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acjohnson55

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6k Bad Coding Lessons Turned a Chatbot Evil

nytimes.com
5 points·by acjohnson55·4 tháng trước·1 comments

The Fall of the Nerds

noahpinion.blog
3 points·by acjohnson55·5 tháng trước·0 comments

Software Engineers Don't Talk Anymore

petercoy.substack.com
2 points·by acjohnson55·5 tháng trước·1 comments

Iran makes high-tech additions to its age-old playbook for crushing protests

cnn.com
5 points·by acjohnson55·6 tháng trước·1 comments

comments

acjohnson55
·26 ngày trước·discuss
Yep. The Crisis of the Third Century, especially.

But also, pre-imperial Rome, a number of times. The Conflicts of the Orders, the entire late-Republican period from the Gracchi to the final demise of the Republic under Augustus.

And then the Eastern Empire had to reinvent itself multiple times. The near-collapse to the Caliphate. The Norman invasions of the Balkans and the First Crusade. The Fourth Crusade and its aftermath.

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Then in the West, you have a couple brief periods where Rome isn't subject to Eastern Imperial overlordship. Justinian fully reconquers it in the late 500s, and Rome stays nominally part of the Eastern Empire until its brief loss to the Lombards in the 750s. But Charlemange's father, Pepin the Short, reconquered Rome and confirmed the Pope's authority over it. A couple decades later, Charlemagne is crowned Emperor of the Romans. And Rome exists under a constantly shifting balance of authority between Popes and Emperors until the Italian Unification in the late 1800s.

It should also be noted that even before the end of the Western Imperial line in 476, Rome rarely served as the actual home of the emperors since the late 200s.

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So there's an interesting question of whether Rome ever did really fall, before the modern period. I would say "yes", in the sense that after the mid-400s, you never again have a sense of authority over the Mediterranean basin eminating from Rome (or the northern half of Italy). That's what people think of when they think of Rome. There are only brief periods of anything like that, and you never again have multi-generational, institutional authority.

But in other ways, there really is a continual reinvention of political systems that trace their lineage and cultural power to Rome. In that sense, it's kind of like China, which is similarly not really a continuous institution.
acjohnson55
·tháng trước·discuss
> These findings differ from earlier studies that associated rudeness with poorer outcomes, suggesting that newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation.

Unless the mechanism is understood, my assumption is that this is a moving target.
acjohnson55
·tháng trước·discuss
It would be interesting to understand the data on this. But I suspect that the results would vary by model.

But I avoid unnecessary emotion in my prompts because I don't want potentially distracting activations. Kind of like communicating with humans.
acjohnson55
·2 tháng trước·discuss
Every now and then, a random math or science concept hits front page. Usually, people chime in with interesting perspectives on it. Guess we'll see.
acjohnson55
·2 tháng trước·discuss
I do think there is going to be an entire risk market for insuring against AI mistakes.
acjohnson55
·2 tháng trước·discuss
I've used Vim plenty for the past 30 years. I don't prefer it to GUI text editors.
acjohnson55
·2 tháng trước·discuss
I've always been a bit mystified by the popularity of TUIs. To me, the power of the terminal is the streaming model. Composible utilities is something that is much less common in GUIs.

I get it that maybe the constraints of terminals force design of TUIs to be more focused on the purpose of the tool than polish, but it's not that compelling of a point to me.
acjohnson55
·3 tháng trước·discuss
I use VSCode and Conductor right now.
acjohnson55
·3 tháng trước·discuss
They recently got bought by Cursor.
acjohnson55
·3 tháng trước·discuss
I think there's a pretty good chance Adam Back is Satoshi, but I don't think this is a great article. Perhaps he's rendering a careful scientific process in a way that makes for a readable narrative, but as written, it sounds like a lot of gut feel and confirmation bias.

The biggest new contribution to the Satoshi question seems to be ad hoc stylometry. To have faith in his methodology, he should be testing it on identitying other people. If he were to show me that a repeatable methodology that doesn't require hand tuning can identify other people with low error rate, and it said Back=Satoshi, that would be much more convincing.

Like so much tech writing done by non engineers, there are many places where mundane things are made to sound remarkable (e.g. Black's thesis used C++, the "heated debate").
acjohnson55
·3 tháng trước·discuss
When I read the article, I was taken aback by the clear references to fraud in the before and after photos.

We're in an absolutely golden age of grift.
acjohnson55
·3 tháng trước·discuss
Depends on what you mean by "win". It would be possible to go in, topple the regime and secure the nuclear material. But only at astronomical cost and years of blowback
acjohnson55
·3 tháng trước·discuss
All those ships stuck on either side of the Strait of Hormuz and their insurers would beg to differ.
acjohnson55
·3 tháng trước·discuss
A pipeline will circumvent Iranian tolls, but would be vulnerable to Iranian strikes in a war.
acjohnson55
·3 tháng trước·discuss
I did one of these experiments around 2011, and because it was so obvious that the experiment was contrived, there was a lot of misdirection around the actual experiment, which was testing something totally different from the pretense. Like different responses to font color or something like that.
acjohnson55
·3 tháng trước·discuss
Or, they actually do have an intuition of the real objective and they skip steps to more efficiently skip to the outcome.
acjohnson55
·4 tháng trước·discuss
Just saw this days later - I'm not sure if it was a surge specifically, but it got bricked after a really wacky power swing. So maybe not a surge, exactly.
acjohnson55
·4 tháng trước·discuss
This may be more correct than you know. Chefs actually don't cook food customers eat. They plan the menu and manage the operations. The cooks cook.
acjohnson55
·4 tháng trước·discuss
I lost an audio mixer to a bad surge last year. I don't know whether it was additional load or just really bad fluctuations that damaged the device. Nothing else bit the dust, but the, digital board in this mixer got bricked.
acjohnson55
·4 tháng trước·discuss
Interesting, so a prompt that causes a couple dozen tool calls will end up costing in the tens of dollars?