neilk

21 ms·

181.
by neilk 4y ago
I think the term for this is "full-reserve banking" or "100% reserve banking". The Wikipedia page only talks about governments that have occasionally flirted with the idea, and economists who have debated its merits as a
182.
by neilk 4y ago
There's a sample of GPT-4 acting as a "Socratic tutor" teaching a student how to solve a high school math problem. If that sample is representative, it means GPT-4 has a theory of other people's minds. Or it is so good a
183.
by neilk 4y ago
This is very interesting. I’ve wondered if git could be a basis for democratic collaboration. Is there a project that this was built for? Is there a “customer”?
184.
by neilk 4y ago
I don't believe in a runaway AI scenario, where something arises that has godlike abilities and takes over the planet. This overweights the returns to intelligence, the likelihood that it will be given a free hand, and underweights the
185.
by neilk 4y ago
Yeah, it was just a joke. Younger coworkers are inevitably much better than I was at their age. How could they not be? Everything is better, and enlightenment is always just a few clicks away. But the internet can’t teach you everything.
186.
by neilk 4y ago
I still feel like the upstart who barely knows what he is doing. The only difference is the people around me. I used to be surrounded by people I looked up to, who seemed to know everything. But now everyone around me has become mysteriousl
187.
by neilk 4y ago
Oh great. Now do Myers-Briggs next. This should be entitled "the bias of extremely online programmers who actually care about their Political Compass results". The Political Compass has exactly the same validity as the Myers-Brigg
188.
by neilk 4y ago
Quite impressive given you’re working with tiny snippets of songs. Kudos. This is so interesting out of the gate that criticisms seem rather foolish. But I’ll just say what I tried. I tried pop songs, jazz tunes, and even rather strange, un
189.
by neilk 4y ago
Some years ago, there was a hacker who was elected to their local parliament, in a small country. Previously, they had stated that, because of the program-proof equivalency, it would be trivial to analyze what government does and port it to
190.
by neilk 4y ago
Some of the original flat earth theorists seem to just be playing around, having fun with the idea of scientific authority. One of them explained gravity by positing the earth was a flat disk accelerating upwards at 9.8m/s^2, forever.
191.
by neilk 4y ago
Some techies and artists I know made some art at Burning Man to demonstrate the curvature of the earth over several miles. It was called Straightedge. A good pic of it. https://www.flickr.com/photos/derewecki/21429
192.
by neilk 4y ago
And they were born in 1999. We are dealing with a unique mind here.
193.
by neilk 4y ago
Amusing, but expertise in art doesn’t equate to expertise in detecting AI-generated images. The one with the flowers has most of the flaws we’ve come to expect from 2022-23 AI - superficially similar but it doesn’t have a clear idea of what
194.
by neilk 4y ago
Without any reasonable way to check the author’s credentials or the soundness of their analysis, I did go looking into who they are. The pseudonym “Cremieux Receuil” and the avatar refer to Adolph Crémieux[1], a French lawyer and politician
195.
Common Red Flags of World-Changing Project Ideas(medium.com)
1 points by neilk 4y ago|0 comments
196.
by neilk 4y ago
Maybe it’s very North American of me but I cringe when the author says “bad team”. Objectively, they didn’t have the skills, experience, or advisors to do this thing. And if the money truly disappeared, then someone crossed over into “bad”
197.
by neilk 4y ago
In a field that includes X Windows, you might want to reconsider "worst design imaginable". There were dozens of serious attempts at a remote GUI applications framework from the 70s to the 90s. HTML + JavaScript is the one that fi
198.
by neilk 4y ago
This is an ingenious idea, one that becomes obvious only in retrospect. To me this feels like a merger of the ideas in projects like magic-wormhole, Wormhole.app, and the (defunct) Mozilla Send. But then it adds a kind of sharchive twist us
199.
by neilk 4y ago
I suspect this is an attempt to troll us all into fighting, by bringing up a beloved conference that some might classify as “woke”. But anyway, there’s something to what you say but I think that analogy doesn’t go very far. Every year the h
200.
by neilk 4y ago
That’s what I’m seeing too. I had a problem with some Hashicorp Packer scripts and posed it to ChatGPT. It did have an idea of the shape of the problem. To solve it the bot just hallucinated syntax. It spoke with great authority that this w
201.
by neilk 4y ago
> (there has been no large move to adopt ACLs or file attributes, for example, although file capabilities have snuck into common use on Linux systems) This is largely true for any server you’re likely to ssh into. But the most common Lin
202.
by neilk 4y ago
Created a sports news site. I was very proud of it - in the mid-90s it was fully internationalized for European audiences, and could deliver minute by minute updates. Mostly it was for journalists who would then relay the info over their me
203.
by neilk 4y ago
Did a lot of work on Wikipedia with media, usability, and internationalization. As with all such things that merely facilitate volunteers, it’s hard to say what’s mine or put dollar values on it. But it’s touched at least a billion lives, a
204.
by neilk 4y ago
There are paid administrators and developers, but also unpaid ones too. Yes, there are volunteer sysadmins, some with the exact same authorizations as WMF employees. With modern infrastructure as code, they can even contribute to how the si
205.
by neilk 4y ago
A reasonable case but far overstated and undernuanced. It’s true that there are plenty of ultra-wealthy people with Black Lives Matter signs on their yard and post hashtag-defund-the-police. But there are also public defenders from non-priv
206.
by neilk 4y ago
Email is the paradigmatic example. You can export your mailbox and use `pine` if that's your jam. But in the real world, most users of Gmail will depend on at least one feature of Gmail that isn't easily replicable elsewhere.
207.
by neilk 4y ago
You are correct. The greatest threat to someone providing a service based on an open protocol is that users might pick up and leave. Consequently, a service provider will plow enormous resources into differentiating their service, and gener
208.
by neilk 4y ago
Big company executives do not see the world the way you do. Creative Cloud alone has at least 5x the users of Figma. I have no idea how to even calculate all the users of all Adobe products. I guarantee that a lot of people at Adobe see Fig
209.
by neilk 4y ago
You're raising an interesting point, but you're coming close to saying that communities are bad, and in my experience they don't have to be. Even ones based around a product. Near where I used to live in the Valley, there was
210.
by neilk 4y ago
They put Google in the lead paragraph just to hook people's attention. I don't think Google has ever done MBTI or any other standardized personality test. However, around 2005, I knew of interns who were interviewing for permanent

More ›