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Metus

180 karma · joined June 30, 2019

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Metus··on Extracting concepts from GPT-4
Notice that most of the examples have none of the green highlight counter, which is shown for

> small losses. KEEPING SCORE: The Dow Jones industrial average rose 32 points, or 0.2 percent, to 18,156 as of 3:15 p.m. Eastern time. The Standard & Poor’s ... OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Warren Buffett’s company has bought nearly

the other sentences are in contrast to show how specific this neuron is.

Metus··on Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food
> No, it's not. Seeds and even embryos are to DNA what a running piece of software (and especially, a Lisp/Smalltalk image) is to its source code: the latter stores only a fraction of the former.

Thank you for pointing out this similarity. While a piece of software is infinitely replicable - a simple git clone from GitHub would suffice -, the surrounding software ecosystem - compilers, interpreters, installers, linkers, operating systems - needs to be in place, as well as the hardware.

Metus··on Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food
> Interesting. Gets you wondering what else you might not have heard of.

Consider how much of a rabbit hole YouTube can be and then imagine that the subsection of humanity that uses or is able to use YouTube is just a small part of it. A few topics and projects get a lot of attention but there are - I suppose - millions more with a dedicated fan base.

Metus··on Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food
> I keep and grow as much seed as possible. It is the only way to adapt plants to your local environment and farming methods and needs. I get plants that are much easier to grow, then breed for taste or other features. Thats how the heirlooms were created.

Do you actively select and breed the plants you grow, or does the selection happen "by itself" since only plants that are somehow adapted to local condition reach maturity?

Metus··on Joint statement of scientists and NGOs on the EU’s proposed eIDAS reform
> It's a shame, really, because DANE would've fixed so many problems.

It would basically make services like Let's Encrypt unnecessary and would move us close to a world where email encryption and validation works by default.

Metus··on Keyboard Maestro 11
Some applications make use of this macOS feature, like CheatSheet or Shortcat. I wish other platforms had a similar feature, I only know of vaguely similar behaviour in Vim/Emacs which which-key.
Metus··on Gittuf – a security layer for Git
Restricting read access is one of the missing features in monorepos. While they make a lot of stuff easier and trackable, I don't feel comfortable having every temporary consultant having access to all code at once.
Metus··on Object SHell
Some stuff I'd love to see implemented:

- Typed inputs and IntelliSense. There is very basic support for types, even so, I'd love even more strict types and type inference as in Typescript, so my terminal and shell can give me a hint what kind of input the command is expecting. At the same time, IntelliSense should tell me what command flags are still available and what are viable inputs, like cd suggesting only directories, or kubectl --namespace suggesting available namespaces.

- A concept of past commands as building blocks and/or interactive data wrangling. Many times I am mucking around in zsh to find a chain of commands that reliably gets the data I need out of some CSV or other source, retyping the same few commands with some new links until it works the way I want it to.

- A command like EXPLAIN in SQL so I can see where I should rethink what I am doing so I can refactor that part of the chain. At the same time, I'd love it if I could take one of those magic snippets from Stack Overflow and have an EXPLAIN-like command pick the components apart and explain the flags via some structured docstring format.

- Snippets in the Shell for some regularly used patterns of command chains.

- The concept of transactions, like in SQL, so I can run a command or script without worrying about it failing halfway through - the shell automatically undoing its changes. Maybe this should work on the level of a shell session even.

Metus··on Global Encryption Day: Encryption's Critical Role in Safeguarding Human Rights
> There's a whole other rant I have about this problem, where we really lack domain specific trust standards - i.e. communicating with a business, what I want to know is "is this a recognized legal business entity in it's jurisdiction, and what's it's status to mine?"

I have the same pain, but this seems more like a regulatory issue than a technological one. Here in Germany, (basically all) legal entities need to publish a physical adress where they are reachable, it would be easy, in theory, to extend this to a reachable domain or email adress, thereby giving a guarantee, at least in Germany, that you are interacting with the business you are expecting. As you said, DKIM already exists.

Unless I have missed your point, then rant away.

Metus··on Global Encryption Day: Encryption's Critical Role in Safeguarding Human Rights
> (2) Signal has no system by which you can communicate to "conceptual entities" - i.e. companies.

This has always kind of bugged me with email as compared to physical mail: While with a physical mailbox I can write a letter "to whom it may concern" and throw it in, with email I need to find out if the special, general purpose inbox is info@, contact@, hello@, or whatever other address the company uses, assuming they use the same domain for their email as they do for their website.

On the next level, there is no first-class support for stuff like 'send this message to person X, although it is adressed to organisation Y, where X works.' Basically, acknowledging the legal and organisational reality that while (single) humans might read, process and respond to communication, it is the legal entity that is actually being adressed.

Metus··on Global Encryption Day: Encryption's Critical Role in Safeguarding Human Rights
In theory the giants that already hold the vast majority of all email communications - like Microsoft and Alphabet - are in a prime position to introduce a successor, hopefully this time with a receipt so the last argument in favour of fax dies off. At the same time, they have no proper motivation to do so.
Metus··on Global Encryption Day: Encryption's Critical Role in Safeguarding Human Rights
I don't think that Signal is a proper substitute for anything that email is used for. Maybe it would be better to work on more secure successors or extensions to email.
Metus··on Global Encryption Day: Encryption's Critical Role in Safeguarding Human Rights
I have similar doubts as well. Especially considering that digital signatures and encryption do not protect against impersonation attacks, like phishing via facebok.com or other similar sounding domains, in either the case of websites or email. But without widespread use you don't even have the option.
Metus··on Global Encryption Day: Encryption's Critical Role in Safeguarding Human Rights
One of the largest holes in encrypted communication is still the fact that the vast majority of email is still neither digitally signed, nor encrypted. And even if they are, the usual schemes do not encrypt the subject line.

I wish there was something like Let's encrypt but for email. Just make it trivial to sign and encrypt your mail. Also, mail clients should give a huge warning for unencrypted and/or unsigned mail, just like browsers do with web sites. Right now, at least on Outlook for macOS, you only get a happy green padlock on signed email, if you ever receive one.

Metus··on Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
I always disliked that it was so difficult to interact with Word if you wanted to create automated documents. Instead I'd love it if there was a developer-first experience to create standardised documents from nice looking participation certificates, invoices, memos, documentation up to multi-tome histories.
Metus··on Ask HN: Show me your half baked project
Is this something where you could or should cooperate with the Internet Archive?
Metus··on Atlassian Acquires Loom
I am still dreaming of something that would allow a user to file a ticket, have them record audio and video like loom to describe the issue and what they were trying to achieve, and then dump a screen record of the last minute before opening the ticket as well as as much info about the machine's state as possible. And/or maybe connecting to helpdesk with video directly. Existing software comes close but is not quite there yet.
Metus··on SpaceX files for new 29,988-satellite W-band network
As an amateur, that follows SpaceX from a distance, what makes the W-band so interesting?
Metus··on M2 Ultra can run 128 streams of Llama 2 7B in parallel
Do these implementations use the neural engine? I saw that there was a stable diffusion implementation using the neural engine and I found that my macbook noticably did not run hot, as opposed to an average Teams call.
Metus··on The Ashley Book of Knots (1944)
Maybe you can start that list, on GitHub or something like that, so people can contribute.
Metus··on Noise is all around us
> This problem is non-existant in Austria, or Germany for the most part.

This is highly dependent on where in Germany you are talking about. In some parts the police don't care at all.

Metus··on NZ’s biggest data breach shows retention is the sleeping giant of data security
No. On the contrary, GDPR explicitly allows data to be stored if retention is required for law, such as all financial data for 10+ years. However, there is absolutely no need to hold all this data "hot" in the production system and not in a "cold" archive without automated connection.
Metus··on Thinking hard makes the brain tired
> The fact that you use the past tense means you got past it? If so, I'd appreciate any advice

I'd love to give you advice so much, however I forced myself through it and started to work in a different carreer.

Metus··on Thinking hard makes the brain tired
Thank you for the list, I will take the advice to heart immediately.
Metus··on Thinking hard makes the brain tired
What are the warning signs? The paths you described kind of describe things I do. Sometimes they are necessary and I am taking steps to prevent them. At the same time I worry I already shut down the warning signs.

Sometimes I wonder whether "burnout" or "occupational burnout" describes something I have experienced in college. It was not a spectacular or intense thing, just losing interest in my subject completely and avoiding getting started with exercises, even though I was decently good at my subject and loved the hours and hours I spent studying.

Metus··on What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide
I disagree with it not being easy to understand, on the contrary it makes perfect sense to me. We have the vast earth we live on as humanity and all the land was here long before us and will be here long after we are gone. Now we divide some of this land up and give people exclusive rights to it. How is it not absolutely intuitive to pay everyone else, who is not allowed to use this land, a fee, rent or tax or however you might want to call it, as compensation? In turn, if you use less land to reach the same goal, i.e. you make better, more efficient use, you pay less, just like with any other resource.

The more common "rebuttal" I hear is "well the land lords will just slap it onto the rent, so no use", to which I ask "then why don't they ask for more rent already if the rentors would be willing to pay?"

Then again, people I talk with are against a wealth tax as well, claiming that property would be impossible to account for and value, meanwhile France and Switzerland, two neighbours, have no issues in that regard. At the same time, both Germany and Austria had a wealth tax until very recently.

Metus··on What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide
Whenever I bring up the topic of Georgism or land value tax, people look at me like I am mentally ill. The idea of taxing the right to exclusive use over a piece of land - something that no human has ever put effort into existing - is so utterly foreign to most people. Unfortunate.

There was a reform of the German property tax system, since the federal constitutional court ruled that the old system was unfair. The current model allows the 16 states to set up their own system, if they wish so, and interestingly enough, Baden-Württemberg turned the property tax into an actual land value tax, taxing only the land value itself, not the real estate on it. Of course there was a documentary the other day about a land owner crying that he is forced to build more houses to rent out and cover the cost of the LVT. That was the point all along!

Metus··on Could you train a ChatGPT-beating model for $85k and run it in a browser?
Of course the quality is horrible relative to a proper video, it just illustrates that txt2vid might not need 100B+ parameters.
Metus··on Could you train a ChatGPT-beating model for $85k and run it in a browser?
There is a video model making the rounds on /r/stablediffusion and it is just a tiny bit larger than Stable Diffusion.
Metus··on Show HN: Finetune LLaMA-7B on commodity GPUs using your own text
https://open-assistant.io
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