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SturgeonsLaw

4,620 karma · joined February 28, 2014

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SturgeonsLaw··on Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy?
I've wanted a projector for so long, and had the chance to borrow a friend's high quality one to test it out. It absolutely elevated the movie experience and - depending on the viewer's preferences - could be worth it for that alone.

However, this:

> The projector, by contrast, is much less pleasant during the day

Was a significant enough drawback to me that it ruled it out as a daily driver. Although I do like the way you framed it.

SturgeonsLaw··on I'm a Proton employee and I'm breaking my silence
> so here's the actual quote in context (unlike the leakers, I have permission to post this image)

Worth keeping in mind that his post was reviewed and vetted by Proton management

SturgeonsLaw··on Serbia just elected the world's brainiest parliament
Yes, largely due to the scientific and medical progress humanity has made despite the sleazebag politicians being in power
SturgeonsLaw··on Ask HN: If the models are so good, why doesn't OpenAI just start 100 companies?
They likely understand full well what's happening, but it raises the cost of failure

"So the third party consultant warned against it, you did it anyway, and it caused these problems?"

SturgeonsLaw··on Why do we have so many meetings?
> He is an external consultant

Called, no answer, left voicemail

Billed 15 minutes

SturgeonsLaw··on Why do we have so many meetings?
Yep, this was me most of my career. Started a new job a couple of years ago, except this time I dialled down the effort to like 80% and enforced strict separation between work hours and home hours, and it's been wonderful
SturgeonsLaw··on "I'm on a war footing": Terry Tao and the crisis in math
Well they've been doing that to devs for a couple of years now and yet mathematicians seem to be much more vocal whingers (might be selection bias in the articles I'm reading though).

AI is coming for all of us knowledge workers, nobody is immune.

SturgeonsLaw··on Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins
> Cool, so I'll have you make an LLM that can make cosine

The last thing we need is more math addicts roaming the streets

SturgeonsLaw··on Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins
While I agree that there's a special element to human crafted pieces, and artisanship would be a terrible thing to lose, I'd point out that Roger W. Smith hand makes ~15 watches per year which sell for around $400k a pop, while Casio's watch division brought in $1.17B in revenue in the most recent FY
SturgeonsLaw··on Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins
Well the thing that comes to mind for me was the US gov classing encryption as a munition and placing it under export controls
SturgeonsLaw··on Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins
Those are the dates that the NSA obtained quantum computer tech from the alien crash site at Roswell, which would enable them to break the crypto they were currently building
SturgeonsLaw··on Thinking will become a hobby
Wolves eat rabbits, not grass, so it's doesn't matter if the grass dies because they can just keep eating rabbits
SturgeonsLaw··on Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?
Netbird has a self hosted option
SturgeonsLaw··on Sharing AI progress in mathematics
Anthropic runs a biology wetlab (while denying biology to consumers of even their publicly available models, let alone their inhouse ones that only they can access) so I'd expect AI to generate practical and lucrative products soon.

Cure for aging? What do you reckon that'd be worth?

SturgeonsLaw··on Religious scholars met with Anthropic
Meanwhile our noble side only slaughters foreigners, so you see that makes us the good guys
SturgeonsLaw··on When oil prices spike, where does the money go?
> You get rich by working hard

Come on now

SturgeonsLaw··on Toyota is taking the Corolla electric
Almost 800 horsepower is anemic? That's the same territory as a Porsche 911 Turbo S
SturgeonsLaw··on OpenAI breaches Medicare, Albanese reveals
The DseWiki incident showed that OpenAI seems to ask its agents time-limited questions on geography-bounded statistics, tasks like finding the average wage of teachers in Wisconsin (made up example), so medical stats in an Australian state does seem to be in the same category of question.

That said, it would be utterly unsurprising to learn that this was a misconfiguration in the website and it was serving stuff that it shouldn't have.

SturgeonsLaw··on I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture
Thanks, I'll have a read
SturgeonsLaw··on I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture
Agreed! I've always been interested in the field of mathematics, only to be let down by my lack of ability to comprehend it. I can usually follow an article up until the point that it starts using formulae.

I love this approachable prose.

If anyone is aware of any other "mathematics for people who don't know mathematics" resources I'd greatly appreciate any links.

SturgeonsLaw··on Giving up on smart rings
We're all in our own filter bubble my friend, there is no the news any more
SturgeonsLaw··on We must pace the frontier
I too am using GLM-5.3-flash in Pi and I've yet to encounter a scenario it couldn't handle. And the pricing is just incredible, I've handed it a previously unseen codebase, asked it to analyse it and build a new feature, came back after it had done so and the API cost was a fraction of a cent. It's $0.5/1M output tokens on OpenRouter.

If I really need to, I can escalate a task to Opus at $25/1M, and the results are good, but not 5000% as good.

SturgeonsLaw··on Nvidia is the central bank of AI
Yeah, I've worked in risk management and if a company said "what we're doing has a 10% chance of killing lots of people" it'd get shut down so fast it'd make your head spin
SturgeonsLaw··on After Work, We'll Have Each Other
I've been awake through enough history classes to know what happens when people get pushed too far
SturgeonsLaw··on 'Global reckoning for big tech': Australia to force opt-out of social algs
It probably won't, too many people just go down the default path with any app, however as an individual it would be nice to have a way to curate my feed
SturgeonsLaw··on I'm a seeing-eye dog for a computer
I justify it to myself by saying that even if I'm arguing with a bot, I want to have a counterargument posted for the benefit of the people who are reading the comments
SturgeonsLaw··on LLMs: Intelligence vs. Cost
I've been very impressed with GLM 5.3 Flash's performance even without considering cost, but once you factor that in, it's incomparable. Not surprised to see its position on the chart.
SturgeonsLaw··on How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
You know what they say, what goes up must continue to go up forever
SturgeonsLaw··on Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
The problem with outsourcing your gorilla marketing is that it can cost big bananas with a hard to quantify return
SturgeonsLaw··on You have to beat the models at something
A lot of engineers are gonna hate this, but the domain that LLMs will have the hardest time dominating is people skills
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