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MichaelZuo

3,872 karma · joined March 16, 2014

M. Y. Zuo

mzuo.ca/about

michaelyzuo@gmail.com

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MichaelZuo··on China's First Frontier AI Export Controls: Mofcom Announcement No. 48
This seems trivially true though, it’s not possible at all for any human being ever to answer that question, without omitting something.

(Unless someone totally bonkers spends thousands of hours and thousands of pages answering a single question)

MichaelZuo··on US Government is hiding a secret court ruling about how it spies on Americans
This seems fairly obvious, clearly vast amounts of possible wrongdoing, once exposed, could genuinely damage reputation abroad to some degree.

So how did such a law ever survive scrutiny?

It seems like a blanket ban on exposure of nearly all possible wrongdoing.

MichaelZuo··on A 10-year-old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs for skin cancer diagnosis
Well yes, that’s what makes it extremeley extremely sophisticated?
MichaelZuo··on A 10-year-old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs for skin cancer diagnosis
If it’s thought of as extremely extremely sophisticated auto-complete, then that wouldn’t be surprising at all.
MichaelZuo··on Google Cloud outage affects almost all banking and other operations in Europe
Wait so then how are they signing big customers still who would definitely lose a lot if us-east-1 went down?

(who would be motivated to check if anything is restricted to only us-east-1)

MichaelZuo··on Apple broke an essential presentation feature of iPads
No.

Flat out removing a functionality that is 100% certain to be critical to many without any way of regaining it via any combination of features found on the iPad…

And without any notice whatsoever, and with no way to downgrade back, gets pretty close to flat out evil.

Don’t try to talk out of both sides of your mouth.

Even if they clownishly made it more buried and difficult to find under a dozen submenus… it would still be much less bad in comparison.

(If they never advertised or implied the iPad as being suitable for presentations, education, etc., then that have lessened the severity, but clearly that’s not the case)

MichaelZuo··on Apple broke an essential presentation feature of iPads
Even though it’s one step removed from literal sabotage, there’s no angle I can see that would render it just a “minor thing”.

It effectively makes it useless for anyone where not showing the presenter’s screen content was critically important.

Unless you know of some alternative method?

MichaelZuo··on Apple broke an essential presentation feature of iPads
Let’s not beat around the bush. Whoever made this decision in Apple seems pretty close to flat out evil.

There must be at least tens of thousands of ipad users globally (on ipads capable of upgrading to 27) who would would find this a critical loss.

To not mention this at all, not even in fine print release notes, while pushing people to upgrade knowing they cant ever downgrade back in the future, is just sabotage one step removed.

Especially as they did not offer any alternative way to access the functionality.

MichaelZuo··on US federal budget deficit jumps 12% in one year to nearly $2 Trillion
Huh? From what I heard, no combination of groups in the beltway bothered to expend the political capital to actually force through across the board cuts. Not even a meagre 5% cut per annum from the total budget.

They all backed out when it came to walk the talk.

(Or to cut $1 billion here and there, hundreds of times per annum, which would have needed like a dozen DOGEs and iron discipline in Congress)

MichaelZuo··on Secret of Orange Cats Revealed After 60-Year Search
Are you confused? I never claimed to own an orange cat.
MichaelZuo··on Apple HomeView
Yeah the lack of an app store is fine for the first year.

But the requirement for everyone to have an ipad or iphone on 27.2 or later (for full functionality) seems more of a showstopper. I would have been in the market for one but haven’t even bothered to upgrade past iOS 18 yet.

MichaelZuo··on Secret of Orange Cats Revealed After 60-Year Search
“ Arhgap36 is known to cause developmental problems in other animals when it is over- or under-functioning. But it seems that in orange cats, the gene is overexpressed only in developing and mature pigment cells called melanocytes.”

This doesn’t make sense… if thousands of anecdotal reports in cats specifically report otherwise? And if it’s known to not be limited to melanocytes in other mammalian species?

MichaelZuo··on Mistral Large 4
This must be a joke, clearly pelican drawing in svg would be in its training data after multiple years of it hitting HN front page.
MichaelZuo··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
Are you confused?

A formal proof with 1 contradiction and 9999 correct steps is just as false as a formal proof with 10 contradictions and 9990 correct steps.

There is no “less wrong” or “more wrong” in logic, by definition.

i.e. There is no safe lower bound threshold of “wrongness” that can partially salvage the correct steps. Or conversely, 1 contradiction is already sufficient to prove anything at all.

MichaelZuo··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
Even if it’s 99% coherent, and only 1% incoherent… then the end result is still incoherent?

e.g. 1 contradiction in a formal proof is sufficient to negate 9999 logically valid steps.

There’s no magical way for it to automatically become coherent.

MichaelZuo··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
Since there can be no universal arbiter on “value”… the whole concept of “CEV” is nonsensical to begin with (unless we assume literally unlimited time/resources/etc.).

It’s a big pretend game.

MichaelZuo··on Does Georgism work? Five years later
This doesn’t seem to follow? No “control” is needed, a quid quo pro is more than sufficient.
MichaelZuo··on Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy
The real question is why is the median Apple decision maker circa 2026 vastly more short term greedy than the median Apple decision maker circa 2012?
MichaelZuo··on Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
To be fair even if they could build a 10x larger e-ink panel factory it’s uncertain if they could shave costs by more than maybe 40% to 50% per panel.

And it’s very questionable whether there is genuinely 10x more latent annual demand for e-ink panels at that still not cheap price point.

MichaelZuo··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
Of course they have ulterior motives to push the message that it can replace high quality human artists, even though that would be ridiculous under any serious analysis.

That doesnt mean you have to believe them.

MichaelZuo··on TSMC revealing details about next gen A14 node
I think the cost per transistor has gone slightly upwards, it bottomed out a few years ago.
MichaelZuo··on The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week
Most people dont read the fine print on the back of gift cards. So I can easily see someone never running into a situation where it’s actually explained that is not allowed face to face.
MichaelZuo··on Will there be a 7G?
Are you confused? The parent claimed 4G was very expensive infrastructure.

Whereas reality showed 4G was so cheap that major telecoms decided to skip over 3G entirely.

MichaelZuo··on We must pace the frontier
Yeah avoiding all mention of the huge financial incentives that may push for “pacing the frontier” makes it seem like the opposite of a credibility boost for these firms.

It seems damaging since most folks (who lack insider knowledge) will naturally wonder if it’s due to plateauing performance per $ or some other non “alignment” reason.

MichaelZuo··on Will there be a 7G?
This doesnt seem to match reality?

e.g. Notably several major carriers in India skipped 3G entirely and went to 4G directly because it was cheaper per subscriber. Which implies less expensive equipment per unit performance?

MichaelZuo··on Nvidia is the central bank of AI
Wasnt this known by everyone who cared to pay attention?

It practically became a joke about how a huge amount of the training data for GPT-4 was bottom of the barrel reddit vomit and obvious bot spam. Leading to many bizarre edge cases.

MichaelZuo··on Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads
What do you think was the root cause?
MichaelZuo··on Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
The more interesting question is why would so many thousands of people in a big firm seemingly be fine with frustrating customers and giving the appearance of a gaggle of clowns?

Standard psychology says they should be highly sensitive to status loss, but it almost seems the opposite.

MichaelZuo··on Tesla killing Solar Roof is leaving installers with six-figure losses
Yeah it would be more surprising if they didn’t have a mandatory expensive program considering how much more complex it is than normal roofing stuff.
MichaelZuo··on Switzerland's Federal Government Is Replacing Microsoft on 3k Computers
From what I heard, the shakedown of the Swiss government over the F35 contract couldn’t have happened without the active support of many actors in the beltway.

So it seems sensible for them to doubt the intentions of many hundreds of decision makers, not just a single person.

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