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JackFr

14,997 karma · joined May 16, 2012

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JackFr··on Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
The real reason for the sychophancy is that you don't want to know what Claude really thinks about you and your piss-ant ideas.
JackFr··on Search all text in New York City
Can’t find me any REVS tags. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revs_(graffiti_artist)

Instead shows me thousands of “Rev“

JackFr··on The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]
Raised 3 kids in a 2 bedroom apartment in NYC. It’s fine. When they go to college, they marvel at the space they have in a dorm room.
JackFr··on AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was
IP is a pragmatic legal fiction, created to reward developers of creative and innovative thought, so we get more of it. It’s not a natural law.

As such fair use is whatever the courts say it is.

JackFr··on AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was
Safety is about unintentional harm to yourself or others. Ethics largely concern themselves with intentional behavior.
JackFr··on AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was
Not hand waving, Asimov’s three laws are not a good framework. My claim is that the whole point was so that Asimov could write entertaining stories about the ambiguities and edge cases of the three laws.
JackFr··on Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial
> Ibuprofen ? That's really not something I'd have expected to end up in someone's 'healthy stuff' list.

Never knew about the potential stomach bleeds until I took my mother to the hospital earlier this year. Ironically, she was taking Motrin given to her in the same hospital a week earlier.

JackFr··on The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
> by securing a large personal loan from Carlos Slim, who went on to become their biggest shareholder.

NYT has dual class shares. It’s run by the Sulzberger family despite Slim’s stake.

They are rich, but not billionaires.

JackFr··on Vibe code is legacy code
I have a strictly hobby web app that I work on. 6-7 years ago I inadvertently pushed AWS email service credentials to GitHub.

Half an hour after the push I got an email and text from GitHub that I had exposed credentials. I quickly logged in to my AWS to turn off the service, to see that AWS had suspended that service because the bounce rate on the 80000 emails sent in that 15 minute period was too high. It was crazy just how fast it was exploited.

JackFr··on Steam, Itch.io are pulling ‘porn’ games. Critics say it's a slippery slope
> Don’t like porn? Don’t buy it.

Ok.

Don’t like porn? Don’t sell it.

“CENSORSHIP! PURITAN NAZIS!”

JackFr··on Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python (2009)
I spent years knowing nothing but C and I’d say it handicapped me in many ways. (I recall insisting that it would be impossible to do anything without assignment.)

After getting my eyes opened a little bit, I read SICP and it was mind blowing. I read a little Haskell, wrote a little Clojure and a lot of Scala. And even though the day job now is Java and Python, I’m much better off for having bothered to learn it.

JackFr··on What even is 'adult' content? [NSFW]
My daughters went to a Catholic all girls high school. The translated Catallus 16 in Latin class.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16

I don’t think anyone considered that the Latin syllabus might be a cause for concern.

JackFr··on What even is 'adult' content? [NSFW]
If people are gonna use “natural” as a justification, nothing more natural than violence.
JackFr··on What even is 'adult' content? [NSFW]
The concept of natural vs. non-natural is a human and largely cultural construct.

It’s still a useful word, but it can’t really shoulder the burden of making one argument more rational than the other.

JackFr··on Man wearing metallic necklace dies after being sucked into MRI machine
That's reporting by the local affiliate, not the Fox News.
JackFr··on Man wearing metallic necklace dies after being sucked into MRI machine
You can volunteer for a study. Check for flyers at your hospital asking for volunteers. (Especially psychiatric institutions - they love brain MRIs for their research.)
JackFr··on Man wearing metallic necklace dies after being sucked into MRI machine
Multiple heart attacks.
JackFr··on Man wearing metallic necklace dies after being sucked into MRI machine
According to other articles I've read, multiple heart attacks.
JackFr··on Will the Fear of Being Confused for AI Mean That We Will Now Write Differently?
Now semicolons on the other hand, they’re an affectation.
JackFr··on LLM Inevitabilism
You sell them Copilot. You Sell them CursorAI. You sell them Windsurf. You sell them Devin. You sell the Claude Code.

Software guys are doing much, much more than treating LLM's like an improved Stack Overflow. And a lot of them are willing to pay.

JackFr··on Florida is letting companies make it harder for highly paid workers to swap jobs
They are moving to Florida because the personal income tax rate in Forida is 0% and in New York it's about 14%.
JackFr··on Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore
My middle school science teacher did it, and the big caveat he gave us was not to use wax or plastic-coated cups if we wanted to try at home.
JackFr··on Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore
> It turns out that no, you don't need pottery to boil things

My middle school science teacher boiled water in a paper cup.

JackFr··on LLM code generation may lead to an erosion of trust
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

The classic on the subject.

JackFr··on Man 'refused entry into US' as border control catch him with bald JD Vance meme
A reasonable news outlet would call CBP for a comment.

Something like "attempts to reach CBP for comment were unsuccessful." goes a long way. It's a tell that they don't. The story is too good not to print.

JackFr··on WhatsApp banned on House staffers' devices
Tell that to Jonathon Pollard.
JackFr··on 'Gwada negative': French scientists find new blood type in woman
I recently had major surgery and got two units of blood in during the operation and two more post-op. Post-op before I got the blood, they typed my blood again, and a nurse stayed in the room while I got the blood and I wondered why. This comment makes it clear.
JackFr··on Learn You Galois Fields for Great Good (00)
1) the properties of a field is missing closure under the operation. This is kind of assumed from context, but I would include it.

2) the reduction step up multiplication of nth order polynomials (to keep them nth order) is missing (or at least I missed it after a couple of readings.)

Apart from those quibbles, this was really good overall though. I enjoyed it.

JackFr··on How I Program with Agents
Although it cannot understand the rhetorical why as in a frustrated “Why on earth would you possibly do it that brain dead way?”

Instead of the downcast, chastened look of a junior developer, it responds with a bulleted list of the reasons why it did it that way.

JackFr··on Plato got virtually everything wrong (2018)
> It implies that they are deep fundamental laws of the universe

Rather they are deep fundamentals of what your brain can contain, so you perceive them as fundamental to the universe.

If we admit there are all sorts of phenomena which we cannot observe directly, which we ultimately observe through machines we construct -- does your imagination permit that there are possibly thoughts that are literally unthinkable to you? What would an artifact that allows us to contain some shadow or essence of these thoughts look like?

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