xyzzy123

9 ms·

121.
by xyzzy123 9mo ago
A bottle of water in the desert and a bottle of water in your fridge don't have the same value.
122.
by xyzzy123 9mo ago
It looks a LOT like a CIA front. EDIT: Sorry... that is too strong... "state aligned influence media". Note that the headline might be true, or it might not, but that source is quite glowy.
123.
by xyzzy123 9mo ago
You mean… by making a forward-looking estimates of cost, time-to-value, return? (even if it's implicit, not documented, vibes-based?). When devs refuse to estimate, it just pushes the estimating up the org chart. Execs still have to co
124.
by xyzzy123 9mo ago
How would you decide between doing project (a) this quarter, or project (b)? If you cannot (or refuse to) estimate cost or probability of success in a timebox you have no way to figure out ROI. To rationally allocate money to something, so
125.
by xyzzy123 9mo ago
Sorry, I edited the plumbing refence out of my comment because I saw a sibling post that made a similar point. I agree there is less uncertainty in plumbing - but not none. My brother runs a plumbing company and they do lose money on jobs s
126.
by xyzzy123 9mo ago
The top down push for timelines is because: In Australia, an SDE + overhead costs say $1500 / work day, so 4 engineers for a month is about $100k. The money has to be allocated from budgets and planned for etc. Dev effort affects the f
127.
by xyzzy123 9mo ago
Not a pro data guy but someone running something like what you're talking about for many years. These days 200TiB is "normal storage server" territory, not anything exotic. You can just do the most boring thing and it will be
128.
by xyzzy123 9mo ago
Making someone produce an identity document or turn on their camera for a selfie absolutely tanks your funnel. It's dire. The effect is strong enough that a service which doesn't require that will outcompete a service which doe
129.
by xyzzy123 9mo ago
Regulatory risk around child safety. DSA article 28 and stuff like that. Age prediction is actually the "soft" version; i.e, try not to bother most users with verification, but do enough to reasonably claim you meet requirements.
130.
by xyzzy123 9mo ago
I have worked in this space, and my experience was that usually age / identity verification is driven by regulatory or fraud requirements. Usually externally imposed. Product managers hate this, they want _minimum_ clicks for onboardin
131.
by xyzzy123 9mo ago
Random forums aren't worth suing. Legally, reddit is not treated as responsible for content that users post under section 230, i.e, this battle has already been fought. On the other hand, if I post bad advice on my own website and so
132.
by xyzzy123 9mo ago
The different is that OpenAI have much deeper pockets. I think there's also a legal perception that since AI is a new area, anything related to liability, IP, etc might be "up for grabs".
133.
by xyzzy123 9mo ago
It does feel like ensh*ttification. I can't imagine how many school essays and law filings and papers these ads are going to end up embedded in. But the most charitable view is that even AGI needs cost recovery. Ads are the way you do
134.
by xyzzy123 9mo ago
It depends on the application but there are lots of situations where a proper test suite is 10x or more the development work of the feature. I've seen this most commonly with "heavy" integrations. A concrete example would be
135.
by xyzzy123 9mo ago
One tactic I've seen used in various situations is proxies outside the sandbox that augment requests with credentials / secrets etc. Doesn't help in the case where the LLM is processing actually sensitive data, ofc.
136.
by xyzzy123 9mo ago
Fellow old guy here, I think this is _really_ noticeable in shows for young kids, across most mediums. There's been a sort of, not sure what to call it, cocomelonization of everything? You can see it clearly in long running shows, such
137.
by xyzzy123 10mo ago
I think because in the west, Christianity provides a common language and framework for expressing very strong feelings of guilt and redemption. Also what it means to have a spiritual crisis and have to reorganise your life and personality.
138.
by xyzzy123 10mo ago
All those sorts of protections seem like they make sense for every worker rather than being "tech" specific. I do understand that collective bargaining could help with carving out sector-specific deals, though. I wonder if there i
139.
by xyzzy123 10mo ago
But what are you negotiating about? What do all tech workers have in common that wouldn't be better addressed with top level regulations like "right to disconnect"?
140.
by xyzzy123 10mo ago
Part of being in a union tends to be lawyering up and "nailing down" exactly what everyone's duties in detail and what fair compensation might be, and what terms / conditions might be etc. Personally I don't think
141.
by xyzzy123 10mo ago
I think a lot of people don't understand the difference between geopolitical control and economic control. Being explicit, I'm saying that having access to a resource doesn't mean you get to sell it to whoever you like.
142.
by xyzzy123 10mo ago
Most businesses get their inputs from suppliers and add value to produce an output. Even if you could afford to build your own datacenters you could not make the chips. Any realistic business will have a web of suppliers. I think before you
143.
by xyzzy123 10mo ago
I'm not sure you can get around the principal-agent problem that easily. Who sets the policy levers on the automation and governs it? They inherit the ceo's negotiating leverage with shareholders. It seems like you'd need som
144.
by xyzzy123 10mo ago
I didn't mean it as a moral statement, but as a practical observation that a person with effective control over a company has a lot of leverage when it comes to negotiating resource splits. Also, you want them to be aligned.
145.
by xyzzy123 10mo ago
What is the difference that explains why this doesn't seem to happen for humans in the ceo role, but would happen if the role were fulfilled by automation?
146.
by xyzzy123 10mo ago
Because the people supplying the automation would extract the surplus that otherwise goes to the ceo?
147.
by xyzzy123 10mo ago
Open cameras make information that was previously local and difficult to collect global and easier to collect. Relatively, it reduces the privacy and power of people on the ground in your neighbourhood and increases the power of more distan
148.
by xyzzy123 10mo ago
One of the worst things IMHO is a loss of... hard to explain, but optionality? When the price of shelter is high and the need for occupational specialisation is also high, you feel more "trapped", situationally. It seems like peop
149.
by xyzzy123 10mo ago
It seems to me like the use case for local GPUs is almost entirely privacy. If you buy a 15k AUD rtx 6000 96GB, that card will _never_ pay for itself on a gpt-oss:120b workload vs just using openrouter - no matter how many tokens you push t
150.
by xyzzy123 10mo ago
Amazon is the second largest retailer in the world, 250 billion dollars of revenue is a lot of anecdotes and IMHO does kinda add up to being data.

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