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MetaWhirledPeas

1,886 karma · joined March 4, 2017

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MetaWhirledPeas··on AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
> LLMs don't; everything gets added.

LLMs can run with whatever directive you give them. If the directive is lots of code that's what you get. But when everyone gets repeatedly burned by vulnerabilities the directive becomes building bullet-proof code. With the right prompting an LLM can be a lot more diligent about that than we ever could.

MetaWhirledPeas··on Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance
> All those accidents you mentioned are "breaking a few eggs". The omelette is speed.

False. There is no omelette. This is all happening because Pandora's box has been opened, and we know that attempts to slow it or regulate it are playing into the hands of the big AI firms who desire regulatory capture.

So it could end up terrible, or not, but either way there's just no way to stop it. The big AI firms getting their way would only slow progress in the countries where they operate. The rest of the world would progress unimpeded. So Big AI would get its paycheck but AI as a broader concept would hardly be slowed at all.

MetaWhirledPeas··on CVE Tracker
> DOGE was impressively criminal. The team tried to remove the CVE reporting system

Honest question: what would be the criminal purpose for that?

MetaWhirledPeas··on Tesla Roadster
I would think the only real application would be military, which is probably not what they were going for. This one was just for fun.
MetaWhirledPeas··on Tesla Roadster
Hah! It sounds exactly like that, except that's not what I meant at all. I see all of humanity as a collective. We work together to achieve things without any single power dictating our decisions. So in my mind I'm actually thinking more libertarian. And maybe a more accurate replacement for "bureaucracy" would be logistical friction or something like that. The lure of highly concentrated leadership is the elimination of this friction, at whatever cost the leadership decides, irrespective of your wishes. When all power is concentrated in the hands of the few, personal liberty doesn't stand much of a chance.
MetaWhirledPeas··on Tesla Roadster
By all means, enjoy your Renault.
MetaWhirledPeas··on Tesla Roadster
> it just feels like they are playing around with toys instead advancing humanity

You don't think electric vehicles and battery storage advance humanity?

On the contrary I would rather my big companies didn't try so hard to advance humanity. Elon has a lot of takes around creating a Utopian society which do not sit right with me. Really it's not the advancement that's the problem, it's the requisite power and resources necessary to achieve the elaborate visions. Humanity should be advanced by a collective, not by a few gifted individuals, even if that means more bureaucracy and less efficiency.

MetaWhirledPeas··on Tesla Roadster
> still better for long trips

I own an ICE car and an EV. We use the EV for long trips and it is great. The only time we hesitate is when we are going out into the middle of nowhere.

EV advantages on trips:

- Smooth ride

- Always-ready A/C

- Pet mode

- Self-driving

You do have to plan a bit more. The Tesla route planner is excellent. Having a charger at your destination really seals the deal.

MetaWhirledPeas··on Tesla Roadster
> Let others do it, find out how late it arrives, what glued panels fall off at speed and wait for the inevitable recalls.

Sound advice for people looking for a practical car. But if you have Lambo money who cares? I have never seen a supercar described as reliable.

MetaWhirledPeas··on Tesla Roadster
Imagine how boring the world would be if we refused every idea that didn't have an immediately practical purpose. Rocketry was probably overkill here but it did achieve at least one thing for the Tesla and SpaceX engineers: you can do things you did not believe were possible.
MetaWhirledPeas··on Tesla Roadster
> Nobody is offering this.

They are trying. Inflation keeps moving the bar. It's not like they want their cars to be expensive; the components and fabrication prices just are.

Used you can achieve sub-25k easily.

MetaWhirledPeas··on Tesla Roadster
I used to feel the same way, namely that the tunnel driving would be the signal that unsupervised driving was ready to go. But now that I see their geofenced robotaxis in operation I sort of get it now. Those things do well at driving autonomously, but there are edge cases where the car's safety response is to essentially shut down and wait for human intervention rather than risk uncertainty. That's not something you want happening when you have a single lane of traffic with no passing, leading to a situation where every car in the chain is now forced to deal with the situation in unison. Humans can figure that out pretty quickly, but training the cars to do it will take time. I do expect autonomous tunnel rides any day now, but I can see why they weren't the first use case for autonomous vehicles.
MetaWhirledPeas··on Tesla Roadster
I'm not saying it was a production-ready car, but the notion of it being styrofoam is stupid. These demos are as much for the morale of the engineers as they are for the entertainment of the public. Tesla doesn't need to demonstrate a rocket car.
MetaWhirledPeas··on AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware
Were the hypothetical "paywalls everywhere" scenario to play out, sites would quickly consolidate their subscriptions. So a subscription to something like Engadget would get you access to a wide swath of sites, making the paywall a lot more palatable overall. This would be the inevitable outcome because it would be the most natural way for sites to compete with other sites.
MetaWhirledPeas··on Beauty in DVD Menus
There's nothing worse than trying to watch a movie with a fresh mind and being bombarded with some over-engineered DVD or Blu Ray menu that shows scenes from different parts of the movie, like some sort of absurd ad for a movie I already decided to watch. OK I guess it's worse when the UX is incredibly bad too, which it usually is.
MetaWhirledPeas··on 1 in 8 cancer cases worldwide are caused by infections, study finds
> every rocket launch and deorbit by starlink et all also put toxic pollution into the atmosphere

Bringing up Starship launches in the same discussion with car emissions is like bringing up skateboards when talking about traffic jams.

One big help for car emissions would be to make them electric.

MetaWhirledPeas··on Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
> hypebro libertarian

What has this got to do with an operating system? Unwelcome commentary.

MetaWhirledPeas··on Meta VR Glasses
Wow I disagree with this. Even with Quest 2 the hardware was powerful enough to create interesting VR experiences. I think a bigger limiting factor is the comfort of the headsets and the quality of the source material (in the case of streaming).

Driving sims may not be peak running on a Quest, but I think that is a different realm from what I am talking about. There is plenty to do and see without photorealistic 3D graphics.

MetaWhirledPeas··on 'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees
> There's very little, if any, incentive to do anything more securely than absolutely necessary.

There wasn't.

MetaWhirledPeas··on AI safety is mostly a sex cult
Sex cult is beyond mere weird sex behavior.
MetaWhirledPeas··on AI safety is mostly a sex cult
If you think your issue is important, and that people should follow your lead, maybe leave the sex cult first.

If anyone is serious about this topic they will find a new spokesperson immediately.

MetaWhirledPeas··on AI safety is mostly a sex cult
> Being in a cult doesn't disqualify people from being in politics

Let's survey the American voters

MetaWhirledPeas··on Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
As someone who has watched a team battle Xamarin and now Maui, and all the painful upgrades in between, I agree with you. Sure they never had the pain of supporting two separate codebases, but they also never had the luxury of doing anything the easy way.
MetaWhirledPeas··on iPhone Duo
Well there are options. https://commodore.net/callback/
MetaWhirledPeas··on I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
I like "tersely".

"Tersely, what are today's headlines?"

I admit I don't personally orchestrate agents, but I imagine something like this would work:

"Tersely, write up plans for agents to implement this feature. Begin each of your agent instructions with 'Tersely,'."

I guess in addition to terse wording you'd get terse code? Which ain't such a bad thing.

MetaWhirledPeas··on 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
> imagine RCA started selling televisions with microphones in them that recorded what was in your room and radioed it back to headquarters for some reason

The problem is that there are real use cases (whether you want them yourself or not) for having an always-on microphone that phones home. The discussion for regulators and lawmakers then becomes about how the data is handled, and that is where they get left in the dust.

MetaWhirledPeas··on 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
The law has been unable to keep up with tech changes. Let's hope for the irony of AI helping them figure this stuff out.
MetaWhirledPeas··on 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
Not a valid critique when dealing with an oligopoly (YT, Tik Tok, Insta, etc.). You use the platform or you get ignored. Using the platform to criticize the platform or other platforms like it is possibly the best use of the platform.
MetaWhirledPeas··on 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
100% agree. There are a million reasons people come up with for why this will never happen, but pardon me if I want to see us try first and then fix the mistakes we made after. Right now we're living in one big dystopian mistake that needs immediate pushback.
MetaWhirledPeas··on 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
Smarter people than me are usually pretty good at guessing what PCB components do just by looking at the shape of them. I guess that's not proof but it's enough for me.
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