twoodfin

3 ms·

1.
by twoodfin 13d ago
RE: JXTA, right around the turn of the century, it felt like there was an opportunity for a globe-spanning peer-to-peer application layer, based on content-addressable storage. DHTs—Chord paper was 2001—started popping up. The big software
2.
by twoodfin 13d ago
Citrix is still everywhere you need a client that can do things a web browser can’t—like run ancient VB4 software or talk to device hardware—deployed at scale. Citrix was bought out by PE for $16.5B a few years ago, under the (sadly correct
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by twoodfin 14d ago
Because lawyers are notoriously affordable and transparent in their pricing & quality? There’s a reason very few guild-like professions have survived to the present day.
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by twoodfin 14d ago
The upside is to the folks who sold the businesses they owned. Should they be outlawed from selling to certain classes of investor? Which?
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by twoodfin 14d ago
It’s been a very long time since I watched Survivor, but in the early seasons at least it was obvious that the producers were also manipulating the game as it went along to increase the drama. Tribe shakeups, double/no immunity, second
6.
by twoodfin 17d ago
Rather than a myth, it’s more of a meme in the sense of “naturally selected, self-replicating idea”. Hits all the right buttons for the motivated reasoner: An eco-disaster that our brains aren’t climate-change numb to. A threat to the most
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by twoodfin 20d ago
Just a guess: Because the product line is so much older, the Mac design tooling is different and not as readily amenable to publishing this data. Under this theory, the Neo is present because it was designed like an iOS device rather than l
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by twoodfin 22d ago
Then why the need for new taxes? You’re right that California tax revenue is way up, too.
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by twoodfin 22d ago
CA’s spending, including Federal funds, was $183B 20 years ago, before the GFC. Today it’s $539B. Total inflation has been about 64%, California’s population has grown by only about 10%. California has a spending and state capacity problem,
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by twoodfin 22d ago
You believe essential infrastructure is air-gapped from the public internet today?
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by twoodfin 22d ago
I dunno, do you really want to bet that if you took a deliberately unaligned frontier model and asked it to permanently disable the US power grid, it would do a poor job of it? What odds would you take on this bet? I’m disturbingly close to
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by twoodfin 22d ago
There will be a big confab at the White House by the end of the month, announcing a voluntary pacing regime roughly along these lines, codified by executive order to avoid antitrust issues.
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by twoodfin 22d ago
The LLMs are going to turn us into stochastic parrots.
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by twoodfin 22d ago
I suspect it’s more like Claude etc. optimizing for a tone that gets the green checkmark from RLHF reviewers, probably over and over in many contexts where style is otherwise an incidental concern.
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by twoodfin 23d ago
hn comment threads on most articles have rapidly taken on the character of Reddit threads ca. 2009. This argument in particular was a classic back then. I’ve started downvoting inanity and flagging one-liner, content-less snark, but unless
16.
by twoodfin 23d ago
Only about 2500 Americans died at Pearl Harbor. I don’t know what automobile safety was like in 1941, but I’m sure it wasn’t great, then, either. I’m therefore not sure what weight this argument is supposed to carry.
17.
by twoodfin 25d ago
“Everyone knew” that in-band signaling was an awful, horribly insecure idea… until we found magic math that couldn’t “think” any other way. I don’t think it’s reasonable to blame the Unicode authors for not anticipating this turn of events.
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Terence Tao – Reflections on the Foundations of Interpretability Workshop(youtube.com)
1 points by twoodfin 27d ago|0 comments
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by twoodfin 27d ago
“All the post-9/11 security measures other than… are worthless theater.” My point is that many of those security measures are largely invisible to passengers, but for the introduction of things like “Trusted Traveler #”’s
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by twoodfin 27d ago
One of the best examples of this: Streaming video. Literally a dream for decades, with billions of dollars spent on technology, marketing, infrastructure by huge incumbent players and startups alike. Netflix didn’t innovate much on any of t
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by twoodfin 28d ago
Under-explored in this article is the degree to which pre-NT/95 Microsoft (particularly BillG) was obsessed with NeXT, at least if you believe Steven Sinofsky: https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/009-
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by twoodfin 28d ago
An awful lot of money was spent on systems to track and profile fliers. It’s the reason TSA Precheck is a thing at all.
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by twoodfin 29d ago
No selective HUMINT is worthwhile?
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by twoodfin 29d ago
Also not “highly processed” in ways that weren’t common 80 years ago or more, which cuts against the correlation->causation connection here.
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by twoodfin 1mo ago
Indeed: “Our hosts began to pass the Turing test within the first year.” Required sci-fi suspension-of-disbelief in 2017, and then at some point in the last few years we just blew by that one. Later seasons of the show were much less dramat
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by twoodfin 1mo ago
That statement, the associated signatories, and their commentary are unsettling in the extreme! If this is all just hype for equity valuation, it’d be the most impressive coordinated disinformation campaign of all time.
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by twoodfin 1mo ago
Taking as given this model meets the “Critical cybersecurity threshold” as defined by OpenAI: Could the Federal government use the Defense Production Act or other legal tools to compel OpenAI to deliver the un-guarded model weights for nati
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by twoodfin 1mo ago
Given how frequently this kind of punchy-but-vacuous slop gets voted onto the hn front page, the hacking seems to be working.
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by twoodfin 1mo ago
We are far too casual about addiction, and suits that endorse language like this are doing more harm to society’s rational appraisal of risks than good. If your kid is addicted to crack cocaine, they have a problem that is light-years furth
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by twoodfin 1mo ago
European citizens should have obstacles put into their path to access one of the great life-enhancing technologies of the last century … so they will vote for the “right” policies as implemented by the politicians setting up those obstacles

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