Hacker News: distant_hat

New comment by distant_hat in "Thomas Massie failed to stop "kill switch" mandate that could disable vehicles"

distant_hat — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 20:24:15 +0000

GPS is notoriously terrible inside cities with tall buildings and when you have overlapping roads, nearby roads with vastly different speed limits and so on. This would lead to way more accidents.

New comment by distant_hat in "What Transport for London can learn about us from our mobile data"

distant_hat — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 22:00:43 +0000

Given the ubiquity of cameras and how optimized face recognition has gotten over time, this is mostly pointless at this time. You will be tracked unless you really pull a major disguise every time you go out.

New comment by distant_hat in "Love after life: Richard Feynman's letter to his departed wife (2017)"

distant_hat — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 18:56:39 +0000

Where are the flaws? That the guy was attractive and managed to seduce others? He may have gone with other people's wives but that is on the wife to say no, not on him.

New comment by distant_hat in "Love after life: Richard Feynman's letter to his departed wife (2017)"

distant_hat — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 15:56:59 +0000

Not all couples subscribe to monogamy. There is no reason to be judgemental about this in the absence of other information.

New comment by distant_hat in "A 'Doxxing Truck' Displaying Students' Faces Comes to Harvard's Campus"

distant_hat — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 17:52:23 +0000

Academia, especially humanities, has gotten amazingly intolerant of any divergent viewpoints over the past decades. Harvard is among the worst in this case. Try to get a marginally right wing personality to speak at Harvard. Students, encouraged by administrators, have increasingly turned on any thoughts that are even nanometers outside of the groupthink line. Professors are better, but they have less power.

New comment by distant_hat in "The crypto industry is rooting for a Sam Bankman-Fried conviction"

distant_hat — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 14:32:00 +0000

This is still a semi-puff piece. Makes it seem like he is being turned into a scapegoat for the industry and drums up sympathy for him.

New comment by distant_hat in "Google to pay $93M in settlement over deceptive location tracking"

distant_hat — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 17:50:43 +0000

So like an hour of revenue.

New comment by distant_hat in "Can LLMs Reason and Plan?"

distant_hat — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 16:47:00 +0000

I suspect this appears to be the case because there is a ton of example pages around explaining tic-tac-toe games. My conjecture is that if you tried it with a game that wasn't so well studied as tic-tac-toe the LLM would fall flat on its face.

New comment by distant_hat in "Lessons from YC AI Startups"

distant_hat — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 19:35:37 +0000

There's a ton of well controlled studies that show the degree to which intelligence is heritable. This is not really controversial.

New comment by distant_hat in "TikTok Shop"

distant_hat — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 14:33:27 +0000

The enshittification of tiktok is almost complete. The famed recommendation algorithm that would figure out and show you want is there but it doesn't generate money. At this point, it is the exploitation phase of the users.

New comment by distant_hat in "Is air conditioning making cities hotter?"

distant_hat — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 20:56:34 +0000

My neighbors cut down trees around their house so that the solar panels could have unobstructed Sun.

New comment by distant_hat in "AI girlfriend ads are flooding Instagram and TikTok"

distant_hat — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 19:44:26 +0000

Because you are sexist.

New comment by distant_hat in "AI girlfriend ads are flooding Instagram and TikTok"

distant_hat — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 19:37:38 +0000

You'd probably have to target the older women crowd. Teenage girls are at the peak of their sexual power and are actively fending off tons of interest every day. While they may be occasionally interested in something like this, I can't see them paying for it enough to be a viable market.

New comment by distant_hat in "AI demand is already shrinking"

distant_hat — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 13:19:54 +0000

The vast majority of people don't care about truthfulness which ChatGPT doesn't care about anyway. Entertainment is a way bigger driver of usage than utility.

New comment by distant_hat in "Common mistakes in salary negotiation"

distant_hat — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 21:49:27 +0000

That's a sound advice for bonds but jobs are largely not like that by design. It is kind of like dating, and asking for a price upfront makes it closer to whoredom and companies explicitly downgrade you for being in it only for the money. If you want to sell a bond and the other person's price is too low, you don't sell it and that's that. For interviews, you end up spending hours through the interview process and may not even know whether you will end up getting a salary quote at the end of it. Getting multiple quotes is a great idea, but putting it in action is harder than it appears. It may help to go with someone like a recruiter who can disintermediate the process. I've often thought someone like an agent for software professionals could make a great idea. That person's job is to get you great gigs and good prices and she makes a percentage of your salary so is aligned with getting you the best offers.

New comment by distant_hat in "AI demand is already shrinking"

distant_hat — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 18:11:02 +0000

I feel this might be more of a mild 'Trough of disillusionment' in the hype cycle than a real shrinking of demand. The other thing with ChatGPT specifically is that during really high usage times, its usability was impacted, so may have driven off some users. Also, ChatGPT has been RLHFed to death. Outside of regular corporate or homework like use cases, the output often feels bland and overspiced with adjectives. I hope other competitors can come up with models that are not so Politically Correct and more creative even if at the risk of offending a user or two.

New comment by distant_hat in "A good measurement culture where numbers don’t replace common sense"

distant_hat — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 20:26:08 +0000

In my experience, there is no good solution long term except changing the metrics themselves every so often. When new metrics come in, as long as they are not totally boneheaded, they improve things. Then people start learn to start gaming them and some of the more sociopathic folks start doing so, then others copy by example and soon enough the metric is useless at best or detrimental at worst and it is time to move to a new metric.

It helps to have someone with a hacker mindset think about the metric being designed so the obvious ways in which it could be games are taken care of and their own metrics/incentives are aligned with the company goal.

Using Generative AI to Resurrect the Dead Will Create a Burden for the Living

distant_hat — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 05:03:51 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wired.com/story/using-generative-ai-to-resurrect-the-dead-will-create-a-burden-for-the-living/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37218873

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by distant_hat in "Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries"

distant_hat — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 16:48:12 +0000

This is kind of ridiculous if you know academics at all. Meeting people in person, knowing the right people makes a huge difference to even things like getting your papers accepted. Job committees in India look favorably at papers presented internationally. Most committee folks have no real idea about your work and go by prestige of vanues it was presented at, people who recommended you etc. Not being able to participate is essentially getting locked out.

New comment by distant_hat in "Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries"

distant_hat — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 15:57:02 +0000

As an Indian the UK visa is way more work than US and the other part is US often gives you a 10 year visa whereas the UK gives 6 month visas so you have to go through the whole process every so often. EU is also more work. You often need to show hotel bookings, flights both ways and so on and if it gets rejected it is a lot of effort down the drain.