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MattGaiser

18,250 karma · joined March 4, 2020

My email is 13mdg5@queensu.ca
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MattGaiser··on PHP Foundation 'under-funded' with one full-time staff member, director says
Are there many serious companies using PHP?

It overwhelmingly seems like the language of the cheap and not very technical or providers of services to the cheap and not very technical.

MattGaiser··on Will big software companies (like Adobe) come together to curb AI?
I think it is irrelevant, as PhotoShop is notoriously poor in UX. GIMP has even worse UX. The battle is not in cloning PhotoShop, but in rethinking complex photo editing.
MattGaiser··on An AI agent emailed researchers for help. It told us why
There is already mass spamming emails. I already get hundreds of emails per day that are spam as I post my emails publicly for people to get in touch. If you want to truly and maliciously spam, you can do that.

The fix is already AI triage.

That is the current state of email today.

So why couldn’t this scale unless for some reason our reaction to this is to shut off email and not build better classifiers?

MattGaiser··on An AI agent emailed researchers for help. It told us why
Yeah, I do not get the dismissiveness given that the researchers themselves were not as dismissive.

> The connection was a “little bit far-fetched,” she says. “But I could imagine a first-year Ph.D. student coming up with exactly those same questions and ideas.”

This one in particular made it seem like a very ordinary interaction.

MattGaiser··on The death of web development education
It depends on whether you bought books to learn or bought books to solve.

There are a vast number of books that I purchased not for any interest in the topic, but to solve a particular problem. I have zero interest in understanding Docker. I find it tedious. But I do have a book on it as I did need to know it at some point.

I wouldn’t buy that book today, as AI means I no longer need to know Docker.

MattGaiser··on CS240 AI Cheating Retrospective
All these analogies are kind of tortured as they ignore the elephant in the room. The students want to be there to get their job getting paper. They aren’t there to learn.

If society offered some reward for lifting the weight while not enforcing how, forklifts would absolutely be used to lift weights.

MattGaiser··on OpenAI Feared "Optics" of what might appear on Hacker News
We tend to accept lawbreaking if it is for a product we want.

There are several multi billion dollar companies where the founding thesis was “what if we just ignore the law?”

MattGaiser··on We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians
Sure, but we currently find that acceptable. Codebases are full of such bugs.
MattGaiser··on OpenAI agent hacked Australian government website, PM says
> No, society does not want corporations with no responsibilities.

It voted otherwise.

MattGaiser··on OpenAI agent hacked Australian government website, PM says
It depends. Society allows a lot of harm because we consider things otherwise useful.

Those killed by climate change will never get compensation. Killing people with a car is not quite free, but very cheap.

MattGaiser··on AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons
Does publishing it matter? You would almost have to keep it out of the cloud to avoid it being ingested as policies change. So even sharing it may become higher friction.
MattGaiser··on There's no point at which turning your brain off will work
The challenge here is that the business world doesn't really recognize the concept of cheating.

In particular, tech is very open to people cheating and if billions of dollars could be had by somehow communicating the chess engine's work to a human at chess, the world of business would cheat at it.

Tech has a number of large startups that basically started with the assumption of "what if we assumed the law had no teeth?"

MattGaiser··on Align AI and Mathematics–To Something Else
This whole discussion is basically a field demanding that their field be preserved for them alone to discover. No competition allowed besides the monks of mathematics.
MattGaiser··on Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K
A lot of this was self inflicted by Florida. Between their roofing coverage laws and their attorney fee laws, suing for new roofs was basically free, so everyone and their dog did it.
MattGaiser··on ElevenLabs Music v2.5
Lots of music is just filler. It’s not intended to be really listened to, but to break up silence.
MattGaiser··on ChatGPT Is Throwing 404
I mean, the lesson from AWS has largely just been to accept it as if US-East-1 blows up, everyone is screwed anyway so you cna just shrug it off.
MattGaiser··on ChatGPT Is Throwing 404
Yeah, just tried to switch over and now getting errors there too...
MattGaiser··on ChatGPT Is Throwing 404
As is Codex
MattGaiser··on Uber is laying off 10% of staff
The coordinators enable extra coordination that is not worth doing. The coordination itself is the problem.
MattGaiser··on A Society of Cheats
The thing is thought that business seems quite happy with the AI prompting. Business has never paid a premium for slop vs knowledge when it is good enough.
MattGaiser··on How credit card rewards became a $9.2B wealth transfer
Most people can’t optimize for 1-3%. Life is flooded with 1-3% choices.

Even as someone who is a credit card optimizer, I also ignore numerous 1-3% choices a day.

Many people also spend more than they can cover on it.

MattGaiser··on Andreessen Horowitz is investing billions into a bleak future
The results of startups flouting laws though have been such that even when faced with determined opposition, in the end they are defeated. Airbnb and Uber ran roughshod over the law and faced determined taxi commissions and groups that usually beat real estate developers.
MattGaiser··on Andreessen Horowitz is investing billions into a bleak future
Do they care? Just cheat the people in the next round!
MattGaiser··on Canada suspends trade negotiations with USA and match tariffs dollar for dollar
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/trump-tari...
MattGaiser··on Why the Ocean Cleanup hasn't solved the plastic pollution crisis
> This attitude is wrong IMO. The issue with high-profile half-baked interventions is that they distract from real unsexy solutions like grab the plastic in rivers BEFORE they make it to the ocean.

This system change nonsense is why no progress has been made on climate change for the past 2 decades.

Could have been well on the way either way solar and wind if a pile of other issues weren’t bundled into the conversation.

MattGaiser··on Software Engineering fundamentals matter more
What is “it” specifically and what languages are you using?
MattGaiser··on AI Thinks the Internet Is Reddit. We Have 8,616 Answers Proving It
Are there any other large online communities that are publicly searchable other than Reddit, particularly ones organized by topic?

Hacker News is not organized by topic.

Even within the walled garden of Facebook, search is awful.

Stack Exchange tends to shut down product recommendation questions (as well as most other questions).

MattGaiser··on When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs
The thing they didn’t want to say is that the problem is that Bank of America has legal reporting and compliance obligations.

On that one, they were right enough that there are an enormous number of businesses that use crypto to avoid something government related.

MattGaiser··on Show HN: Git-knife – Edit commit messages, authors, and dates like a spreadsheet
A tool like this never sees the light of day without an LLM. Git is complicated and use case for this is rather niche.
MattGaiser··on Degrees of Wealth
Its astonishing how many people miss that if you have servants, you must be an elite, as by definition, we cannot each have 5 servants.
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