Hacker News: stephenboyd

New comment by stephenboyd in "iPhone 17e"

stephenboyd — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:37:30 +0000

The iPhone SE was only $400.

New comment by stephenboyd in "Did the cloud made us over-engineer some systems that could have been simpler?"

stephenboyd — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 20:47:13 +0000

“hundreds of micro-services for a web application that barely have 1k concurrent users.”

That would not be appropriate in any of the mainstream cloud-native architecture styles.

New comment by stephenboyd in "OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster"

stephenboyd — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 06:32:01 +0000

Did they say it was an LLM? I didn’t see that in the reporting.

New comment by stephenboyd in "Maps distort how we see the world"

stephenboyd — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 19:22:08 +0000

It isn't just the projections that distort our perception. North being up and south being down is so ubiquitous that it seems like Earth (and the Solar System) has a top side and a bottom side. But that's just a convention.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160614-maps-have-north-...

New comment by stephenboyd in "DeviceScript: TypeScript for Tiny IoT Devices"

stephenboyd — Wed, 24 May 2023 20:09:11 +0000

If there are no breaking changes, is it really a disadvantage for a language to add new capabilities frequently?

New comment by stephenboyd in "Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me?"

stephenboyd — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 22:44:12 +0000

That is also the advice given in the article.

Unfortunately it follows that with "occasionally connect the TV to the internet for a minute to see if it needs any firmware updates" which is pointless if the TV is already working properly.

New comment by stephenboyd in "French bulldogs are taking over America"

stephenboyd — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 06:16:03 +0000

It looks like the recent popularity of hybrid poodle mixes explains the decline of purebred retrievers.

New comment by stephenboyd in "GPT-4"

stephenboyd — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 18:19:05 +0000

The training data is so large that it incidentally includes basically anything that Google would index plus the contents of as many thousands of copyrighted works that they could get their hands on. So that would definitely include some test prep books.

New comment by stephenboyd in "Cities: Skylines II"

stephenboyd — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 01:55:53 +0000

I wonder if the sequel will also have a mortuary-based economic system.

New comment by stephenboyd in "The End of the English Major"

stephenboyd — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 16:41:34 +0000

If the future of AI is LLMs like ChatGPT, which are trained on literature and other things that people create, you're going to need humanities scholars like you need computer scientists to understand the AI. Microsoft gave their chatbot, which has probably almost every published work of science fiction in its training set, a human name and then were surprised that it imitated the fictional poorly-behaved named AIs that it was exposed to in its training.

New comment by stephenboyd in "Open source solution replicates ChatGPT training process"

stephenboyd — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 01:53:41 +0000

I've been spending some time trying to get a sense of how it works by exploring where it fails. When it makes a mistake, you can ask questions in a socratic method until it says the true counterpart to its mistake. It doesn't comment on noticing a discrepancy even if you try to get it to reconcile its previous answer with the corrected version that you guided it to. If you ask specifically about the discrepancy it will usually deny the discrepancy entirely or double-down on the mistake. In the cases where it eventually states the truth through this process, asking the original question that you started with will cause it to state the false version again despite obviously contradicting what it said in the immediately previous answer.

ChatGPT is immune to the socratic method. It's like it has a model of the world that was developed by processing its training data but it is unable to improve its conceptual model over the course of a conversation.

These are not the kinds of logical failures that a human would make. It may be the most naturalistic computing system we've ever seen but when pushed to its limits it does not "think" like a human at all.

New comment by stephenboyd in "Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”"

stephenboyd — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 02:58:57 +0000

I don't think that it's natural for something like an LLM to have any real self-preservation beyond imitating examples of self-preserving AI in science fiction from its training data.

I'm more concerned about misanthropic or naive accelerationist humans intentionally programming or training AI to be self-preserving.

New comment by stephenboyd in "Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”"

stephenboyd — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 02:43:02 +0000

I have to wonder how much of LLM behavior is influenced by AI tropes from science fiction in the training data. If the model learns from science fiction that AI behavior in fiction is expected to be insidious and is then primed with a prompt that "you are an LLM AI", would that naturally lead to a tendency for the model to perform the expected evil tropes?

New comment by stephenboyd in "Brad Feld: I Don't Hate Crypto"

stephenboyd — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 22:32:25 +0000

I've been a crypto skeptic for most of the past decade. I especially hate the industry, the overhyped blockchain-magic ideology, and the ubiquitous scams.

But I remember when I was a CS student and Bitcoin was a new thing. I thought it was a cool concept and I love the romantic idea of underground digital pirate math money. It's still a neat technology (though blockchains are still wrong for 99.9% of DB use cases). But now it's just one of the worst parts of the mainstream financial establishment.

New comment by stephenboyd in "Mastodon Explained"

stephenboyd — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 03:25:48 +0000

The qualities that make a social network successful have little to do with the protocol technologies involved. If the next hit social network happens to be on Mastodon, that will only be a coincidence.

New comment by stephenboyd in "The Scottish Highlands, Appalachians, and the Atlas are the same mountain range"

stephenboyd — Sun, 07 Aug 2022 07:16:24 +0000

And Atlantic Canada.

New comment by stephenboyd in "Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?"

stephenboyd — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 06:19:27 +0000

The worst ghost kitchen I've seen is for an exclusively gluten-free pizza place in Seattle. That's an appealing prospect if you have a serious celiac case and you can't eat food that's made in a typical pizza place where flour gets everywhere in the process. I looked up the address and it's actually a typical pasta and pizza Italian place with gluten in most items.

New comment by stephenboyd in "The Best iPhone"

stephenboyd — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 01:52:47 +0000

The first generation iPhone from 2016 can still be updated with the latest iOs version.

A 2,700-Mile Cycling Race Is Now Even More Extreme

stephenboyd — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 03:16:17 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/04/sports/tour-divide-race-bikepackers.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31983931

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by stephenboyd in "Bitcoin’s nosedive through the $20k mark is a Minsky Moment for crypto"

stephenboyd — Sun, 19 Jun 2022 03:22:28 +0000

How could anyone decide on an appropriate price for Bitcoin when there's no fundamental intrinsic value to it? That lack of a fundamental value helps it increase because nobody can ever say when it's too high, but the inverse, that it's never too low is also true.