crdrost · HackerTrans

3 ngày trướcdiscuss

I mean people do make a living doing it, but my understanding is that it requires a lot of hustle—as a hobbyist you can just take your time and meditate and take a million pictures, but if you're trying to make a living you have to focus on volume, volume, volume... So you have to have a system, this one goes in the cleaner and you are immediately disassembling the next, another is in a tray next to the machine that tells you how fast or slow it's ticking... It is maybe less glamorous than it first sounds.

crdrost

24 ngày trướcdiscuss

We must be very clear that this is very light rephrasing.

Just to put it side-by-side in a form that will absolutely not work on mobile but might work if you're on desktop, here's a "two-column form" of an example plagiarism from the thesis:

    [ THESIS ]                                  [SOURCE]
    les équations de la physique engendrent,    les équations de la physique engendrent,
    en plus des solutions correspondant aux     en plus des solutions correspondant aux 
    phénomènes, des solutions sans aucune       phénomènes, des solutions sans aucune
    signification physique directe.             signification physique directe (certaines 
                                                solutions sont rejetées, par exemple,
                                                parce qu'elles violent la causalité 
                                                usuelle). La correspondance entre les 
                                                mathématiques et la physique n'est donc
                                                pas biunivoque et naturelle. Ceci laisse
                                                donc planer un doute sur une sorte
                                Un doute
    très sérieux plane donc sur l'idee d'un
    isomorphisme entre le language mathé-       d'isomorphisme entre le langage (mathé-
    matique et la nature. Quant                 matique) et la nature. [...]
    à l'explication platonicienne de la         L'explication platonicienne de la 
    réussite des mathématiques                  réussite des mathématiques peut être
                                                divisée en deux thèses. La première
                                                pourrait être qualifiée de « platonisme 
                                                faible » (celui qui peut être trouvé dans
                                                des dialogues tels que la République).
    elle consiste à admettre que 
                        les mathématiques       Selon cette conception, les mathématiques
    constituent un langage intermédiaire qui    constituent un langage intermédiaire qui
    permet de passer du monde sensible au monde permet de passer du sensible aux monde
    des Idées, qui forme la réalité profonde    des Idées qui constitue la réalité profonde
    des choses. Si les mathématiques sont       des choses. Les mathématiques sont
    efficaces, dira un platonicien, c'est       efficaces ici 
    parce qu'elles permettent de viser les      parce qu'elles offrent unmoyen de viser les
    structures profondes du monde.              véritables structures du monde.

crdrost

24 ngày trướcdiscuss

It's worth pointing out that his M.O. was apparently to sometimes tweak the beginning of a sentence and then word-for-word copy some chunk from this source, some from that source, maybe tweak the ending to create a lead-in to the following sentence... but this is not just "oh some figures of speech lodged in my subconscious" -- this is like "whole sentences were mashed up together."

Just some Google Translate of some of the plagiarized paragraphs, the thesis "The Unity of Physics" has:

> The idea that the diversity of reality is underpinned by a deeper unity is as old as thought itself. Great mythologies recount it, early philosophers affirm it, and modern science has taken up the same agenda by first unifying concepts of motion, matter, and space. Indeed, the desire for intelligibility can arguably not do without the idea of the One. However, simply attributing such a tendency to human nature does not validate its realizations. The proclaimed unity may well prove false—stemming merely from incantation, decree, or fantasy—while exerting a purely dogmatic fascination. Yet, if thought were to discover—amidst the shifting mirrors of phenomena—eternal relationships capable of encapsulating them, one could certainly speak of a joy of the mind. While not necessarily an essential framework of thought, the desire for unity corresponds to a nostalgia, a craving for the absolute, an ontological impatience. Yet, the moment it is expressed, it clashes with the irreducible dispersion of things. From this arises a rift between the desiring mind and the disappointing world. At the close of the century, the increasingly assertive power of physical theories—with their all-encompassing nature and unifying aim—prompts us to examine the foundations of the physicists' quest for unity, to define its limits, and to consider its current prospects.

This is claimed to be a mashup of paragraphs from three different sources, first, the sentence starting "However..." is said to hail from Jean-Michel Besnier's "Theories of Knowledge",

> Could the "monist" tendency inherent in the act of knowing be suggested any more clearly? Yet, simply positing such a tendency within human nature is obviously not enough to validate its realizations. Indeed, that unity may well prove illusory, stemming from sheer fantasy while exerting a purely dogmatic fascination. That is precisely why critical philosophy sets out to distinguish between the scientific and...

Followed by a bit of Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus,"

> If man were to recognize that the universe, too, can love and suffer, he would be reconciled. If thought were to discover, within the shifting mirrors of phenomena, eternal relationships capable of summarizing them—and of summarizing themselves in a single principle—one could speak of a happiness of the spirit of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ludicrous counterfeit. This longing for unity, this craving for the absolute, illustrates the essential movement of the human drama. Yet the fact that this longing exists does not imply that it must be immediately appeased.

The last sentence of Sisyphus was changed except for the "Yet" to what appeared to be an original sentence or two in the thesis, "Yet ... irreducible dispersion of things. From this arises a rift between the desiring mind and the disappointing world" -- but only to immediately jump into a third line from Parrochia's "Grand Revolutions of the 20th Century,"

> The increasingly assertive power of modern physical theories—along with their all-encompassing nature and unifying aim—now enables the scientist to occupy, to some extent, the role held by the philosopher from antiquity through the classical age. This is by no means the least significant consequence of the revolution we have experienced...

My very very initial read of this style, I would almost guess that he paid someone else -- someone who did not have a science education -- to write his thesis for him. And probably if that were true, then he had to provide the sources, "I like this sentence from here, that one from there, you see I highlighted this paragraph of this paper -- I'll highlight and you just paste everything together into one big whole and I'll look through the word processor and tweak a couple of sentence beginnings and endings to make everything look nice for the committee and probably only one person on the committee really reads a bit of it but let's be honest that they're all busy with their own research." With that sort of origin, that's how you get the "blind copying without rephrasing" type of thing (The person who's copying doesn't trust their technical chops to rephrase anything! "What if I choose the wrong word and it has another meaning in science and I embarrass myself?" -- so they go verbatim, "this made sense to someone who was well educated in the sciences, it can't be too embarrassing") with a little bit of tweaks between the chunks.

The really incredible thing about the plagiarism report is the 16 copié-collé/copy-paste sections AFTER this one, where it's just like "Yep, he stole whole pages at a time from his sources in just this way."

crdrost

27 ngày trướcdiscuss

If you're a type purist then undefined looks nicer... It'd be like being upset at booleans because things get coerced to them or some 'ish.

No: it's the type that has one inhabitant—it's not that type's fault that it appears as a default argument or var or was left out of JSON... So long as typeof null === "object", null is the absurd one

crdrost

tháng trướcdiscuss

Yeah so all of personal computing—text editing, SVG antialiasing, etc, fits in 20,000 LOC (VPRI's STEPS project) so a million lines of code is 50 reïnventions of personal computing. BUT: it is unlikely that humans would have solved this problem in 20 kLOC. Sussman said “we really don't know how to compute!” as his talk title and LLMs had to ossify some pre-existing voice as the forever programming habitus and it chose a persona that doesn't know how to program—because we don't —and now we are stuck with it. Claude is our tickets, our implementations, our documentation... And if you tell it “hey the node role should not have those permissions, that should be a service account” it will happily do the right thing, but it has no intrinsic sense of taste and the error message it's trying to clear just says “the node role doesn't have that permission and the system prompt says “keep it short, stupid ” and graybeards might be our last bulwark.

crdrost

tháng trướcdiscuss

Back when people would read blog posts about the erosion of ownership in the face of intellectual property law, I used to blog about something similar...

Of course the MPAA is against copying, I would say -- the ideal situation for the MPAA would be if when you left the theater, they could just wipe your brain of the memory of the film you just watched. You just remember that you had a fun time with your friends and it was a good movie, but you don't remember any of what happened there. "but those are MY memories" -- no no no we didn't touch YOUR memories, we left your memories just fine -- we only removed a copy of OUR copyrighted content from the world, consistent with our terms of service for the theater. But if you want to experience it again, by all means, come back to watch it again.

"That sounds like it would stifle all cinematic innovation" -- no you don't understand! Our artists are suffering because they don't get the full amount of money they are due because of all of these unlicensed copies moving about the world in peoples' heads. When people are discussing how amazing that movie was, our artists deserve to have them in a controlled cafe attached to the theater where they can control that experience and fully profit off of it. Don't you get it? Bigger financial incentives, bigger payoffs for successful artists -- therefore more artists, and more cinematic innovation! When you play back these unlicensed copies in your "memory" and pirate our works, you're really just contributing to monoculture by not rewarding the people who made your favorite things.

crdrost

2 tháng trướcdiscuss

The thing that Rovelli is arguing against (well -- not really arguing -- more, "stubbornly sticking his head in the sand" against) is not really a position that is held by a bunch of religious people trying to create a weird "god-of-the-gaps style argument" as you characterize.

Like, that may have been your experience -- not contradicting you on who you've met and what you've talked with them about etc. ... but what he's talking about is a position argued by a lot of philosophers and including those who have no particular metaphysical commitments.

Rovelli here does a lot worse than Dennett's "quining qualia" paper where he tries to get people to be really specific about "what are these qualia like" and finds that they're so hard to embed in language, to symbolically represent, that maybe he-as-philosopher can discharge his duty to be engaged-with-phenomenalism by just kinda sticking his fingers in his ears and saying "what phenomena?! you haven't clearly defined the phenomena!"

But someone like Searle who has no bones about himself being an atheist and, while he didn't like to describe himself as "materialist" because of the history of that term[1] he would acknowledge that it was close to his basic position. And I want to be clear that he views consciousness as a scientifically solvable problem. He doesn't think we've solved it yet but he thinks the philosophical problems are ultimately tractable and if we solve them and get out of the way you'll get a fine science of consciousness someday. Nevertheless, he's very clear about agreeing with the fact that these qualia are important to the discussion and he would laugh at you for trying to leave them out -- he'd say, now you're trying to make a science of consciousness, by leaving out the consciousness. And of course you don't think there's any science left to be done at that point and "well, it's all deterministic physics, we understand it all, nothing to be done here."

So like if you want to read his take, a book is Freedom and Neurobiology, but for this comment I just want to point out that him simultaneously believing that there are phenomena of experience, and believing that there is no God, are two beliefs that are not uncommon for philosophers to hold together.

1. There's kind of no way to very briefly make the point since you kind of need to be hit in the face with a sledgehammer about it. So Searle views Descartes as erroneously trying to package up the world into two realms -- mind properties or substances on this hand, physical properties or substances on that hand -- and insisting that they can't overlap. And then Descartes' legacy was that you had camps which said 'those mind properties aren't real, only the physical properties' (materialism) and 'those physical properties aren't real, only the mind properties' (idealism) but coming from the same mistaken beginning. Searle would point to the score of a football game and say 'now is that physical because it's represented in terms of lights on the scoreboard, or is it mental because it's represented in terms of the thoughts of the referee, what about all the people on both sides who think the referee made the wrong decision -- something which, remember, by definition the actual referee cannot do; they are the final authority -- and they believe that the score is "really" some other number distinct from the score represented on the lights; and what if none of these people are "right" in the sense that if a perfectly perceptive model referee could have made all of the scoring calls in the game according to the rules on the books, then the score would have actually included an event that everyone watching thought was unambiguously non-scoring but actually it was completely legal and valid. But here I-the-philosopher come into all of this absolute mess and I want to carve out a clear boolean yes/no classification, mental vs physical, material vs ideal, which is it -- the problem, was not that I counted to two distinct possibilities, but that I thought counting those possibilities was a meaningful way to decompose the problem in the first place.

crdrost

2 tháng trướcdiscuss

It feels like half the problem in this blog post is dealing with memory access issues induced by QEMU and the VM boundary... it's probably something dumb I'm missing, but if you boot up Ubuntu in Docker, wouldn't the NVIDIA drivers still load? And then you wouldn't have to fight Apple about the memory management because OSX would still own the memory?

crdrost

2 tháng trướcdiscuss

That's like 10% of the reason why people would commit CLAUDE.md…

The number one reason is, you are on a 10-dev tea and it just doesn't make sense for everyone to waste their token budget creating separate instances of this file, which an also requires ingesting the othe whole repo... That is 50, 60%.

The other bit is that you have a review pipeline hooked into CI/CD, and it is the easiest way to tell the bot how to review your code.

crdrost

2 tháng trướcdiscuss

Well that's where I thought this link was going to go before it went down the simd path... We have a way to beat binary search, it is called b-trees, it has the same basic insight that you can easily take 64 elements from your data set evenly spaced, compare against all of those rapidly, and instead of bifurcating your search space once, you do the same as six times, but because you store the 64 elements in an array in memory, they only take one array fetch and you get cache locality... But as you have more elements, you need to repeat this lookup table like three or four or five times, so it costs a bit of extra space, so what if we make it not cost space by just storing the data in these lookup tables...

crdrost

2 tháng trướcdiscuss

This is simply false -- the literature is full of discussion about the health effects of social media.

More generally you're committing I believe two separate fallacies of ambiguity? Like one in going from the institution of social media to its reification in the form of specific websites, and then a second fallacy when you go from the specific websites to all websites in general? Like if you said "Gun ownership is not a thing at all. Gun ownership is a piece of metal. Pieces of metal cannot be healthy or unhealthy." OK but, you owning a gun is known in the scientific literature to significantly correlated with a bunch of very adverse health effects for you, such as you dying by suicide or you dying from spousal violence or your protracted grief and wasting away because your child accidentally killed themselves. Like to say that it's impossible for the institution to have adverse health effects because we can situate the objects of that institution into a broader category which doesn't sound so harmful, is frankly messed up.

[1]: Bernadette & Headley-Johnson, "The Impact of Social Media on Health Behaviors, a Systematic Review" (2025) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12608964/ - the content you consume can promote healthy or unhealthy behaviors

[2]: Lledo & Alvarez-Galvez, "Prevalence of Health Misinformation on Social Media: Systematic Review" (2021) https://www.jmir.org/2021/1/E17187/ is notable not just for its content but also like a thousand papers that cite it getting into all of the weeds of health influencers sharing misinformation to make a buck

[3]: Sun & Chao, "Exploring the influence of excessive social media use on academic performance through media multitasking and attention problems" (2024) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10639-024-12811-y was a study of a reasonably large cohort showing correlations between social media usage and particular forms of multitasking that inhibit academic performance -- more generally there's broad anecdata that the current "endless scrolling constant dopamine hits" model that social media gravitates to, produces kids that are "out of control" with aggressive and attentional difficulties -- see Kazmi et al. "Effects of Excessive Social Media Use on Neurotransmitter Levels and Mental Health" (2025) (PDF warning - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sharique-Ahmad-2/public...) for more on the actual literature that has probed those questions

[4]: The APA has a whole "Health advisory on social media use in adolesence" https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advi... which is pretty even-handed about "these parts of social media are acceptable, those parts can maybe even be downright good -- but here are the papers that say that for adolescents, it can mess with their sleep, it can expose them to cyberhate content that measurably promotes anxiety and depression, it has been measured to promote disordered eating if they use it for social comparison..."

crdrost

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

Probably. But, the time when the laptop is taped off would be uniquely a good time to hit it with some polyurethane or something clear to protect it from that sort of damage? Just make sure you hit it with compressed air first so you aren't gluing the aluminum dust to the chassis?

crdrost

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

> That's not what's happening here.

No, it is, the comment you're replying to is correct in what it said to you.

> The Privacy settings applies only to access to the Documents folder without the user interaction.

Yes, BUT, the user interaction is irrevocable. There are two user interactions here, one is "please access Documents this one time" and the second is "please don't let this app access Documents again."

Of course, if the stakes were higher you wouldn't even think to defend this behavior. Like if you were dealing with a nuclear weapon launcher and there was a big panel saying "TARGETING SYSTEMS: 0 targets (Permission Lock sandbox excluding 450 potential targets needing approval)" and then you poked around and found out "uh... why can I still go into the interface and target Milan and the big glowy 'launch missiles' light then starts lighting up and presumably I can launch a nuclear strike on Milan?!" and someone says, "oh yeah, that's because back when we were demoing it, the general had us punch in a random city to show what the targeting UI looked like, and we randomly chose Milan... it's okay, to fix it someone just needs to go and manually remove the warhead and put in a different one and then we'll restart the system and it'll forget all its targeting data for the old warhead" -- that'd strike you as unsustainable.

But this is very low-stakes for us so it seems less outrageous, but fundamentally it is a solid buggy behavior, "The UI makes it sound like there is only one system at play here, but there are actually two and the other system can override a specific revocation that's placed at the level the UI controls." Even if there are going to be two systems, you expect that their security controls will both be followed, or that the second one will know enough to be able to say "I say no, but I am being overruled" in its status panel.

crdrost

4 tháng trướcdiscuss

So the advice here is (from my understanding, not a tax lawyer) sound, but it is "unsound-adjacent" -- so a lot of people will start from this basic understanding and then go off into crazytown.

So like influencers get to hear other influencers explaining this "you can reinvest your profits and then you won't have profits" type of advice... but then they will put it right next to unsound advice about "by the way, a great way is to invest in a "business" trip to Greece to sail the Mediterranean, it is "team-building" between you and your spouse and kids who are all employees of your little influencer company, oh by the way you should buy fancy watches so that you can show them off in your videos, and get a very expensive hairstylist to do your hair -- as long as you make a video about it!"

And it's like, no, the tax courts actually have procedures they follow to determine if those things are personal expenses or business expenses and 90% of the advice that you hear here are some form of tax fraud.

But from the point of view of a company, as the tax year comes to an end you hopefully have extra money left in the bank, now you can either use it to buy things that the company needs and thus grow the company, or you can hold onto it where if you're a C-corp the government will take 21% of the year-on-year delta, or you can pay it back to the shareholders as a dividend and they pay 15% capital gains tax on it. (And of course you don't have to dump the whole account into just one bucket, you can choose how much goes into each of the three.) And when it gives the advice "pssst, you should probably reinvest most of it," that's a standard practice explicitly sanctioned by the government.

crdrost

4 tháng trướcdiscuss

This is just the weirdest thread.

Like, the whole point of open source is that this thread is not a thing. The whole point is "if this software is taken on by a malevolent dictator for life, we'll just fork it and keep going with our own thing." Or like if I'm evaluating whether to open-source stuff at a startup, the question is "if this startup fails to get funding and we have to close up shop, do I want the team to still have access to these tools at my next gig?" -- there are other reasons it might be in the company's interests, like getting free feature development or hiring better devs, but that's the main reason it'd be in the employees' best interests to want to contribute to an open-source legacy rather than keep everything proprietary.

crdrost

4 tháng trướcdiscuss

That's unintentionally hilarious -- some of us remember 15-20 years ago when flaky support for wireless devices was the biggest reason people would decide Linux wasn't ready for desktop yet and avoid switching from Windows to Linux. (Well, Windows to dual-boot -- Windows users were never fully willing to let go of the video games angle at the time.)

crdrost

4 tháng trướcdiscuss

FWIW I like to explain it to folks like this: ignore all of your moral baggage around licensing and just focus on the fact that licensing is a legal tool of art that pretty much only becomes relevant in the context of threatening lawsuits.

BSD-type stuff is very simple because it says "here is this stuff. you can use it as long as you promise not to sue me. I promise not to sue you too."

Very simple.

GPL-type stuff is intrinsically more complex because it's trying to use the threatening power of lawsuits, to reduce overall IP lawsuits. So it has to say "Here is this stuff. You can use it as long as you promise not to sue me. I am only going to sue you, if you start pretending like you have the right to sue other folks over this stuff or anything you derive from it. You don't have the right to sue others for it, I made it, so please stop pretending and let's stop suing each other over this sort of thing."

Getting the entire legal nuance around that sort of counterfactual "I will only sue you if you try to pretend that you can sue others" is why they're more complex. And the simplest copyleft licenses like the Mozilla Public License have a very rigid notion of what "the software" is, so like for MPL it's "this file is gonna never be used in a lawsuit, you can edit it ONLY as long as you agree that this file must never be used by you to sue someone else, if you try to mutate it in a way that lets you sue someone else then that's against our agreement and we reserve the right to sue you."

Whereas for GPL it's actually kind of nebulous what "the software" is -- everything that feeds into the eventual compiled binary, basically -- and so the license itself needs to be a little bit airy-fairy, "let's first talk about what conveying the software means...", in various ways.

The interesting thing here is that as far as the courts are initially ruling, these from-scratch reimplementations are not human works and therefore are not copyrightable, which makes them all kind of public domain. Slapping the MIT license on it was an overstep. If that's how things go then Free Software has actually won its greatest sweep with LLM ubiquity.

crdrost

5 tháng trướcdiscuss

Hopefully this does well just the way it is, but you might also want to tag the title with "Show HN:" next time? It gets you featured on a separate part of Hacker News that some of us like to visit.

crdrost

6 tháng trướcdiscuss

With a slide rule you can start from 92200 or so, long division with 9.22 gives 9.31 or so, next guess 9.265 is almost on point, where long division says that's off by 39.6 so the next approximation +19.8 is already 92,669.8... yeah the long divisions suck but I think you could get this one within 10 minutes if the interviewer required you to.

Also, don't take a role that interviews like that unless they work on something with the stakes of Apollo 13, haha

crdrost

6 tháng trướcdiscuss

Why. Why would you want this.

The only framework we have figured out in which LLMs can build anything of use, requires LLMs to build a robot and then we expose the robot to the real world and the real world smacks it down and then we tell the LLMs about the wreckage. And we have to keep the feedback loops small and even then we have to make sure that the LLMs don't cheat. But you're not going to give it the opportunity to decrease the wealth tax or increase the income tax so it will never get the feedback it needs.

You can try to train a neural network with backpropagation to simulate the actual economy, but I think you don't have enough data to really train the network.

You can try to have it build a play economy where a bunch of agents have different needs and different skills and have to provide what they can when they can, but the "agent personalities" that you pick embed some sort of microeconomic outlook about what sort of rational purchasing agent exists -- and a lot of what markets do is just kind of random fad-chasing, not rationally modelable.

I just don't see why you'd use that square peg to fill this round hole. Just ask economics professors, they're happy to make those predictions.

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