sobiolite · HackerLangs

The analogy to MLM doesn’t work. In a pyramid scheme, early investors are guaranteed money, whereas late investors are guaranteed losses. With a vibe-coding platform, everyone has the same (extremely low) odds of building a hit app, so is at least more equitable in that sense.

sobiolite

23일 전discuss

Aren't they serving the same thing? Proactively and reactively keeping you healthy requires understanding your body, both the baseline of how it functions when you're healthy, and how it functions when you're not.

Right now we're often in a situation where the only data you have is expensive tests ran when you're sick enough to justify them, when it may already be too late.

sobiolite

지난달discuss

London property is expensive, but £180k is a lot more than the "minimum". I am on half that, and I managed to buy.

sobiolite

지난달discuss

Let the market decide what, though? What the market cares about may be different from what you care about, if the average investor has a higher tolerance for risk that you do. For pension funds, long term stability is key. A wide spread of large companies has traditionally been a good way to achieve that, but that isn’t guaranteed.

sobiolite

2개월 전discuss

I mouse right-handed because it’s convenient, but I still naturally default to doing any novel task left-handed. It’s not a matter of fine motor skills, you can learn to do anything with either hand if you decide to, it’s just an unconscious preference.

sobiolite

3개월 전discuss

Human communication and reasoning is the end result of billions of years of evolution. I'd be very surprised if LLMs can fundamentally alter it in a few years.

When considering phenomenon like these, I think people seriously underestimate what I'd call the "fashion effect". When a new technology, medium or aesthetic appears, it can have a surprisingly rapid influence on behaviour and discourse. The human social brain seems especially susceptible to novelty in this way.

Because the effects appear so fast and are often so striking, even disturbing, due to their unfamiliarity, it is tempting to imagine that they represent a fundamental transformation and break from the existing technological, social and moral order. And we extrapolate that their rapid growth will continue unchecked in its speed and intensity, eventually crowding out everything that came before it.

But generally this isn't what happens, because often what a lot of what we're seeing is just this new thing occupying the zeitgeist. Eventually, its novelty passes, the underlying norms of human behaviour reassert themselves, and society regresses to the mean. Not completely unchanged, but not as radically transformed as we feared either. The new phenomenon goes from being the latest fashion to overexposed and lame, then either fades away entirely, retreats to a niche, or settles in as just one strand of mainstream civilisational diversity.

LLMs will certainly have an effect on how humans reason and communicate, but the idea that they will so effortlessly reshape it is, in my opinion, rather naive. The comments in this thread alone prove that LLM-speak is already a well-recognised dialect replete with clichés that most people will learn to avoid for fear of looking bad.

sobiolite

3개월 전discuss

The comment said "Claude Code also found one thousand false positive bugs, which developers spent three months to rule out.".

Please explain how a bug can both be unvalidated, and also have undergone a three month process to determine it is a false positive?

sobiolite

4개월 전discuss

I’m not with I could ever migrate away from Gmail, even if I wanted to. I have so many accounts and services linked to it.

sobiolite

4개월 전discuss

Are you suggesting that authors didn't know or understand that commercial exploitation of their OSS contributions was possible? If so, that is a complete misrepresentation of history. There has always been open-source licenses that disallowed commercial use. Authors have chosen not to use them, and instead chose licenses, such as MIT/GPL, that allowed commercial use. And there has always been commercial use of OSS. Big companies, small companies, tech companies, oil and gas companies, weapons manufacturers, banks, hardware companies, etc. They all use OSS and they all make a profit from it, without giving anything back to the people who originally wrote it. That's not an edge case or an unexpected consequence, it a fundamental tenet of free (as in freedom) software: You do not get to choose who uses it, or how they use it.

sobiolite

4개월 전discuss

That review is a year old. Just maybe it’s improved since then?

sobiolite

6개월 전discuss

The nearest "absolutely fucked" pub to me hasn't existed since 2008. I'd say they have bigger problems than a rates increase.

sobiolite

9개월 전discuss

What I'm suggesting is: what if AIs get so good at crafting vulnerable (but apparently innocent) code than human review cannot reliably catch them?

And saying "ones that get less attention will continue to get less attention" is like imagining that only popular email addresses get spammed. Once malice is automated, everyone gets attention.

sobiolite

9개월 전discuss

I wonder if we're going to end up in an arms race between AIs masquerading as contributors (and security researchers) trying to introduce vulnerabilities into popular libraries, and AIs trying to detect and fix them.

sobiolite

10개월 전discuss

So I do think we're in a bubble, but I also remember when all the discussion around here was around Uber, and I read many, many hot takes about how they were vastly unprofitable, had no real business model, could never be profitable, and only existed because investors were pumping in money and as soon as they stopped, Uber would be dead. Well, it's now ten years later, Uber still exists, and last year they made $43.9bn in revenue and net income of $9.8bn.

sobiolite

10개월 전discuss

> Nakamura responded to Kramnik’s allegations by arguing that focusing on a particular streak while ignoring other games was cherry-picking. The researchers note that there’s a problem with this argument, too, as it violates the likelihood principle. This principle tells us the interpretation should only rely on the actual data observed, not the context in which it was collected.

I don't quite understand this objection? If I won the lottery at odds of 10 million to 1, you'd say that was a very lucky purchase. But if it turned out I bought 10 million tickets, then that context would surely be important for interpreting what happened, even if the odds of that specific ticket winning would be unchanged?

sobiolite

10개월 전discuss

Perhaps, but Hank Green published a pretty convincing argument recently that electricity supply has nowhere the necessary elasticity, and the politicised nature of power generation in the US means that isn't going to change:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39YO-0HBKtA

sobiolite

10개월 전discuss

Won’t this be solved fairly soon when package managers have automatic scanning of updates by AIs that are superhumanly good at spotting malicious code?

sobiolite

10개월 전discuss

I've noticed the same when looking at old Georgian and Victorian maps of London. You get these surprisingly sharp edges between urban and rural. You often have streets lined with quite grand buildings and nothing but fields behind them. It's quite strange when you're used to modern cities that gradually peter out into suburbs.

My guess is it's because at this point the population of cities was growing quickly, but the large scale migration of farm laborers into them hadn't begun in earnest yet. So most of the housing being built at the edges was intended for the expanding merchant classes, who wanted something a bit more impressive, and who also had live in servants. The Georgian terraces of London are typically three or four storeys, with the top storey being rooms with low-ceilings where the servants lived.