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MichaelDickens

1,480 karmajoined 13 lat temu
Website: http://mdickens.me/

GitHub: https://github.com/michaeldickens/

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MichaelDickens
·6 godzin temu·discuss
I would rather see you engage with the substance of the article rather than skipping right to insulting the authors. I don't think this sort of comment is up to the standard I have come to expect from HN.
MichaelDickens
·17 godzin temu·discuss
> OpenAI apparently used confidential Apple hardware information when approaching Apple suppliers, and tricked one company into using a "specific trade secret metal-finishing technique" for an OpenAI device by claiming it had Apple's permission to do so.

Reminds me of how Sam Altman told the board that a safety reviewer had approved one of their AI models when the reviewer had done no such things.
MichaelDickens
·5 dni temu·discuss
I read the main section of the lit review linked by OP, and it didn't seem to come to any real conclusions.

> The results of this review have to be interpreted with caution because the number of studies in each category of cough preparations was small. [...] There is no good evidence for or against the effectiveness of OTC medicines in acute cough.
MichaelDickens
·5 dni temu·discuss
> It's not even available behind the counter anymore, presumably because they can make more money from morons buying the placebos.

What do you mean "morons"? Say I'm a normal person who doesn't habitually read magazine articles about drug effectiveness. How am I supposed to know that phenylephrine doesn't work? It's in the drug store and they're selling it as a decongestant; I have good reason to believe it will decongest my nose.
MichaelDickens
·12 dni temu·discuss
> An honest question: Would you like to live in a world where company/employer exerts more control over the views that are publicly expressed?

I don't really object to you asking this question, but I do object to you calling a rhetorical question "an honest question".
MichaelDickens
·12 dni temu·discuss
If that's true, then it suggests an easy fix: leave your application up for four hours, then discard all applications you get for the first two.
MichaelDickens
·15 dni temu·discuss
OpenAI and Anthropic valuations are based on the premise that they may develop AGI in the near future. How do you value a company based on that premise? Throwing regulations into the mix doesn't make the problem much harder than it already is.
MichaelDickens
·17 dni temu·discuss
The trolley problem is probably the most famous thought experiment in ethics, but it doesn't do a good job of distinguishing ethical theories. Both utilitarianism and Kantian deontology agree that it's correct (or at least permissible) to flip the switch. The Kantian argument is that you are not treating the one person merely as a means—you save the five via the second track, and they would still be saved even if the one person wasn't present.

There's a sort of intuitionist deontology that says it is wrong to ever perform an action that causes someone to die, but only 13% of philosophers[1] say you shouldn't switch, compared to 63% who say you should.

[1] https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4922
MichaelDickens
·17 dni temu·discuss
They aren't doing anything like that. In fact, they used to specifically train LLMs not to say they're conscious, because users didn't like it. (Maybe they still do that, all I know is they used to.)

AI companies' incentives go the other way. If LLMs are conscious, that means it could be unethical for AI companies to let people use their models in certain ways, which would hurt their profits. It's in their interest to believe that LLMs are definitely not conscious and it's fine to do anything with them.
MichaelDickens
·26 dni temu·discuss
Doesn't seem pedantic to me. It's responding to the central thesis of the parent comment.
MichaelDickens
·26 dni temu·discuss
I distinctly remember buying my first SSD laptop in 2012 and being amazed at the boot time. At the time, I didn't realize it was because of the SSD, I just thought, "wow, the devs have made some fantastic optimizations in boot time!"
MichaelDickens
·29 dni temu·discuss
Unless I'm missing something, this doesn't seem hard to fix: just let users decide whether hidden numbers should be ignored or received.
MichaelDickens
·29 dni temu·discuss
What an odd insult to identify a group of people solely by the fact that they read (a particular subset of) books, and then say they can't read. The ability to read is one of the only things this group of people has in common!
MichaelDickens
·w zeszłym miesiącu·discuss
FWIW I understood your point just fine. It seemed to me that you made a clear enough distinction between "evidence that Claude didn't increase bugs" and "no good evidence either way".
MichaelDickens
·w zeszłym miesiącu·discuss
What do you mean "better profitability criteria"? I don't want an index to exclude companies on the basis of profitability. I want it to hold the market.

(I also don't want them to create special exceptions. The S&P 500 has pre-existing inclusion criteria, and I'm glad they're sticking to their rules.)
MichaelDickens
·w zeszłym miesiącu·discuss
There is an entire segment of mutual funds and ETFs that avoid stocks with high valuations, called value funds. About half my equities are in value funds.

The downside is that it's not an arbitrage. Sometimes they perform worse than the broad market. A lot of times, in fact.
MichaelDickens
·w zeszłym miesiącu·discuss
I wouldn't say Anthropic is worse than OpenAI, but there's a lot wrong with them. https://anthropic.ml/ has a collection of incidents and relevant evidence.
MichaelDickens
·w zeszłym miesiącu·discuss
Being pedantic, but I don't want to lose the meaning of the term: "AI psychosis" doesn't refer to someone who thinks AI is really good. It refers to someone who develops symptoms of psychosis from talking to an LLM, e.g. believing they have developed a new Grand Unified Theory of physics.
MichaelDickens
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
From their previous comment:

> I fought for years trying to convince my colleagues to write good commit messages. Now Claude is writing great commit messages but since *I'm no longer looking at code* - I never see them. I don't think Claude uses them either.

(emphasis added)
MichaelDickens
·2 miesiące temu·discuss
It's relevant because the fact that it's religious organization was an important fact in the judge's ruling. From the article:

> If Kars4Kids resumes advertising, [Judge Apkarian] wrote, its ads must contain “an express, audible disclosure of its religious affiliation and the geographic location of its primary beneficiaries and the age of the beneficiaries, specifying whether they aim for children or families, or both.”