sanderjd

30 ms·

631.
by sanderjd 1y ago
The meaning of my last sentence is "You (should) always use units (or else there will inevitably be some mistake eventually due to confusion about the units)".
632.
by sanderjd 1y ago
Yes. The point is that for some reason dB seems particularly susceptible to people dropping the units. For instance, I've heard loudness of sounds described in decibels for my whole life, and first saw the actual units people are descr
633.
by sanderjd 1y ago
The explanation and motivating examples are in the article.
634.
by sanderjd 1y ago
If you were writing a research paper or engineering artifact rather than having a casual conversation, you should specify the units ("years old") for age as well.
635.
by sanderjd 1y ago
This is literally the same as saying that you don't need to explicitly specify units in any field because "it all makes sense in context" to "engineers working in those fields". No. We've painstakingly figured
636.
by sanderjd 1y ago
This isn't what the article is about!
637.
by sanderjd 1y ago
I'm sorry, but did you read the article? This is not the complaint. If decibels were used only to measure sound relative to "experienced loudness" there would be no complaint. The complaint is that it is used in many other
638.
by sanderjd 1y ago
"It's weird and blunder prone but useful" is not actually a counterargument to the author, who is not arguing that it is not a useful thing.
639.
by sanderjd 1y ago
> In every context where decibels are used, either the unit they qualify is explicitly specified, or the unit is implicity known from the context. The author's whole point is that this is not true. To adapt your analogy, it's n
640.
by sanderjd 1y ago
Yeah maybe I buy it. But it reminds me of the investment in building out the infrastructure of the internet. That predates HN, but it's the kind of thing we would have debated here if we could have :)
641.
by sanderjd 1y ago
On (1): Investment volume relative to what? To me, it looks like a very similar pattern of investors crowding into the currently hot thing, trying to get a piece of the winners of the power law. On (2): I'm honestly not sure I think th
642.
by sanderjd 1y ago
I honestly think it's still way too early to say this either way. If your hypothesis that there are no breakthroughs left is right, then it's still a very big deal, but I'd agree with you that it's not steam engine level
643.
by sanderjd 1y ago
HN is always divided on "how much is the currently hype-y technology real vs just hype". I've seen this over and over again and been on different sides of the question on different technologies at different times. To me, th
644.
by sanderjd 1y ago
This seems very pedantic. The original comment's criticism remains valid with this description of what he says.
645.
by sanderjd 1y ago
I don't think it's nearly so easy to disentangle a person's ideology from the propaganda they have been exposed to. The way propaganda works is by nudging ideology. This goes for all of us. Some people do a worse and some a b
646.
by sanderjd 1y ago
Not if they work for a private company. Arguably, employees should just avoid working for private companies that have no mechanism for employees to participate in their equity. But in practice this is unrealistic for lots of people.
647.
by sanderjd 1y ago
I think the question is: What is the value of that intermediate step? It depends on how long the full path takes. If we're one year away from realizing a brave new world where everyone is going straight from natural language to machine
648.
by sanderjd 1y ago
Thanks! The information here is why I think it's extremely plausible that staffing shortages were disastrous here. But it also doesn't make the direct link. I think it's probably just too soon to know whether all the warnings
649.
by sanderjd 1y ago
I agree that DOGE is bad. But I also think it's unhelpful to claim evidence of a bad outcome directly caused by what they've done. It muddies the water and bolsters people who want to argue that people are only criticizing them ou
650.
by sanderjd 1y ago
This seems entirely plausible, but I'm not sure this article successfully makes this connection with direct evidence. Has anyone seen anything on this with better evidence?
651.
by sanderjd 1y ago
I saw that and thought it was an interesting dichotomy. I think a way to square the circle is to recognize that people have different goals at different times. As a person with a family who is not independently wealthy, I care a lot about b
652.
by sanderjd 1y ago
Yeah I haven't found the right language for this yet, but it's something like: I'm happy and optimistic about LLMs when I'm the one doing something, and more anxious about them when I'm supporting someone else i
653.
by sanderjd 1y ago
lol, if anything there was way more wall to wall coverage of that here
654.
by sanderjd 1y ago
A story that I think is clearly worth discussing on HN is "what seems to have happened with grok here?". Musk fiddling with the system prompt is only one of the possibilities. People here can make arguments for or against that the
655.
by sanderjd 1y ago
It looks like the system prompt may have been modified, or that it may be some kind of attack on the system prompt, or possibly someone attacking the training data, or it may be totally organic somehow, in which case it's still interes
656.
by sanderjd 1y ago
I wouldn't say "more than", I would just say that these are both different problems, with different impacts. I don't think it's obvious which thing is a bigger problem. But yes, I agree that the root causes are like
657.
by sanderjd 1y ago
Yeah, I do wonder if a survey question getting at "how concerned am I about the risk that I won't be able to find good work in 15 years" would be pretty well correlated with fertility rate decline. Most things I see look at c
658.
by sanderjd 1y ago
You've just moved the problem to explaining why "the percentage of the population taking birth control has increased significantly since that time". Your initial claim was that it was the availability of birth control. That i
659.
by sanderjd 1y ago
Two points: 1. In rich countries (like the US, where I live), some of the cost of children is subsidized for poor people. 2. Middle class parents are very unlikely to raise their children at the same cost as poor parents. If they can affo
660.
by sanderjd 1y ago
A few comments seem to make the assumption that "via computers" implies screens, but that assumption is not valid; computers can talk. I agree with the thrust of the pushback though. I think it seems like there would need to at le

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