Hacker News: civilized

New comment by civilized in "Ex-Meta scientists debut gigantic AI protein design model"

civilized — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 22:38:19 +0000

Forgive my ignorance - is that true even for non-synonymous mutations? They usually have a hard time disrupting the big structure?

New comment by civilized in "Ex-Meta scientists debut gigantic AI protein design model"

civilized — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 21:44:43 +0000

If the mutations were non-synonymous, resulting in different amino acids, the fact that they keep the natural function is still kinda cool. Very much a pure research result AFAICT, but worth a little something.

New comment by civilized in "A brief introduction to interval arithmetic"

civilized — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 21:45:51 +0000

Yes, I see. There's a desire to map intervals pointwise through functions, but also a desire to produce intervals by all-pairs calculations, and the impossibility of representing both interpretations in one notation leads to some inconsistencies.

New comment by civilized in "A brief introduction to interval arithmetic"

civilized — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:21:45 +0000

> Why x^2 isn't always x * x

It turns out he's claiming they're different if x^2 is interpreted as squaring each element in the interval x, while x * x is interpreted as a cross product: the interval obtained by multiplying all pairs of elements in the interval. But I haven't ever seen anyone use x^2 to mean pointwise squaring on an interval x. Is that some kind of standard notation?

New comment by civilized in "I am using AI to drop hats outside my window onto New Yorkers"

civilized — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 17:39:47 +0000

Not your mistake, he does his best to imply that the hats are dropping on heads.

He's got a future in marketing.

New comment by civilized in "Social-Media Influencers Aren't Getting Rich–They're Barely Getting By"

civilized — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 13:47:28 +0000

But is that "willingness to do for a low price" some kind of inherent property of artists as a group of people, or does it come from somewhere else? (The "or" here is not necessarily XOR.)

What if it all comes down to supply and demand? Maybe the supply of artists is much greater than the demand for art, while for tech products it is reversed?

New comment by civilized in "Social-Media Influencers Aren't Getting Rich–They're Barely Getting By"

civilized — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 13:25:50 +0000

In the past I have thought about it as you do. But it occurs to me now that this is also a property of tech products, isn't it? These products can be built by a small team and serve millions or billions of people. The most successful ones usually expand the team (Google Maps now employs over 7,000 people!) but it remains true that only a small team is really needed to keep the thing going.

So why are tech employees thought of differently than entertainers? Why is the math so different, such that tech employees have much more predictable and favorable employment prospects?

New comment by civilized in "Wells Fargo Fires over a Dozen for 'Simulation of Keyboard Activity'"

civilized — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 22:09:46 +0000

This is the real story. Mouse Jiggles a Key Performance Indicator at Major US Bank.

New comment by civilized in "Wells Fargo Fires over a Dozen for 'Simulation of Keyboard Activity'"

civilized — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 16:02:38 +0000

While the law allows it, in my opinion there is no real moral basis for a company to lay claim to all of an employee's time. If the employee is sufficiently responsive and productive, there is no issue. If not, the company can dismiss the employee. There is no reason for the company to have more surveillance and control power over the employee than this.

New comment by civilized in "Wells Fargo Fires over a Dozen for 'Simulation of Keyboard Activity'"

civilized — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 15:47:03 +0000

Providing objective, accurate, relevant contextual information that reasonably makes people outraged is not in itself an appeal to emotion and outrage.

The information is relevant to how we view Wells Fargo as an ethical entity. Bad food in the cafeteria would not be relevant.

New comment by civilized in "Microsoft Chose Profit over Security, Whistleblower Says"

civilized — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 15:44:13 +0000

Why not go even further? Why not say that the whistleblower was wrong and Microsoft business leadership was right? Maybe their profits from ignoring this issue have been fantastic, and the externalities from e.g. mass theft of national security secrets are not Microsoft's problem.

New comment by civilized in "Wells Fargo Fires over a Dozen for 'Simulation of Keyboard Activity'"

civilized — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 15:27:48 +0000

I think that context about the company in the article is context about the article, but I understand your difference of opinion.

To see my point, consider this pull quote from Wells Fargo which is contained in the article:

> “Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.

It is important to understand that this is coming from a company whose recent unethical behavior went far beyond what anyone really thought plausible.

New comment by civilized in "Wells Fargo Fires over a Dozen for 'Simulation of Keyboard Activity'"

civilized — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 15:24:33 +0000

Context: in the 2010s, Wells Fargo management looked the other way while its sales force scammed customers, creating millions of fraudulent accounts (with associated fees) to meet performance targets and quotas [1]. The Fed imposed an asset cap as punishment in 2018, and as of today, the asset cap remains in place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_cross-selling_scan...

New comment by civilized in "Feynman’s Razor"

civilized — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 22:48:31 +0000

Many of you will be familiar with this story: military pilot gear was once designed for the average person, but then they realized that actually, most people deviate significantly from the average in at least one way. So they made the gear adjustable, and that greatly improved performance and reduced mistakes.

Why is it that in tech we are often told a seemingly contrary narrative -- that everything is better, or at least more profitable, when targeted to some hypothetical average person, and who cares about the diversity of individuals?

New comment by civilized in "I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews"

civilized — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 06:36:53 +0000

Leetcode-style tech interviews fall far short of standardized tests. In real standardized tests, the same questions are given to everyone, and effort is made to develop new questions not known to the test takers.

They're more like a standardized test than a pure shoot-the-shit interview is, but still pretty far away.

New comment by civilized in "I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews"

civilized — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 10:49:14 +0000

> the fact that there is a standardized test

...a standardized test? No. There are tests. They sure as heck aren't standardized.

Maybe they should be, since everyone seems to be doing the same thing.

New comment by civilized in "LLMs aren't "trained on the internet" anymore"

civilized — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 22:24:20 +0000

Hopefully it'll all be available in a fire sale when these companies finally have to be stripped for parts.

New comment by civilized in "Companies with return-to-office mandates face losing their most valuable workers"

civilized — Thu, 30 May 2024 01:14:04 +0000

Believe it or not, we talk, and their input influences my actions.

New comment by civilized in "Companies with return-to-office mandates face losing their most valuable workers"

civilized — Wed, 29 May 2024 12:41:29 +0000

The lack of communication of potentially valid reasons such as these might contribute to why people view RTO mandates with cynicism.

If we knew why we were being asked to RTO, we could solve that problem in the way we thought best, combining in-person and remote time. And those of us with junior team members we care about are already solving for this in the way we think best.

New comment by civilized in "Generalizing Support for Functional OOP in R"

civilized — Wed, 29 May 2024 01:01:57 +0000

Apologies, my bad, but I'm a bit too late to edit. The experts say that R qualifies as a lazy language [1, 2].

My impression was that R was mostly an eager language that somehow allowed for laziness. I will research this further and hopefully suss out why I got confused.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3360579

[2] https://www.r-bloggers.com/2018/07/about-lazy-evaluation/