept). Sure, for most distributions, most peo
10.
by ndriscoll 8d ago
Because you can't exactly sneak on/off of an international airplane. It should be pretty trivial for customs to funnel travelers through a checkpoint where they can search at the time of the actual border crossing. Likewise we now
11.
by ndriscoll 8d ago
Pretty easy for a lightning strike to simultaneously destroy both though unless you always unplug your computers during a storm.
12.
by ndriscoll 8d ago
> it's the nature of security - it is adversarial Yes, this is the issue. People don't like how adversarial security people act, and how they force things onto people. It's fine if a corporation wants to have some internal
13.
by ndriscoll 8d ago
Can you just as easily pick a quorum of folks? It seems to me that no matter what, you're going to have to choose people you know and be accused of nepotism because those are the people you can actually assess, and in the case of child
14.
by ndriscoll 8d ago
The person I replied to said they know what monoid means, so they're familiar with algebra. The explanation is intuitive for someone familiar with undergraduate algebra (adapted to also assume some familiarity with programming and sh
15.
by ndriscoll 8d ago
A better analogy is probably TV. You could watch the Flintstones (along with smoking ads!), or e.g. Mr. Wizard.
16.
by ndriscoll 8d ago
I influence where I can, and I have encouraged my team at work to use models as learning tools. Probe into their claims. Ask them to prove things with a quick demo/test/PoC. etc. They have tons of embedded knowledge that you can d
17.
by ndriscoll 8d ago
Will they do that? Obviously they want some publicity about their model capabilities recently, but even there they have their eyes on major newsworthy problems. Are they going to scan everyone's blogs so they can scoop them on some ran
18.
by ndriscoll 8d ago
Sure, I expect that if you gave me the LD99 of some poison, I will die. But there are still many things (and my point is this is one of them) where all it takes to be an outlier is to decide to be one.
19.
by ndriscoll 8d ago
I mean sure I care. I'd love for my kids to grow into a world where everyone around them is a super jacked highly competent and motivated ubermensch, but what are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to get people to not let themse
20.
by ndriscoll 8d ago
You don't need to prove anything or lead anyone or change society. You have a tool in front of you that can help you achieve your goals or distract you from them. You decide how you want to use it. Just do your thing. > It is easy i
21.
by ndriscoll 8d ago
One thing I've learned in life is to accept that I'm in many ways an outlier, which means that even if the research is done, it frequently doesn't apply to me anyway. Like I wouldn't doubt that research could show that m
22.
by ndriscoll 8d ago
So then the solution is to publish more often (e.g. on a public blog) even if your ideas are not fully developed in order to establish priority and show you are doing something. Analogously with software development, it's always been
23.
by ndriscoll 9d ago
Simple: if you don't publish your work, we don't fund you. Why is this even a question?
24.
by ndriscoll 9d ago
A maybe example that springs to mind is how Gauss discovered the FFT in the early 1800s (predating even Fourier analysis) but didn't find it interesting enough to publish, so while his work was important, it was also forgotten and had
25.
by ndriscoll 9d ago
The question was about greenfield projects, not all projects in existence. In a greenfield project, you can set your own standards, be judicious about what libraries you use, etc. I'm not framing it as a question one only asks if they
26.
by ndriscoll 9d ago
"The meme" literally comes from a book that was offering it as an intuitive explanation of a long definition, assuming you know what a monoid is. All the laws and stuff boil down to "if you generalize the idea of a monoid a
27.
by ndriscoll 9d ago
Comparator.comparingDouble returns a comparator, which is a two argument function, which is what min expects. Min can't know how your comparator is defined without reflection to do that kind of peeking, and as you point out, that kind
28.
by ndriscoll 9d ago
Yes, this is why I say we should abolish software copyright, and the vendor should have an obligation to provide their source code, and it should be illegal to use technological measures to try to stop you from making it work (e.g. firmware
29.
by ndriscoll 9d ago
It's literally not a statement of opinion. It's a factual statement about how computers work. And yeah people hack their appliances all the time. Car modders replace all sorts of things; I don't see why they wouldn't tou
30.
by ndriscoll 9d ago
How is that a gotcha? If there aren't two elements how could you possibly expect a function with two arguments to be called? What would you call it with?

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