Hacker News: aksophist

New comment by aksophist in "Nobody cares"

aksophist — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 15:40:16 +0000

This post is angry detritus. I’m sorry someone upset you recently Grant, but seriously?

Billions of people care. And if you bother looking for them, you’ll find them. Most of the problems he describes result from complex systems being challenging and individuals having limited ability both to comprehend and influence them.

And no I don’t mean “this software module is complex” complex. I mean, “this social problem has hundreds of interacting incentives, changing any of them in isolation makes things worse, and it will take years and millions of dollars to change things, all while political winds of change are trying to blow down the consensus to tackle the problem.”

New comment by aksophist in "Nobody cares"

aksophist — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 15:32:40 +0000

It’s a statement of privilege to believe (and say) that there are hundreds of good doctors per handful of bad ones? It sounds to me like a statement of fact. And that you dispute the fact. What does privilege have to do with it?

New comment by aksophist in "Launch HN: GPT Driver (YC S21) – End-to-end app testing in natural language"

aksophist — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 14:25:45 +0000

What is a false positive rate? Is it when the agent falsely passes or falsely “finds a bug”? And regardless of which: why don’t you include the other as a key metric?

I’m not aware of any evals or shared metrics. But measuring a testing agents performance seems pretty important.

What is your tool’s FPR on your golden suite?

New comment by aksophist in "Launch HN: GPT Driver (YC S21) – End-to-end app testing in natural language"

aksophist — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 15:14:58 +0000

how do you evaluate your tool, and have you published your evaluation along with the metrics?

New comment by aksophist in "Launch HN: GPT Driver (YC S21) – End-to-end app testing in natural language"

aksophist — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 14:38:50 +0000

It’s only deterministic for each version of the app. Versions change: UI elements move, change their title slightly. Irrelevant promo popups appear, etc. For a deterministic solution, someone has to go and update the tests to handle all of that. Good ‘accessibility hygiene’ can help, but many apps lack that.

And then there are truly dynamic apps like games or simulators. There may be no accessibility info to deterministically code to.

New comment by aksophist in "Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's Leaked Stanford Talk"

aksophist — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 06:51:02 +0000

I read up to where he started taking questions (less than half the transcript or so?) and these were the interesting quotes that stood out to me:

So imagine a non-arrogant programmer that actually does what you want and you don't have to pay all that money to and there's infinite supply of these programs. That's all within the next year or two.

…

Google decided that work life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.

…

But certainly in your lifetimes, the battle between the US and China for knowledge supremacy is going to be the big fight.

…

And one of the things to know about war is that the offense always has the advantage because you can always overwhelm the defensive systems. And so you're better off as a strategy of national defense to have a very strong offense that you can use if you need to.

And the systems that I and others are building will do that. Because of the way the system works, I am now a licensed arms dealer, a computer scientist, businessman, and an arms dealer. Is that a progression? I don't know. I do not recommend this in your group.

…

And if anyone knows Marjorie Taylor Greene, I would encourage you to delete her from your contact list because she's the one, a single individual is blocking the provision of some number of billions of dollars to save an important democracy.

New comment by aksophist in "Tell HN: Bypass Paywalls repository is gone"

aksophist — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 23:55:11 +0000

Now I wish I had bookmarked the distributed (peer to peer?) github replacement I’ve seen trend on HN a couple of times. It seems like a good place to host something like this. Anyone remember which tool I’m talking about?

New comment by aksophist in "His Job Was to Make Instagram Safe for Teens. His 14-Year-Old Showed Otherwise"

aksophist — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 04:48:13 +0000

What world are you living in where asking children under 16 to share pictures of their private sexual body parts is a “nuisance”? Epstein, is that you?

New comment by aksophist in "HTTPS Watch"

aksophist — Fri, 23 Jan 2015 02:04:05 +0000

Where is the line item for "prevents downgrade of HTTPS connections to vulnerable protocols"?

New comment by aksophist in "H.R.4681 - Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015"

aksophist — Fri, 12 Dec 2014 20:49:21 +0000

> how we enact change in a democracy

You're either thinking of another country or have it wrong. The way change (legislation) gets enacted in the US is through lobbying.