cvoss · HackerLangs

5 дней назадdiscuss

This assumes that OP would make a different app choice if OP knew this context. And it also assumes OP does not know this context. Neither are supported by the evidence, since HN links are posted without OP commentary. Not everybody cares so much about this sort of thing and perhaps OP was drawn to the app for other reasons. HN is not a monoculture.

cvoss

7 дней назадdiscuss

Yes, it does need to be said. Many people will read this article and miss the satire, which is, in part, the intent of sophisticated satire. The point is that it is outlandish and foolish and ridiculous and yet still resembles some serious discourse that real people engage in. So much so that some onlookers can't tell the difference. That proves the satirist's thesis: the real world is full of ridiculous people making ridiculous arguments and they can't even see themselves or their arguments for what they are.

I know real life people who write essays with claims as outlandish as "software engineering is an ableist field" and are dead serious. But that assertion belongs just as well in a satire piece. It can be very hard to tell if you don't have prior context for the author.

cvoss

8 дней назадdiscuss

In fact, most states have a large number of elected officials in them, especially those elected officials who hold the legislative power of that state.

But if you meant the 500ish elected federal officials, most of whom are not Virginians or Marylanders, and so have neither any influence as voters nor as legislators, then... well I'm still not sure what you mean. Privacy laws are good. I don't see a reason to be cynical.

cvoss

11 дней назадdiscuss

The effect is going to be on the issuance or not of new warrants going forward in this domain.

The police could not have foreseen this ruling. It was not previously known that such warrants were unconstitutional. Now we know. Now judges are not to issue such warrants.

cvoss

14 дней назадdiscuss

Mozart is among the most famous Western composers, and, like others of his stature, all his extant manuscripts have been cataloged and studied extensively. To find a previously unknown manuscript is a major event in that scholarship.

cvoss

17 дней назадdiscuss

Yeah, it's definitely more challenging and fun on a self-imposed "hard mode" where you must employ the information that is revealed.

cvoss

18 дней назадdiscuss

Nice! I'm not actually sure what its mechanism is for providing the "least information". It could be smart and reply in a way that maximizes the number of remaining consistent answers. Or it could be greedy and try to report as many "grays" as possible, then as many "yellows" as possible, then resorting to "greens". The latter seems more likely to me, since its easier to implement.

cvoss

18 дней назадdiscuss

Another great variant is Unfair Wordle [1]. The opponent does not fix the answer upfront but instead evades the player's guesses as long as possible, providing you with the least information it legally can give (according to the usual rules) while still preserving a valid game completion path. The result is that your guesses end up looking extremely unlucky in retrospect.

[1] https://tweakimp.github.io/unfairwordle/

cvoss

29 дней назадdiscuss

I once received an internal defect report from my product's QA team. It was long and obvious that what they did was feed the error log into an LLM and ask it to diagnose. It was total nonsense.

I reported it to my manger and stated that I will not have my time wasted this way. She was delighted to have this ammo because we have a long standing beef with our QA for not putting in due diligence. LLMs are like candy for them.

cvoss

в прошлом месяцеdiscuss

Your friend's argument holds no water. None at all. That's not how morality and ethics work.

cvoss

в прошлом месяцеdiscuss

If you believe in the objective truth of the quoted source, then that makes the claim that humans are valuable about as robust as any claim can be.

If you do not believe in the objective truth of the quoted source, you must still reckon with the fact that this is the (start of) the punchline of the opening narrative of the foundational text of the world's largest religion or religion family. (The punchline continues with the judgment that the universe, being merely good before humanity, is now very good with humanity.) That is to say, this is an incredibly widely and deeply held value by a vast number of people over millenia, not to mention the many others whose religions may contain analogous claims.

Remember, the statement "X is valuable" is always shorthand for "X is valuable to Y". In this case, at absolute worst we mean "humans are valuable to humans," if not also "humans are valuable to God".

It is a forceful argument when carried through.

cvoss

в прошлом месяцеdiscuss

It matters because of the inability to measure up front whether the content is sufficiently good. AI's best skill is making something look right and look good when it is, in fact, not right. It does this all the time, as opposed to human-made things, which are like that only for specific attempts at deception.

cvoss

2 месяца назадdiscuss

Article argues that we don't see J-model software companies (or at least they aren't very good) because there's something inherent about software that demands innovation, green field work, blue sky ideas, etc., and that those things only happen (well) in an H-model company.

I disagree. So much of software is long lived or should be. We desperately need incremental refinement of already solid products and instead we have decay and rot because H-modelers make bad calls. (E.g. OSes.)

My team develops a product that is 15+ years old. As I read how J-models work, I kept thinking, "Yeah, we need that. That would help a lot. I'd love to work for decades on this product if we could do it thay way." Our product is mature and always in demand. But it always needs maintenance and it frequently needs significant improvement to keep pace with the changing environment around it. Bad H-model judgments have sent it in the wrong direction sometimes based on directives from on high, when, actually, the team itself holds so much knowledge and expertise that we can often self-organize in ways that maintain, refine, and improve this 15 year old system. We could benefit so much from a move toward proper J-model thinking.

cvoss

2 месяца назадdiscuss

No, I think the government paying is right. It wasn't just the offending officer acting alone that led to the gross mistreatment of this man. The officer was working within the context of a system of local government that ought to have righted the wrong on its own. But the man had to appeal to the federal government to get it righted. The fact that the system lacked enough accountability to avoid or fix this wrong shows that more than just the one officer is the problem.

Thus, the appropriate remedy should put pressure on the conduct of the whole local government, whose use of tax-payer funds is accountable to the electorate. Punishing just the one officer by depleting his private resources won't move toward systemic reform.

And finally, on the principle of the matter, the officer can't and doesn't jail people on his own power and private authority as a citizen. He does so on the power and authority of the government that grants him his office. His actions as a private citizen did not harm the man. His public actions as an agent of the government harmed the man. In other words, the government did wrong, through the officer.

cvoss

2 месяца назадdiscuss

I don't understand the use of the word "actually" in this sentence. The second half does not stand in contrast to the first half. In fact, it explains the first half.

And portraying oneself as having independence and grit when one doesn't actually (which I don't concede happened here) is not what virtue signaling is. "Virtue" here more closely means "morality" than "admirable or sympathetic qualities". Virtue signaling is disingenuously behaving like you are a moral person because it is advantageous, when in fact you lack such morals.

I feel the need to belabor this because accusations of virtue signaling are too often unfounded and amount to a cheap trick to shut down more thoughtful discussion.

cvoss

2 месяца назадdiscuss

I'm reading the statute this comes from [0] and its associated definitions [1] but I don't see that it's as bad as you made it sound. (I don't love it, still.)

The 100 mile "reasonable distance" is used to define where vessels and vehicles may be searched for aliens.

But the warrantless search may only be applied to persons seeking admission for whom an officer has suspicion of reasonable cause for denying the person entry.

Of the 80% of people living within that distance (which is an upper bound, btw; the agents in charge are required to set a bound not to exceed that by taking into account such things as "density of population, possible inconvenience to the traveling public.") almost none can be suspected of being under reasonable cause for denial of entry.

So to do the thing you are fearing, 1) the chief patrol agent has to set the distance to encompass an inappropriately large area in violation of this law, 2) an agent has to stop and search cars randomly, and 3) somehow become suspicious that an occupant is seeking entry and ought to be denied entry, and 4) believe that searching that person's device would reveal information demonstrating that the suspicion is correct.

It's not great, but it's not "80% of Americans can have their devices searched without a warrant".

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1357

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/8/287.1

cvoss

2 месяца назадdiscuss

The most natural reading of "Utah is close to banning VPNs" is that there is a bill working its way through the statehouse that would ban VPNs if it passed. But that is an untrue reading.

Another reading of "Utah is close to banning VPNs" is "Utah did something that is not banning VPNs but (as an editorial opinion) is thematically and logically adjacent to that concept." This matches reality (under some viewpoint) but is an unnatural reading.

Hence, the sentence "Utah is close to banning VPNs" is misleading, as evidenced by others' comments. That you read the headline "correctly" does not show the headline to be forthright.

cvoss

2 месяца назадdiscuss

There are many comments here that are confused about what the bill actually says. Headline very much implies something about a law banning VPNs. But that's not what the headline really means. So it's misleading.

cvoss

2 месяца назадdiscuss

The headline leaves much to be desired. It has nothing to do with actually banning VPNs. The rule is that age-restricted websites aren't allowed to help you figure out how to use a VPN.

cvoss

2 месяца назадdiscuss

This comment and GP are two of the most concise and punchy descriptions I've ever heard of some of the deepest aspects of modern physics. On the one hand we have principles of locality and finite propagation speed, which limit the computational work to a small neighborhood, and on the other hand we have principles of non-locality and superposition, which cause the computation to explode as it swallows up potentially everything and every possible thing.