Hacker News: terminal_d

New comment by terminal_d in "PFAS can suppress white blood cells’ ability to destroy invaders"

terminal_d — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 15:23:43 +0000

"The best nootropic is getting up in the morning and getting sunlight. Then you sleep at a reasonable hour and wake up fully rested."

New comment by terminal_d in "Seattle becomes first U.S. city to ban caste discrimination"

terminal_d — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 15:24:47 +0000

North and South both screw each other over. And people of the same race / region / caste / creed screw over others belonging to the same group. This is universal and will never change. What this legislation does is line the pockets of the people putting their pens to paper for it while piggybacking on a divisive issue.

And yeah, I've had good friends from almost every state in India. Some of them were weird about it, most don't really care. So-called "nationalists" will screw you over in any region if you're a migrant.

Anyway, it's not a binary issue. It's just something that happens, and it's not possible to legislate.

New comment by terminal_d in "Seattle becomes first U.S. city to ban caste discrimination"

terminal_d — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 15:18:07 +0000

Yup, because that works out really well in India...

New comment by terminal_d in "Seattle becomes first U.S. city to ban caste discrimination"

terminal_d — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 15:15:21 +0000

Funny how the United States is speedrunning ""sensible"" legislation without considering what it entails in the country the practice originates from. And yep, once enforced it's never going away. I guess people can now look forward to ever-convoluted steps for mitigating issues caused by this, and it'll fill the coffers of anyone that puts his stake into it. Better for the lawmakers, crap for literally everyone else.

BTW, to anyone that hasn't lived in India: you don't understand how extensive """caste discrimination""" is or how it impacts society. You just don't.

New comment by terminal_d in "Software 2.0 (2017)"

terminal_d — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 17:53:28 +0000

>Have you _used_ ChatGPT?

I have, and I didn't find it to be useful for anything I did. I can do what it does with a search engine and trusty C-f. Also, TTS exists.

It's 50% tech and 50% marketing (and I doubt it's 50% tech at that), it's not gonna upend anything. Except maybe increase the authenticity of online scams and make people get more degrees in machine learning. And yeah, make the people that rely on it bound as it degrades their skills.

It's basically the "internet is educationally useful" argument. At some point everyone's gotta use it but you can live without it just fine. And even though people tout its usefulness for everything good, the majority of data transferred is porno.

New comment by terminal_d in "Software 2.0 (2017)"

terminal_d — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 16:10:16 +0000

The adoption of the so-called "Software 2.0" depends on how influential OpenAI is as a company. The majority of the use-cases of GPT-3 are only about "remixing" information, and the "notoriety" of the AI is (IMO) mostly a publicity stunt; I'm assuming that there are prompts for personalities / jokes / poems / etc that are never shown to the end-user and are hailed as an "organic outcome" of the model. Obviously, no one can check for these right now. Seems to me that microsoft has taken a few leaves out of the OpenAI playbook and applied them (rather chaotically).

So when you're looking at actually writing software that needs to be dependable / modifiable / bug free, you'd need a massive overhaul of whatever software stack is being used, so there's very little human-assisting "cruft", and instead you'd want a lot of supporting material for a model, which might look like something written in languages used for formal verification of programs.

The promise of GOFAI was about having a human-understandable bottom-to-top framework, and the current "AI" paradigm is at odds with it. The "formal verification" assumption, then, skews towards GOFAI. But since there has to be some human support for the current not-there-yet AI to write software, we might see yet another abstraction layer based on NN / something newer in the years to come.

New comment by terminal_d in "Ask HN: How do AI chatbots develop personalities?"

terminal_d — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 08:54:56 +0000

They don't. It's you who gives it meaning. Also, it's trained on trillions (gazillions?) of man-hours of data, so even if it's an antiquated "algorithm" it manages to be authentic. Also, no one factors in the small adjustments (and likely deliberate prompt / text insertions) that the parent company would undertake to make the ""AI"" seem more real. It's 50% tech, 50% marketing.

New comment by terminal_d in "People can read their manager's mind (2015)"

terminal_d — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 11:22:17 +0000

Companies either want you to be technically proficient or to support the hierarchy. You need to suss out what kind of company you work for and act accordingly.

New comment by terminal_d in "Consultancies know less than they claim and cost more than they seem to"

terminal_d — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 11:11:56 +0000

They exist to propagate good feelings amongst management and to ensure a fat paycheck keeps coming though, even if it means sabotaging the company.

New comment by terminal_d in "Consultancies know less than they claim and cost more than they seem to"

terminal_d — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 11:11:04 +0000

IT Consultants =/= Standard Consultants from Big4 and the like

New comment by terminal_d in "Consultancies know less than they claim and cost more than they seem to"

terminal_d — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 11:10:13 +0000

No, that's just the business tagline. Consultancies purity spiral on Goodhart's law. They're worse than useless, and it's their "cult"-like behavior that is the basis of their entire business.

You HAVE to believe they bring in value because... well, you gotta believe.

Tell HN: Emacs is now available for Android devices

terminal_d — Sat, 11 Feb 2023 11:41:14 +0000

F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.gnu.emacs/

Repository: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/?h=feature/android

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34751449

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

New comment by terminal_d in "Ask HN: Things that have made you a better programmer"

terminal_d — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 17:02:54 +0000

Thinking hard and pausing before writing: If you can suss out the pitfalls for some program before you write a significant amount of it, it'd save you a lot of time. The way you've learnt something can lead you to be stubborn about a certain process, which means you might have to "hack" your way through it -- I ""prototype"" code in an easier language before I start writing it. It doesn't have to run in that language. I use lua for this purpose.

Take diligent notes: My system (in emacs) helps me out here. Taking a few seconds to look for a solution in your notes trumps going through a wild goose chase on the internet only to encounter links that you immediately half-recognize as something you tried six months ago when you had $issue. "Quantified life" stuff helps out here. Here's a big protip: never delete your bash history.

New comment by terminal_d in "Ask HN: Are you tired of reading ChatGPT headlines?"

terminal_d — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 15:38:40 +0000

> The newer research papers coming out are where I would focus if I'm really worried. Great reply, could you expand on this?

New comment by terminal_d in "Ask HN: Are you tired of reading ChatGPT headlines?"

terminal_d — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 15:33:28 +0000

I think that's more representative of tabloid writers than anything, haha. Understanding text is difficult, and scales with g. GPT-3 can make us believe that it can comprehend text that falls in the median of internet content, and I guess there would have to be some edge cases addressed by the devs, but it can't convince humans that is understands more difficult content, or even content that isn't in its db.

New comment by terminal_d in "The Business of Book Styling"

terminal_d — Sat, 28 Jan 2023 10:25:36 +0000

Arranging books in shelves by color is the biggest pseud tell out there.

New comment by terminal_d in "Olympic medalists in art competitions"

terminal_d — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 22:32:31 +0000

You know what would REALLY be a cool competition?

Who can build [X] the fastest, from scratch. Could be a house, clothes, food, etc. Known objective, and meritocratic.

New comment by terminal_d in "Microsoft to lay off 11k employees"

terminal_d — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 22:29:29 +0000

Hey, you're right -- this is a bargaining chip for BigCo, but the "invisible" factor here is that the economy is clearly in freefall and no one is ready to call the emperor naked. Everyone's cutting their losses, and in sectors as important as tech and with companies as big as MSFT, there's always some government support and "insider insight" into these events. If BigTech comes out of this on the other side, I fully expect one big company to be absorbed / dependent upon another. If not, this is prime time for underdogs to really show what they are capable of.

New comment by terminal_d in "Ask HN: How to get better at spoken English?"

terminal_d — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 22:21:22 +0000

Starting early trumps everything else.

You can still try and be competent in a year or two, but you'll sound weird saying certain words.

Read more, speak more, and try to not translate from your native language to english.

New comment by terminal_d in "Nikita Bier – Gas has been acquired by Discord"

terminal_d — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 22:18:47 +0000

"A boy gassed you up"

I've never heard about this before. Seems like gen Z (gen alpha?) is increasingly tech illiterate and tech-dependent. Not ten years ago, most kids weren't given phones by their parents. I guess it would be impossible to graduate high school these days without a phone.