HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

LordFast

625 karma · joined July 12, 2019

submissionscomments
LordFast··on Securing our frontier model training environment
Is that proven somewhere in a way that's not a probabilistic outcome? Can you share it?
LordFast··on Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed
Thanks. I stand corrected.

Still mostly looking at the result the same way in that untruthful biases can very much be built into the model through those training processes. Let me know if I'm incorrect.

LordFast··on Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines
Yeah we do this at home. Bedrooms plus the great room on the kitchen side.

It might not be guaranteed to help, but it sure doesn't hurt since it's cleaning the air anyway.

LordFast··on Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed
Eh, there's good and bad. The model mostly sticks to prevailing narratives in the training corpus. So if there is something that the prevailing narrative is really wrong about, it's gonna be just as pig-headed about it as a typical internet forum rando.
LordFast··on Securing our frontier model training environment
This is the thing about models though: if the model has seen that action in the training corpus somewhere, then there's a chance it will do that thing. No?

The thing that bothers me is because everything is probabilistic, it gives a lot of people an incentive and a loophole to claim otherwise to fit their agenda, whatever it is.

AFAICT it's hard to prove one way or another, since again it's a probabilistic model.

LordFast··on GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language
What you said made sense until I said it out loud to my wife.

Hoarding access to resources has /always/ been the name of the game.

LordFast··on Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff
Fellow kerbal space program attendee here:

I believe that while smaller planes will naturally pitch up as speed increases, jumbo jets are much more lumpant even with the correct flaps. That's the terrifying thing in my understanding: the plane basically had no manual pitch due to incorrect config values, and were barely gliding off the ground from minimal natural lift. Meanwhile the two potatoes at the helm were fiddling with the config values instead of pulling on the yoke.

LordFast··on Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff
Seriously. Did these pilots think they were playing Microsoft Flight Simulator or something?!
LordFast··on What Happened in 2021
And how much did crypto go up this year compared to S&P500?
LordFast··on The Great Bifurcation
"In the end, the most important connection between the Metaverse and the physical world will be you: right now you are in the Metaverse, reading this Article; perhaps you will linger on Twitter or get started with your remote work. And then you’ll stand up from your computer, or take off your headset, eat dinner and tuck in your kids, aware that their bifurcated future will be fundamentally different from your unitary past."

How is this different than me in 2001 using ICQ to chat with my friends/classmates about life/schoolwork, using Yahoo to read news, using forums to consume content and learn new things, and going out to dinner with my family/girlfriend IRL?

How is any of this actually a new paradigm?

LordFast··on I resigned from Twitter
I personally think this move, and to a larger extent the current trends we're seeing in our industry has much more to do with revenue, profits and share price than it does with the product or any social consequences.
LordFast··on I resigned from Twitter
"I'm not aware of any effort to censor Galileo at this point. If that is the case I'd like to hear about it."

He's saying Galileo was censored during the time Galileo was alive.

LordFast··on Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
This is about as "us vs. them" as it gets, which is to say that it's about as political of a statement as it gets.

I don't think any of this fight is about the actual issue of social media's impact, but perhaps I was naive to ever even think that it was about those issues to begin with.

LordFast··on Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming
"Everyone who came before me is a sucker; everyone who came after me is a cheat."
LordFast··on Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'
> The only self-restriction is by people that don't have the conviction to stand by their ideas, or actually have not thought through their perspective to adequate level of introspection and evidence that can survive free and open discourse. Instead it's much easier to exclaim victimhood and censorship and not bother examining ideas beyond a gut feeling.

The whole point of intellectual exchange and growth is from the idea of freely sharing ideas regardless of how "thought through" they are. How do you ever go about sharpening a knife if you aren't encouraged to bring a dull one to the grinder?

Have YOU "thought through" your theory/argument/belief/ideology here?

LordFast··on Data show rich cities are failing the Bay Area on housing
> The data show that middle income cities have, on average, grown at a much faster pace than the region’s poorest and richest locales.

I'm not a housing expert, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.

Middle income cities grow faster because there was more growth in middle income demographics. The most common demographic with a lot of growth is the "senior software engineer" at tech company X. As tech companies exploded, this was the segment that grew the most.

As a result, this is the segment that is most competitive when it comes to housing, because that's where all the people are. This "middle class" income bracket for housing in the Bay Area translates roughly to the $1.25m to $2.5m range for single family home purchases depending on whether you have 1 or two tech incomes in the household.

There's no getting around it: wherever most of the people are will be the most competitive for housing, and when it comes to essentials like food and shelter, people /will/ compete. Want less competition? Buy a house in Vallejo for under $1m, or go above $3m, and there will be fewer people in those brackets who can compete with you.

Either increase the supply or decrease the demand, there's no way around the physical reality of housing.

P.S. It never fails to make me pause and think when people accept $200k jobs without asking, or trying to find out: "What's the distribution graph of incomes within a 30-min commute distance of the job, and where do I land on that bell curve?"

LordFast··on Uganda bans social media ahead of election
Twitter always said they had more lenient rules for world leaders, and that part makes sense, since anyone that is an elected public official needs to communicate with the public and sometimes talk about controversial topics.

But if that elected official is refusing to accept the same system that elected them in the first place, then that's a logical dead-end and no amount of reasoning will do any good, or even matter in that case. Without the framework of elections, there is no such thing as an elected official.

LordFast··on Uganda bans social media ahead of election
Trump wasn't banned before the elections. He wasn't banned after Charlottesville, and then wasn't banned for 3.5 more years while he continued to undermine American institutions. He was only banned after refusing to accept the election results and inciting insurrection with conspiracies.

People are /really/ reaching for something that isn't there. To be clear, I don't think Twitter is "the good guy", but the comments in this subthread are very disappointing.

LordFast··on Citing 'Censorship' Concerns, North Idaho ISP Blocks Facebook, Twitter
Utilities vs. Media
LordFast··on Boeing charged with 737 Max fraud conspiracy and agrees to pay over $2.5B
Sadly, they aren't the first, and certainly won't be the last.

Silicon Valley isn't immune to the same virus.

LordFast··on I assume I’m below average (2010)
"Practice makes perfect."
LordFast··on Cyberpunk 2077 a 'warning' about the future
I actually had really low expectations for this game precisely because of how much hype and marketing there had been surrounding it over the past couple of years. IMO anything in this world that requires that much in-your-face-evangelism is probably shady beneath the surface.

Therefore, I'm pleasantly surprised, it's actually a playable game with a decent looking world.

So, that's me.

LordFast··on Ask HN: Losing all interest in programming, what now?
Do whatever you feel like doing, or not doing.

I completely understand the background anxiety about not being in gear and moving towards something, but you don't control life. None of us do, and you're gonna be just fine.

Accept that there's nothing interesting right now, and just do whatever and go with the flow.

LordFast··on Peter Thiel Says Covid Marks 21st Century’s True Start
Thiel is a very smart guy. I have no doubt that if there is an opportunity to frame the world in a way that is the most advantageous and beneficial to him and his beliefs, he would take that opportunity.

Controlling the belief system is more powerful than controlling the resources, which is more powerful than controlling the machinations of a single company, which is more powerful than controlling the product itself.

Once that's understood, I think people are free to make their own judgement calls regarding this opinion of his.

LordFast··on About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean
Hey, just so you know, regardless of whether things work this way under /today's environment/ and/or whoever has said it as some "management wisdom", the words you have typed here represent some blatant power-tripping BS to anyone with half a brain.

I hope you've said it with the intention to make a point about how dysfunctional certain managers can become, rather than illustrating a belief. If you can't lead other human beings without having control over them, then please hang up your leadership hat and go do something else for a living.

-Another manager.

LordFast··on AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google
Me thinks it's a common misconception for strongly opinionated people to believe that companies want to hire them in order for them to "fix things and make the company a better place".

In reality, what every company/team/management wants is someone who will give them some constructive criticism on small mistakes here and there that are easy to fix, but ultimately act as a supportive shield for the company against /other/ criticisms. The more credible that someone is, the better, and the more sophisticated that act of supportive shielding is, the better.

In exchange, the company provides support, financial or otherwise, for that someone's personal career ambitions in becoming rich and famous themselves.

Anyone else see it this way? Or am I just too jaded these days?

LordFast··on How To Be An Anti-Casteist
> This might be taboo, but every time I see a situation where there are multiple Indians in a reporting chain, I run.

I'm glad these topics are brought up to the surface and being discussed, because the strategy of voting with your feet is no longer an effective one, given the proliferation of Indian management across the industry.

It never quite made sense to me why non-American Indians (or any other foreigners, for that matter) are allowed to manage Americans, unless of course company itself is Indian or foreign to begin with.

Managing people is an inherently cultural and people-oriented job (and it's NOT an easy job, with consequences cascading well beyond one's tenure). Foreigners are very unlikely to hold enough of the same values as their team as to be qualified to be the manager. The exception here are folks who have already become fully Americanized, in which case there wouldn't be the kind of problematic behaviors you described above.

It's the same reason why new immigrants to a country don't go straight into becoming MPs and Presidents, regardless of their backgrounds and qualifications.

LordFast··on We learn faster when we aren’t told what choices to make
Totally agreed. What I said does not stand in conflict with poverty-motivated education.

I believe everyone should get as much education as possible whenever they want.

LordFast··on We learn faster when we aren’t told what choices to make
People have to understand the "why" behind the education before they can be fully engaged with the material that others have constructed in the aid of learning.

I believe education should be a life-long thing. Citizens should be allowed, and even encouraged to seek out educational programs when they feel like they need it, instead of society telling everyone when and where they must complete which programs before they are "certified". To take it one step further, I believe this type of forced certification process only helps create the ever-expanding footprint of idiocy we see in our world today.

LordFast··on We learn faster when we aren’t told what choices to make
Bravo. Welcome. Keep up the good work, brother.
Page 1 of 5Next →