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mcherm

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mcherm
·10 hari yang lalu·discuss
I frequently have trouble understanding both sides!
mcherm
·11 hari yang lalu·discuss
Yes, BUT...

If, indeed, the park was rented out for a private affair and the person managing that affair asked that someone be removed from the property, then like any case of trespass, it is within the purview of the police to remove that person.

It doesn't make the US look good, but I don't think it reflects poorly on the behavior of the Belgian police.
mcherm
·11 hari yang lalu·discuss
I suspect that the implication in context was that the 51st state would be Greenland. Which doesn't really help make this less of a diplomatic faux pas.
mcherm
·11 hari yang lalu·discuss
I find them gorgeous.

Admittedly, the term is unavoidably subjective. But what I like about them is that they are distinct, and that each one has character. Honestly, the fact that they looked like pictures I could find in a child's book is the main part of what I like about them: they have simple ideas ("a bird") and forms so distinctive a child could tell them apart.
mcherm
·19 hari yang lalu·discuss
> The US is really shooting itself in the foot here.

Not exactly. The close buddy with the owners of several other AI companies who has a known dispute with Anthropic and who has seized near-absolute power in the US is doing something that damages Anthropic. The fact that it also destroys long term prospects for the US overall is irrelevant because the individual can't think ahead and also doesn't care about the future of the US.

It's nearly the same thing in the end, but helpful to understand the cause.
mcherm
·21 hari yang lalu·discuss
So apparently you believe that a 17-year-old should not be allowed to (a) order a pizza; (b) drive a car; (c) adjust the thermostat, unless they live in a sort of pre-internet Amish society which is probably based on the level of technology that was widely available when you were a child.
mcherm
·bulan lalu·discuss
If you don't want to be called out for putting zero effort into the books that you publish, you probably shouldn't put zero effort into the books you publish!
mcherm
·bulan lalu·discuss
Nicely done!

I always felt that Python's "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." was a bit of a mess.

Obviously (to anyone who was around at the time), that plank was written in response to Perl's motto: "There is more than one way to do it."

Zig's original take on this, "Only one obvious way to do things" seems even worse. You see, both languages agree that Perl had it wrong: it is unhelpful to have several different ways to write any future. But they went a little too far: it is not actually bad for it to be possible to write the same thing in more than one way.

Zig's new phrasing: "There is an idiomatic way to do it." captures the CORRECT alternative to Perl's motto. It is not important that there be no alternative ways of writing something, Rather, it is important that there be a single idiomatic way to write it.
mcherm
·bulan lalu·discuss
I did.

Then the rules were changed.
mcherm
·2 bulan yang lalu·discuss
I don't think that's the real issue. The problems with billing and dashboards at cloud vendors are not new within the past few years, they have existed far longer than the LLM coding.
mcherm
·2 bulan yang lalu·discuss
There is one little-discussed down side to ever shorter-lived certificates...
mcherm
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Haven't you heard? Under the new form of government in the US, random tweets from the President ARE government policy, superseding laws and any act of Congress.

The Supreme Court has blessed this new form of government, declaring that the President is immune to all laws, but retaining for themselves the right to reverse any tweet on the "shadow docket".
mcherm
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Does it? How do you know?

If they start excluding random content (eg: .git) without effective notice, maybe they AREN'T backing up everything you think they are.
mcherm
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Some companies are in the business of trust. These companies NEED to understand that trust is somewhat difficult to earn, but easy to lose and nearly IMPOSSIBLE to regain. After reading this article I will almost certainly never use or recommend Backblaze. (And while I don't use them currently, they WERE on the list of companies I would have recommended due to the length of their history.)
mcherm
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
So you are suggesting that a private communications and messaging system that proports to offer reliable anonymity is a reasonable use case for more-or-less unsupervised development by Claude? Because that is just the sort of use case where I would NOT trust an unsupervised AI.
mcherm
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
How does my attention, the time I spend reading news.ycombinator.com, pay for the site? I DON'T run an ad blocker, but I am not watching any ads here.
mcherm
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
The significance of the changeover would be much more impactful if the chart showed a longer history.
mcherm
·4 bulan yang lalu·discuss
It's the third sentence of the article:

> the district court ruled that using the books to train LLMs was fair use but left for trial the question of whether downloading them for this purpose was legal.
mcherm
·4 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Many people are taking what I believe to be the wrong message here.

I believe the author's intent was (or should have been) to describe how THEY wanted to receive communication, not how EVERYONE should.

A skilled communicator will craft their message for the audience. Some want "just the facts" with no social lubricant. Others want the banter to build person-to-person relationships. Some want a quick statement of context for everything. If you can adjust the message to the audience you will be more successful at working with them.

I have begun including "how I want you to communicate with me" as part of my standard "introduce myself to new team members" talk.
mcherm
·4 bulan yang lalu·discuss
A specific example will help.

Imagine I am working for a company and I discover they are engaged in capturing and transporting human slaves. Furthermore, the government where they operate in fully aware and supportive of their actions so denouncing them publicly is unlikely to help. This is a real situation that has happened to real people at points in history in my own country.

I believe that one ethical response would be to violate my contract with the company by assisting slaves to escape and even providing them with passage to other places where slavery is illegal.

Now, if you agree with the ethics of the example I gave then you agree in principle that this can be ethical behavior and what remains to be debated is whether xAI's criminal behavior and support from the government rise to this same level. I know many who think that badly aligned AI could lead to the extinction of the human race, so the potential harm is certainly there (at least some believe it is), and I think the government support is strong enough that denouncing xAI for unethical behavior wouldn't cause the government to stop them.