wat10000

8 ms·

121.
by wat10000 1mo ago
We could do both. We can make cars safer and push on public transit.
122.
by wat10000 1mo ago
Sorry, I’m not following. What are the low risk behaviors you’re referring to and what makes them suddenly become unpredictably dangerous?
123.
by wat10000 1mo ago
It’s not whataboutism when you’re comparing the exact same actions and the two things can be substituted for each other. Whataboutism is “how dare you complain about our gulags when you treat your black people like slaves.” It is not “our s
124.
by wat10000 1mo ago
Oh good. I may be put at unnecessary risk because people have higher standards for automation, but at least the guy who killed me will go to jail, maybe.
125.
by wat10000 1mo ago
It should be a critical part of the evaluation. If you set the bar higher than “safer on average” then you’re going to delay the switch, and every month of delay will cost more lives. “Safer on average” is exactly when you should start usin
126.
by wat10000 1mo ago
That was kind of the original idea of RISC. Expose simple instructions that could be implemented without microcode. Push the complexity into the program instead of the microcode. Instead of writing a memory-to-memory add instruction that de
127.
by wat10000 1mo ago
The start menu shows news stories?! I haven’t used Windows for more than 30 seconds since XP. Every time I hear about what it’s become, I’m just baffled. I never considered it to be good , but at least it tried. Now it seems like another e
128.
by wat10000 1mo ago
I’m sure they’ll be critical in the sense that they’ll be heavily involved and the system set up to rely on them. I’m not so sure they’ll be critical in the sense that they substantially improve the process compared to today. Consider compu
129.
by wat10000 1mo ago
All of those things changed some individual lives I the short term, and changed societies in the long term. But they did not change societies in the short term. The average life in the decades before the printing press was pretty much the s
130.
by wat10000 1mo ago
Things are coming so much faster now. Writing has been around for thousands of years. But it caught on extremely slowly. It took thousands of years to spread across the globe. For thousands of years being literate was rare. The printing pre
131.
by wat10000 1mo ago
The platform already supports it.
132.
by wat10000 1mo ago
How does providing the specs to run Linux on a MacBook open them them up to competition from junky used eBay laptops?
133.
by wat10000 1mo ago
I’d say this one is frequently true, and is one of the things that distinguishes senior from junior programmers.
134.
by wat10000 1mo ago
Falsehoods programmers believe about programming: you don’t have to work around other people’s bugs.
135.
by wat10000 1mo ago
Go without air for a few minutes and you’ll die, and yet they give the stuff away for free.
136.
by wat10000 1mo ago
How inference works is you do a bunch of math and token weights come out, and then you pick one based on some sampling policy. “Prediction” is really about how they’re trained than how they run afterwards.
137.
by wat10000 1mo ago
Right. But that's never what the discussion is about. This is the first time I've seen someone say, "it's not just a next-token predictor because a bunch of the training isn't about predicting the next token."
138.
by wat10000 1mo ago
I'd guess it comes down to what counts as "the government." Millions of people work for the federal government, and millions more for state and local governments. Is there widespread corruption among them? I don't think
139.
by wat10000 1mo ago
The discourse around this is annoying. A big group of people use "next-token predictor" to imply that LLMs aren't capable of anything interesting. Another big group of people opposes the use of "next-token predictor&quot
140.
by wat10000 1mo ago
It's bad policy to influence prices by subsidizing one particular input that has much broader uses. Subsidizing diesel means you're indirectly subsidizing rice and flour, but also luxury cars and fancy watches.
141.
by wat10000 1mo ago
Different kind of "everyone benefits from it." There's "individual people benefit when they pay for themselves and everyone does this" and then there's "everyone benefits from each individual receiving it.
142.
by wat10000 1mo ago
Just because everyone benefits from it doesn’t mean it’s good to subsidize it.
143.
by wat10000 1mo ago
You could definitely call it stark, but the comment I replied to suggested that it would be well over 50%.
144.
by wat10000 1mo ago
The site covers a 300,000 year span, so a randomly chosen year would average ~150,000 BCE, which definitely isn't happening. The skew towards the present isn't as stark as that. World population has exploded in the past couple of
145.
by wat10000 1mo ago
Could you be a little more specific? https://www.prb.org/news/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-... puts the halfway point at over 2,000 years ago, so you'd expect less than 50% probability of getting a random
146.
by wat10000 1mo ago
Bear in mind that the population curve defaults to a log scale on the year axis. If you switch it over to linear, that big fat area at the end shrinks to a needle-like spike..
147.
by wat10000 1mo ago
How near is near? With ~100 billion people having ever lived, the odds of a randomly selected life falling within the past couple of centuries are not all that high.
148.
by wat10000 1mo ago
Right, that 42% dying before age 5 means the survivors typically lived well beyond 28. There weren’t a huge number of people living into their 80s, but 28 wouldn’t have been “old man” territory.
149.
by wat10000 1mo ago
Big companies are all becoming user hostile these days. They act like the customer is an inconvenience rather than a fundamental part of their business. Every interaction exudes this feeling that your primary role is to serve as an unwanted
150.
by wat10000 1mo ago
Typed allocator migration just requires a recompile, it’s not a big job.

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