Hacker News: pfsalter

New comment by pfsalter in "UK founders rush to sell startups ahead of Autumn Budget"

pfsalter — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 20:33:15 +0000

"actively exploring exits" is not the same as "rush to sell". Most startups are actively exploring exits as that's the whole damn point of a startup

New comment by pfsalter in "Looming Liability Machines (LLMs)"

pfsalter — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 09:27:20 +0000

Humans don't really generate text as a series of words. If you've ever known what you wanted to say but not been able to remember the word you can see this in practice. Although the analogy is probably a helpful one, LLMs are basically doing the word remembering bit of language, without any of the thought behind it.

New comment by pfsalter in "Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google"

pfsalter — Sun, 18 Aug 2024 11:17:18 +0000

Back in 2018 [1], at a similar time that there was a lot of moving about and restructuring. I think this is about the time that Google search started going downhill as well

[1] https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...

New comment by pfsalter in "Big tech has distracted world from existential risk of AI, says top scientist"

pfsalter — Sat, 25 May 2024 10:14:27 +0000

No idea what this guy is talking about. Big tech are only talking about the existential risks to hide talking about the actual very real risks of how the technology will be misused.

New comment by pfsalter in "Computer scientists invent an efficient new way to count"

pfsalter — Fri, 17 May 2024 10:16:52 +0000

My interpretation from the paper is that this algorithm is simpler than other options but also worse. So in a professional context you'd use one of those instead

New comment by pfsalter in "Unexpected responses from ChatGPT: Incident Report"

pfsalter — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 13:23:59 +0000

The biggest problem is that if you're using this in production then it could cause problems. It's not like a traditional outage where you get a load of 503 errors, the system appears to be working correctly but generates gibberish. If you're using this in a chat bot you could be liable for things it's saying...

New comment by pfsalter in "Ancient Rome's failed building projects"

pfsalter — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 12:12:24 +0000

Agreed. There's nothing inherent about slaves that is more efficient than paid laborers. It's just cost and time. It can look incredible that the Romans built these huge structures, but the timescales were measured in decades. Same with cathedrals in the middle ages. If you've got 200 years to build something you can really do a great job.

New comment by pfsalter in "AI system self-organises to develop features of brains of complex organisms"

pfsalter — Sat, 25 Nov 2023 10:34:57 +0000

That's something you could philosophise about but not research unless you already have a human level intelligence to test. We won't know if it's even possible to replicate in silicon for a very long time

New comment by pfsalter in "TrasHTTPandas – Trash Panda HTTP Responses"

pfsalter — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 10:34:09 +0000

Very weird that it's using paths instead of the Accept header to change the content type, but otherwise pretty cool

New comment by pfsalter in "SiFive: The road ahead (post layoffs)"

pfsalter — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 13:22:10 +0000

Every person you hire to help drive a period of growth is someone who will later be fired once that growth (or commonly just funding) runs out. It's very easy to just increase headcount to increase growth but it's not sustainable.

I feel like companies often think they're always going up an exponential curve rather than breaching the top of the 'S' and you really need to plan for the long term health of your company. This company obviously hasn't

New comment by pfsalter in ""No, it's less effort than that""

pfsalter — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 21:17:50 +0000

Completely agree, the article reads more like someone who thinks they are doing research rather than development. There's no esoteric perfect form for software that needs to be discovered, there's a set of patterns and structures that can be learned before the project starts.

Analogies are often unhelpful because people argue about the analogies instead of the actual problem at hand. If you can't communicate why these things are hard, and why 'do it faster' won't always get results, you need to get better at dev management.

New comment by pfsalter in "Authors say OpenAI 'ingested' their books to train ChatGPT"

pfsalter — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 10:00:22 +0000

Considering that I'm not allowed to copy any of the physical books, films or songs that I own as it breaks copyright then copying it and putting it into a generative AI should also be illegal. Just because you change it from words into weights, it's just another form of compression. I'd rather not live in the world where AI models have better rights than people.

New comment by pfsalter in "The Darwinian argument for worrying about AI"

pfsalter — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 10:28:45 +0000

I'd say that none of these have been proved to be impossible but they're hard in a different way than a lot of the developments we're used to because of Moore's Law.

New comment by pfsalter in "Lessons from Creating a VSCode Extension with GPT-4"

pfsalter — Fri, 26 May 2023 00:30:32 +0000

> Writing code does not take most of the day.

Definitely this. I spend about 10-15% of my time writing code so a 20% increase really doesn't save me a lot of time. Also AI generated code requires more reading of code, which is harder and more cognitively expensive than writing code.

New comment by pfsalter in "The long life of Apache httpd 2.4"

pfsalter — Sat, 20 May 2023 19:22:15 +0000

I often find random parts of nginx hidden behind their paywall, and then I'll reach for Apache. Especially when creating load balancers

New comment by pfsalter in "Go with PHP"

pfsalter — Fri, 12 May 2023 12:15:26 +0000

Not since PHP8 it's not [0], it's a real part of the language that you can read and view using reflection

[0] https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.attributes.overview.p...

New comment by pfsalter in "Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF"

pfsalter — Sat, 06 May 2023 09:18:21 +0000

Still more cost efficient to run a single bus than separate vehicles, just in maintenance alone. Also we already have buses, these single occupation EVs that still have enough space for a decent battery size don't exist.

New comment by pfsalter in "Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF"

pfsalter — Sat, 06 May 2023 09:02:46 +0000

A better idea might be to provide the homeless with a better standard of living, therefore making them nicer to be around on public transport

New comment by pfsalter in "Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”"

pfsalter — Fri, 05 May 2023 22:50:31 +0000

Could be talking about Mintel [0] which was a simpler, earlier version of the web

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

New comment by pfsalter in "AI Incident Database"

pfsalter — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 17:59:06 +0000

This is the same standard for any Startup claiming to leverage AI, so I think that's fair