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ThrowawayR2

9,214 karma · joined October 19, 2016

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ThrowawayR2··on The importance of communities around software
AI use fades into the background as organizations emphasize accountability and quality rather than the origin of the work product, much like Linus Torvalds did recently. Those who fail to keep up, including the many who deskill because of AI or devolve into prompt-only "coders", will flunk out leaving a very shrunken, less well-paid software profession.
ThrowawayR2··on We won't "just hang out"
A depressingly percentage of the population doesn't even want to acquire the basic literacy and arithmetic skills provided by a high school education. Their aspirations means nothing because they don't want to put in the work to build any of the foundation needed to reach for them.
ThrowawayR2··on We won't "just hang out"
I enjoy learning more than most, but without anything to apply that learning to, it would be just a form of solitaire.
ThrowawayR2··on Goto Considered Sick (for error handling in C)
I've heard that submitters can manually edit the title if the title rewriter incorrectly modifies the title.
ThrowawayR2··on Ask HN: Why is pagination gone on "Ask HN", and showing only 19 items?
Recently answered by the HN moderators in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49984484
ThrowawayR2··on The young are conformists in denial
Archive link: https://archive.ph/YbAVZ
ThrowawayR2··on Raspberry Pi Zero 3W and Pi 4 Model A spotted in device trees
The article literally says "Phoronix spotted it first" in its first paragraph and provides that link, so the parent poster is quite mistaken.
ThrowawayR2··on Raspberry Pi Zero 3W and Pi 4 Model A spotted in device trees
Original source article: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Raspberry-Pi-Zero-3-W-Pi-4-A
ThrowawayR2··on Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible
That's an edutainment game for early grade schoolers. (I should know; I played it in that era.) Nothing in it would hold an adult's attention.
ThrowawayR2··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
Failing to live up to a business promise runs afoul of promissory estoppel: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/promissory_estoppel.asp
ThrowawayR2··on Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to a quarter of its workforce
> "it becomes apparent people who make 150k a year are in the same boat as those making 50k"

I dare you to say that to people making 50k a year.

ThrowawayR2··on Show HN: I put employees inside S&P 500 market-cap bubbles
Probably because posting summaries of the submission is discouraged by the HN moderators, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44946681 or https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
ThrowawayR2··on What Adobe v ArtCraft teaches us
Models only have information up to the date when they were generated. APIs get updated and expanded, new frameworks and libraries get introduced, bugs get fixed. How long is an existing model going to still be useful? A year or two at most?

As existing models become out of date, somebody has to pay the massive cost for training updated models to replace them, including, of course, the free models.

ThrowawayR2··on To make AI morally good, tech companies are turning to religion
That sort of thing seems like how one would get the outcome of Fredric Brown's "Answer", dohohoho. Instead of the ridiculous "AI hell" experiment, perhaps someone should experiment to determine how easy it would be to give an LLM a god complex or narcissistic personality disorder by feeding it ego-boosting text that overpraises its vast embedded knowledge, reasoning capabilities, and whatnot.
ThrowawayR2··on The foolishness of "natural language programming" (1978)
Dijkstra elegantly explains why AI systems are effective at mathematics and programming but much less effective when writing prose or other realms where what is good is nebulously defined:

> "The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulations, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid."

ThrowawayR2··on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
To quote yourself in another post: "I notice that you too have no counter to it!" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50190984) Kind of hypocritical there if that's the best response you can muster when actually presented an argument because that's just plainly the argument from authority fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority).
ThrowawayR2··on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
> "I notice that you too have no counter to it!"

May I point out that I replied to your earlier post?

ThrowawayR2··on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The search shows 34 pages of comments and that doesn't include [dead] comments. I'm surprised it's that few; I suspect there's a time cutoff even though the settings says there isn't.

ThrowawayR2··on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
Any ideology can be plugged into the "paradox of tolerance" and it works just fine, including yours [EDIT] and mine. That is why it is worthless. What is your defense if the conservatives, who currently have the political upper hand, invoke the paradox of tolerance against the left to justify suppressing them?

It should also be noted that [EDIT] the preceding sentence to Popper's quote is omitted: "In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise."

ThrowawayR2··on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
It is very delicious poetic justice. Some liberals warned repeatedly that deplatforming would backfire but were shouted down and ridiculed by illiberal activists hellbent on silencing their foes.
ThrowawayR2··on The AI doom scenario you've never heard of may be the hardest to stop
Bingo, finally, somebody gets it. No drones, no viruses, none of that trashy SF movie drivel. Instead, humanity willingly cedes more and more decision making and control over to AI for their own convenience and comfort. Even as AI coddles us to death, we will beg for more AI with our last breath.
ThrowawayR2··on This Is the Good Scenario?
Archive link: https://archive.ph/A86bN
ThrowawayR2··on What shall I teach my son?
Izzat all? Man, kids these day sure have it easy. When I was a kid, we had to worry about getting nuked into glowing cinders in World War III, getting conscripted and blown to bits fighting the Soviet led Warsaw Pact, or not being able to get on the property ladder and being told that the Japanese will replace what few skilled blue and white collar jobs were available.
ThrowawayR2··on Steam Users Beg for "No AI" Filter as Vibecoders Flood Next Fest
Slop makes it harder to find good games, both in terms of discoverability and customers being less willing to take a chance on purchasing an indie game, resulting in fewer purchases and less income to Valve. Slop games also mean an increase in customers asking for game refunds.
ThrowawayR2··on Steam Users Beg for "No AI" Filter as Vibecoders Flood Next Fest
Someone has to buy the game before they can rate it and there is a threshold before a consensus rating is shown, by which time the slop submitter has already gotten what they want.
ThrowawayR2··on Steam Users Beg for "No AI" Filter as Vibecoders Flood Next Fest
There is an easy way to filter crap out: crank up the fee charged to developers to submit a game to Steam in order to deter slop and also use the proceeds to cover the cost of more human curation of submissions, also to deter slop. Sometimes the gate does need to be kept.
ThrowawayR2··on Steam Users Beg for "No AI" Filter as Vibecoders Flood Next Fest
When Valve had a strict curation process, many years ago, there were widespread complaints about indie games being kept out.
ThrowawayR2··on What shall I teach my son?
> "...Bill Gates were college dropouts, but the market deemed them good."

Gates had excellent grades and was credited in an academic paper during his undergraduate years. Not exactly like the average dropout.

> "Now that I think of it, apparently Einstein was a mediocre student, but his contributions to science were his way out. "

That's a myth. Einstein got top grades in science and mathematics.

As for the original question, "If you wish to build a ship, do not divide the men into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.", incorrectly attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

ThrowawayR2··on Linus Torvalds's first LLM-assisted patch series
They would say that Linus requires extremely high quality patches backed up by a human with complete understanding of the code submitted that is willing to put their reputation on the line for it, the same as he always has. The AI aspect is almost irrelevant.
ThrowawayR2··on I no longer care to work on any Ruby gems so I've archived all my repositories
The end goal is not adoption of FOSS licenses, the end goal was the Four Freedoms ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T... )

- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).

- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Note that "preserve licenses" and "preserve attribution" are very much not in that list. Well, the Four Freedoms are what these AI doohickeys enable by being able to in theory reverse engineer or replicate any code, making all code effectively "public", and to bypass any copyright issues around distribution. The fact that AI blowing away the existence of proprietary code also blows away the licenses of FOSS licensed code is a harmless side effect of getting to the Four Freedoms, which was the Free Software goal all along.

If any of this is surprising, then you didn't understand what you signed up for. The AI monkey's paw has curled and you've got what you asked for, sort of.

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