thwarted · HackerLangs

Leap days, February 29th, are not at the level of time zones. Different time zones do not disagree as to when March 1st will occurs immediately after February 28th.

thwarted

vorgesterndiscuss

> "What's your favorite sarcopterygian?"

Am I reading your post correctly, this question is the prompt given to an LLM? What is anyone expecting by asking an LLM what its favorite anything is? This is a conversational prompt, so accuracy and rigor is barely applicable or expected, so downgrading to a lesser model should be acceptable. If you really want to attribute preference to an LLM, consider the downgrade to be a "this conversation is beneath my advanced n-billion parameter training".

thwarted

vor 5 Tagendiscuss

> extra capabilities you get from an ActiveRecord framework such as full-stack admin pages

The naive "here's a row-level view of the database records" that things like ActiveRecord/ActiveAdmin give you by default are entirely inappropriate for any line of business administrative interaction. Line of business admin sites should be workflow based and focused on surfacing specific information needed for processes outside of the admin site itself. Non-developer staff should not be expected to interpret the state of rows and relationships among the tables.

thwarted

vor 8 Tagendiscuss

"We have this thing that's awesome that we can convince people to buy" eventually becomes "We can convince people to buy". It's unfortunate that "convince people to buy" can be successfully used independently of the quality or appropriateness of the item being sold.

thwarted

vor 17 Tagendiscuss

> younger folks don't fully adjust for important factors: plane hijackings used to be much more common

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings

(I can not say how comprehensive that wikipedia list is).

There's more in the 70s and 80s than I was expecting (having lived through the 80s), but given how many flights there are, hijackings have been and are exceedingly rare; and most of these are not even US flights. These are "driving is orders of magnitude more dangerous than flying" and "10x a very small number is still a very small number" numbers.

https://businesstats.com/global-air-traffic-number-of-flight...

https://easbcn.com/en/how-many-planes-fly-per-day-around-the...

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/world-air-pas...

These numbers only serve to re-enforce that the response of giving up liberty for (the feeling of) security due to terrorist action in the US was probably outsized. General population awareness in general was probably more of a deterrent after 9/11 than any of the first order 9/11 response actions, especially considering that the US gave countries in the middle east further reason to hate Americans and US foreign policy after 9/11. Obviously, terrorist attacks get a lot of air time and column inches, which feeds the perception of the risk.

thwarted

vor 19 Tagendiscuss

It's rich that the cohort that sees identity verification and real names policies as necessary and meaningful also doesn't seem to understand the first thing about identity and names.

thwarted

vor 23 Tagendiscuss

It's safer in the same sense as if you're paranoid about your date being a serial killer, you meet them in a public venue. It doesn't mean your date isn't a serial killer, but the risk profile is different because other people can be involved/witness/have context.

You didn't use the word "safe", you used the relative term "safer", and on average, it is harder to hide ill intent in open source software, there's a greater chance it will eventually be discovered. The blast radius is larger for open source (because the barrier to using it is lower), which increases the number of people impacted, but an increase in the number of people impacted also increases the chance of discovery and motivation to address it once discovered.

thwarted

vor 29 Tagendiscuss

"I need you to turn your key and enable the missile silo's MCP server, sir".

~ the opening scene from a reboot of War Games, probably.

A few years ago there was consternation over the US's missile launch system using 8" floppy disks, that it was needless archaic and had never been updated. Can't say that if the launch is mediated by the latest hotness LLM.

thwarted

vor 30 Tagendiscuss

Reducing buffer size puts back pressure on the whole system, which can be valuable to manage load (but often throttles faster stages and that throttling makes people uncomfortable). A meaningful metric is how much of the buffer is used at any given time and the throughout. If the buffer is backed up, that says there's a bottle neck on the consumption side of the buffer and more bandwidth is needed there. For whatever reason, adjusting buffer sizes is the more common action taken. A buffer provides throughput management but it also provides info/metrics about the operation of the system.

thwarted

vor 30 Tagendiscuss

I remember a book I read as a pre-teen, 40 or so years ago, about a kid who wanted to be "perfect". A wear a tree of broccoli on a string around your neck to learn how to overcome embarrassment. A perfect person never makes mistakes, and the best way to not make mistakes is to not do anything. Similar "requirements" of perfection and their expression are presented. The kid eventually finds himself in an empty room, by himself, doing nothing, wearing broccoli. Perfection was achieved, but at the cost of an extremely boring life.

thwarted

letzten Monatdiscuss

Having a key isn't a distinguishing aspect, it's the position in the "web of trust" network that is important.

thwarted

letzten Monatdiscuss

Interesting, TIL. That makes the conversion to @2001 even stranger.

thwarted

letzten Monatdiscuss

> "[IPv6:2001:etc:etc::192.etc.etc]"

I'm trusting this is a throwaway example and that you used a real IPv6 address literal in this test, without the "IPv6" and with only colons and no dots (unless you mean to use v4 mapped address with dots)? Because this IPv6 literal is so malformed that I'm hardly expecting it to do something sane and changing that to "@2001" is nasal-demons quality undefined behavior. I tried with this exact literal and it let me send it but then there was a tiny red pop-up at the top of the gmail interface that said "could not be delivered, check your network connection" (which is odd; the same kind of pop-up that appears in gray when you legitimately are not connected to the internet) and it ended up in my drafts with the To: field empty.

I just tried to send a message to a "test@[" my current IPv6 address "]", and gmail told me

    Error
    The address "test@[«redacted»]" in the "To" field was not recognized.
    Please make sure that all addresses are properly formed.

This address doesn't have an MDA listening on it, but it didn't accept it enough to give me a non-delivery notification, it didn't even let me send it. gmail did accept an IPv4 address literal in brackets, although it hasn't given me back a non-delivery notification. What it stuffed into my Sent folder for this message has the square brackets stripped and the IPv4 address appears right after the @.

thwarted

letzten Monatdiscuss

> There are very principled reasons why LLMs do not know how many letters are in words, and it says nothing about their facility for understanding meaning. … Tokens are the most basic input unit of an LLM. But tokens don't generally correspond to words or letters, rather sub-word sequences. So Strawberry might be broken up into two tokens 'straw' and 'berry'.

This sounds like a description of a child who has not learned to read yet. You ask a child who is not aware of the alphabet and of "words" how many r's are in strawberry you'd get a non-sense answer too. So what you're really pointing out is that the LLMs have not been trained on "the english language" and how words are constructed and what they are composed of. That they operate by tokens that don't correspond to words or letters is irrelevant as an answer to why they can't count the letters in a word. It's not that I know how many r's are in strawberry because of how I'm understanding the word "strawberry", I know how many r's are in strawberry because I know how to spell strawberry. The LLM needs to be trained on this the same way someone who is learning to read would be trained on it. No one should be surprised that an LLM can't "read" in the same way no one should be surprised that a child can't "read".

thwarted

letzten Monatdiscuss

This "common sense" you refer to, is it the same common sense Babbage was subject to?

"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

~ Charles Babbage

thwarted

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

> it turned out that predicting elections is still very hard

So maybe we shouldn't be doing it. The value of predicting an election in the large out in public seems kind of dubious, and it's more like gambling than actually being useful. A candidate only runs, and continues running, if they think they can win. All predictions like these do is confuse voters leading up to election day and while they are voting. It keep candidates from making strong cases for their platform, keeps the voters from listening to the candidates' platforms, and encourages team-based partisan politics.

thwarted

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

When the default "search" results are AI, it's difficult, if not impossible, to "choose", since Google is pushing the AI so hard.

thwarted

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Sometimes a given presentation is called biased but it's not that the reporting is biased but that the actual event is or the source material is biased or lacking. "Dog bites man" is not biased against the dog if they don't or can't get the dog's take. And if they do get the dog's take and the dog wastes everyone's time by ranting/barking about cats and they don't print it, it's not the reporting that's biased, the dog squandered its chance to offer its perspective on the topic at hand.

Sometimes there is no "other side" or the other side offers meaningless contribution. The trend to present oneself as unbiased have often given platforms to voices that are not worthy of having a platform, for whatever reason, and someone needs to make a call, and they should be transparent about it. Are they not giving time because they choose to ignore legitimate and useful information or because giving someone a platform to rehash all the bogus reasons that the moon landing was faked again isn't worth it (to use an extreme example). Moon landing deniers can set up their own web site to push their faked moon landing agenda, they don't need to clutter up everyone else's content with their nonsense in the name of "unbiased reporting".

thwarted

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Isn't a "centi-millionaire" someone who has $10,000? Exactly what order of magnitude of millionaire was this person?

thwarted

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Recognizing someone's "fist" and other patterns in their communication is part of traffic analysis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis

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