Hacker News: playingalong

New comment by playingalong in "USFS decision to halt prescribed burns in California is history repeating"

playingalong — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 21:30:27 +0000

Shouldn't the govs and laws be immune to this?

New comment by playingalong in "First wooden satellite launched into space"

playingalong — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 21:26:55 +0000

Is temperature or even temperature variance not a problem for wood?

New comment by playingalong in "PEP 2026 – Calendar versioning for Python"

playingalong — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 21:24:08 +0000

I guess with project of this importance, one cannot have anything else than fixed release date, even if the scope is dynamic. A bit like Olympic Games hosts are decided several years in advance (Salt Lake City 2034).

New comment by playingalong in "Netflix Europe offices raided in tax fraud probe"

playingalong — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 16:11:28 +0000

The whole point (or at least the main point) of the tax paperwork is to be able to produce them to tax investigators. If you don't want to share anything, then it's easier not to do the accounting. Which I guess is severally illegal globally.

New comment by playingalong in "Google is now watermarking its AI-generated text"

playingalong — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 13:33:06 +0000

> the team tested it on 20 million prompts given to Gemini. Half of those prompts were routed to the SynthID-Text system and got a watermarked response, while the other half got the standard Gemini response. Judging by the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” feedback from users, the watermarked responses were just as satisfactory to users as the standard ones.

Three comments here:

1. I wonder how many of the 20M prompts got a thumbs up or down. I don't think people click that a lot. Unless the UI enforces it. I haven't used Gemini, so I might be unaware.

2. Judging a single response might be not enough to tell if watermarking is acceptable or not. For instance, imagine the watermarking is adding "However," to the start of each paragraph. In a single GPT interaction you might not notice it. Once you get 3 or 4 responses it might stand out.

3. Since when Google is happy with measuring by self declared satisfaction? Aren't they the kings of A/B testing and high volume analysis of usage behavior?

New comment by playingalong in "DeepMind debuts watermarks for AI-generated text"

playingalong — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 13:23:43 +0000

> It has also open-sourced the tool and made it available to developers and businesses, allowing them to use the tool to determine whether text outputs have come from their own large language models (LLMs), the AI systems that power chatbots. However, only Google and those developers currently have access to the detector that checks for the watermark.

These two sentences next to each other don't make much sense. Or are misleading.

Yeah. I know. Only the client is open source and it calls home.

New comment by playingalong in "Did You Know That Apes Have Never Asked a Question?"

playingalong — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 22:03:57 +0000

Interesting. So is this what differentiates us from all the animals?

(See^^^)

New comment by playingalong in "Ask HN: Do you think your life better or worse than it was 4 years ago?"

playingalong — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 16:55:45 +0000

Don't give up. There are still 5 or 6 years in the decade. We are not even half way through.

New comment by playingalong in "Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak"

playingalong — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 01:07:27 +0000

Europarlament too?

New comment by playingalong in "Weird Lexical Syntax"

playingalong — Sat, 02 Nov 2024 14:04:41 +0000

Nice read.

I guess the article could be called Falsehoods Programmers Assume of Programming Language Syntaxes.

New comment by playingalong in "New iMac with M4"

playingalong — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 17:37:02 +0000

I have been to a on orthodontist office which didn't have any iMac.

I wouldn't apply this observation to judge if the product makes sense

New comment by playingalong in "Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court"

playingalong — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 17:04:45 +0000

Not sure. Hardly anyone would remember if Streisand was a singer or actor or whoever. Now her name is mostly tied to Streisand effect, not the art she had produced.

New comment by playingalong in "CHP seizes cars after Bay Bridge sideshow with Flock Security data"

playingalong — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 21:42:27 +0000

TIL. Apparently "sideshow" means blocking the whole traffic (one way) to have illegal street racing or burning tires, etc.

New comment by playingalong in "A Stacktrace Puzzle"

playingalong — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 10:07:59 +0000

It's from April and he didn't get any response in either SO or the mailing list?

New comment by playingalong in "A near impossible literacy test Louisiana used to suppress the black vote"

playingalong — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 14:54:41 +0000

Germany is self-blaming only to some extent or for some definitions of this notion.

Yes, they are well aware of what happened in 1930s and that there was Hitler, etc.

And still they conveniently fail to see any connection with today times. It is some unclearly defined Nazis who took over the control of Germany and did all the killings and destroyed a few countries around. But not anyone's grandfather was involved. And supposedly the companies which built their wealth on slave work and death of thousands continue to prosper.

New comment by playingalong in "The science of "Zoom fatigue""

playingalong — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 18:30:42 +0000

I think it's different order:

1. Primarily at oneself 2. Anything else on the computer 3. Speaker

New comment by playingalong in "Show HN: I've added undo and redo to IsoCity"

playingalong — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 20:51:27 +0000

Re whitespace: ... or use the w=1 hidden query parameter: https://github.com/victorqribeiro/isocity/pull/26/files?w=1

New comment by playingalong in "Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says"

playingalong — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 18:42:17 +0000

> acknowledged that he had not been able to pinpoint Columbus’s place of birth

Nit pick.

I don't know it for sure, but if he was able to meet a king and a queen eventually, I assume he came from a wealthy family.

For wealthy families at that time, it wouldn't be an issue to travel. Especially if you turn out to be the most known traveler in human's history.

Thus, I fail to see how come we can even think of establishing the place of birth based on DNA. A likely area where his family came from - sure. But POB?

New comment by playingalong in "Lessons from Plain Text"

playingalong — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 15:47:36 +0000

Useful? Yes.

But then you need some way to provide the exact indentation/spacing in some cases. And the easiest is to provide them verbatim.

New comment by playingalong in "The FBI created a coin to investigate crypto pump-and-dump schemes"

playingalong — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 20:56:34 +0000

Why is the same agency tasked with investigating financial fraud and provide physical security for the president?