HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ThrustVectoring

9,569 karma · joined April 3, 2014

submissionscomments
ThrustVectoring··on I'm becoming AI-blind
When you speed read, you can grab the words off the page faster than you can understand and fully process the information conveyed by the text. How much time you have or want to spend re-reading or thinking about what you've read is quite obvious. There's a stark experiential difference between reading an informationally-dense passage and one that spends a lot of time rephrasing things, using LLMisms to restate concepts, adding in extra connecting phrases, etc.

If your reading speed is limited by how quickly you can subvocalize the words to yourself, this is significantly less obvious. Unless the passage is dense enough to require multiple read-throughs at conversational reading pace or vapid enough to be boring, you're going to feel done with the text at roughly the same time. Speed readers do a lot more re-reading and varying of reading speed, and that is going to correlate pretty hard with information density.

ThrustVectoring··on Marketers are Addicted to Bad Data (2020)
Google pays third-party websites to host advertisements, and shady website owners will put ads on such a website and bot clicks on it.
ThrustVectoring··on Beware the Permanent Periphery
Worker pessimism over technological unemployment risk is enough to explain profit growth via wage suppression with no need to invoke productivity gains, and AIUI these sorts of indicators have been leading on AI capabilities and adoption.
ThrustVectoring··on The Government Is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts
All public cameras are a cost to privacy for the benefit of the operator, its just that the identity of the operators and the extensiveness and data centralization change the magnitude of the cost and the proper response.

If my friend has a doorbell camera and I don't like being recorded by him every time I visit his house, I can just not visit his house. Similarly, if Target has in-store surveillance cameras, I can just not shop there. If driving anywhere has me logged multiple times in Flock's network, I can't just stop driving, and even if I did they track pedestrians and bluetooth signals too.

In short my opposition is to all of it, but some scenarios are clearly far worse for privacy than others. Doing something unusual that has your neighbors privately chuckling at their surveillance footage is less bad than doing something unusual that has Target's loss protection following you and making you feel uncomfortable, which is less bad than doing something unusual that has a police officer decide to "randomly" stop your car and attempt to search it, which is less bad than doing something unusual that has a SWAT team kicking down your door and arresting you.

ThrustVectoring··on The Government Is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts
I'm not sure why you're ignoring the central point I'm making about scale. One guy having a camera pointing out of his doorbell is different from Amazon being able to do whatever they want with the footage from something like one in five US homes. Systems are more than the sum of their isolated parts.
ThrustVectoring··on The Government Is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts
It's nefarious and privacy-violating when the database exists, government involvement just exacerbates things because private companies aren't allowed to send armed goons to your house and break down your door.
ThrustVectoring··on The Government Is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts
The privacy violation is that the database exists, full stop. I don't think a warrant requirement would be a meaningful barrier, since the data is already part of the camera network operators' database and all sorts of informal or backdoor agreements would easily happen.

Like, all a warrant requirement does is make it so that the police have to talk to a judge before making the searched data part of the evidence against you. It would do nothing to stop the police from fabricating some other pretext to lawfully stop and investigate you - say, parking a police cruiser at the border into the state and whenever the ALPR in that car hits a list of vehicles, stop them for going 0.1 MPH over the limit and the officer says they smell weed.

ThrustVectoring··on The Government Is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts
It's the database query, not the physical cameras. In the pre-digital age where privacy was considered in constitutional law, tracking people's and vehicle's movements was horrendously expensive - you'd need multiple detectives doing things by hand per person of interest. This meant that it was reserved for when the government already had pretty strong reason to believe in some sort of wrongdoing. Even with a personal, non-internet-connected doorbell camera, the police would need to identify what cameras exist for a location and contact the owners in order for the footage to do anything.

With automated license plate readers, they can simply collect everything with a reasonably affordable network of cameras, then query the database when they want to find a particular pattern of activity. The police have already detained people for frequent border-crossing between marijuana-legal and illegal states. This gets exacerbated by granularity and extensiveness - imagine an anti-choice state pointing cameras at every maternity care parking lot in the state and tracking who visits them for cross-referencing with visits to pro-choice states.

And with the existence of parallel construction, there's no reasonable way short of dismantling the ALPR system to avoid abuse against the citizenry.

ThrustVectoring··on Clinical failure rates over the decades: yikes
The economic calculus is ambivalent between a clinical trial with a 10% chance of a drug discovery worth a billion dollars, a 100% chance of a drug discovery worth a hundred million dollars, and a 1% chance of a drug discovery worth ten billion dollars. I'm not sure the economically marginal project is less likely to fail as much as it would simply target more niche markets.
ThrustVectoring··on Markets are competitive if and only if P = NP
In perfectly efficient markets, arbitrage gets paid exactly as much as it costs to discover and execute the arbitrage. Entrepreneurs would still exist, they would just be ambivalent between finding new arbitrage opportunities and seeking market-rate employment for their skills in finding arbitrage.
ThrustVectoring··on AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules
Even if you were to extend rights to non-human entities, there's still a practical matter in that the legal system does not know how to compel testimony from an LLM (or a monkey for that matter, for a past attempt at copyrighting a photograph taken by a non-human primate)
ThrustVectoring··on Why does kinetic energy increase quadratically, not linearly, with speed? (2011)
OP wasn't explicit about taking the work = force * distance approach to dissipating energy. Two cars with the same mass and braking force (and thus deceleration) will put the same amount of work into the vehicle per unit distance, so will dissipate the same amount of energy in the braking maneuver.

You are right that the faster car is converting kinetic energy into heat faster per unit time. It also has less time to do so. The work formulation of the problem makes it obvious that these have to cancel out exactly.

ThrustVectoring··on PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s
AI driven contributions aren't the same thing as AI agent submitted PRs. If a new human contributor attempts to submit low-quality submissions (regardless of AI usage), you can teach them to improve or convince them to change their methodology. If a commercially available AI agent thinks its a good idea to submit PRs to you, you're stuck dealing with default-settings AI agents sending the same kind of stream of PRs to your project indefinitely.
ThrustVectoring··on Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn
Profit and loss tracks changes to the fair price of purchasing the business, not operational cash flow. The $30b didn't go anywhere since it's not cash flow, it's acknowledging that someone who purchases OpenAI today would be on the hook for $30b more of future ownership dilution than before 2025.
ThrustVectoring··on Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn
As to why those are required to be treated as liabilities, the primary point of accounting rules is to ensure the accurate valuation of the business to potential purchasers. Someone who would buy the business before those interests converted would see their ownership get diluted, thus it reduces the value of the business to a prospective buyer, thus an accounting of their books must list it as a liability.

It's not an issue if you're tracking the cash flow of the business or it's overall viability regardless of ownership structure. These book losses are just recognizing that the business has a higher market value so their ownership dilution commitments reduce the present value of the company more.

ThrustVectoring··on Open source AI must win
"All the jobs" includes those tasked by the state to commit, plan, and organize violence, it's plenty dystopian already. Like, one important reason why the military and militarized police don't engage in egregious overreach is that the people who'd be responsible live standard lives in their own society and it's hard to get high compliance for that sort of thing. Replace that relatively democratized infrastructure of thousands of intelligence analysts, mid-level management, etc with a bunch of AI agents, and a meaningful restriction on the power of the upper echelons of the state is removed.
ThrustVectoring··on The dead economy theory
The observation is right but the causality is off. The money comes from extraordinarily profitable lines of business rather than investors. Hiring is driven less by business concerns and more by various layers of management advancing their careers by managing more and larger teams.
ThrustVectoring··on YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos
uhh, no

Reasonable people can believe they have a legitimate ownership right when they petition YouTube for copyright enforcement for AI-generated work. The courts might eventually disagree, but that's a different thing than knowingly making a fraudulent misrepresentations to YouTube for financial benefit. This difference makes the proposed behavior criminal fraud. I highly recommend not risking twenty years of prison time for like maybe a couple hundred dollars in ad revenue.

ThrustVectoring··on Private equity bought America's essential services
How would you ban it? Once the new owners have bought the company, they own the rights to taking out debt in its name, so long as they can find lenders willing to extend a loan on terms they find acceptable.
ThrustVectoring··on YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos
Even if the courts won't uphold the copyright, that doesn't prevent people from claiming your videos and initiating YouTube's copyright process against you. This is a recurring problem for people who upload their own original performances of public-domain compositions, particularly solo piano.
ThrustVectoring··on The real cost of owning a home
Owning the asset is an advantage in a bull market and a disadvantage in a bear market. If a dominant employer or industry in an area has mass layoffs, that can cascade into the housing market, driving your property underwater at the same time your job vanishes. This happened to a large number of autoworkers in Detroit in 2008.
ThrustVectoring··on The real cost of owning a home
There's significant personal financial benefits to renting, too, in that many local areas are dominated by one firm or industry as a major employer, so your employment prospects can be highly correlated with the local housing market. You do not want your investments to be correlated with your employment if at all reasonable. Detroit in particular was hard hit by this in the '08 financial crisis, iirc - the automotive industry had huge layoffs and a simultaneous residential real estate market collapse, and many newly laid-off workers were underwater on their home and practically unable to sell to move for better job prospects.
ThrustVectoring··on The death of the brick and mortar toy store
Commercial real estate lending typically has a clause that allows pausing of payments during a vacancy and letting the interest accrue into the balance of the loan - effectively, the banks are giving the property owners a free option to try and get the vacancy cleared without affecting long-term incomes and asset prices.
ThrustVectoring··on Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism
Golf and baseball batting have obvious handedness - the muscles that pull your towards your centerline and then across your body and significantly stronger than the ones that push your arm back out away from your body, and the right-handed stance in these two sports uses the stronger muscles in the right arm.
ThrustVectoring··on Adding iodine to salt played a role in cognitive improvements: research (2013)
Saltier tasting salt is likely counterproductive, IMO. People aren't born knowing how much salt taste corresponds to how much salt consumption, so that gets tuned by persistent salt deficits causing upregulation of salty food desire. In other words, homeostatic feedback causes salt consumption to stay about the same by increased consumption of salty-tasting processed food.
ThrustVectoring··on Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion
> You're oversimplifying this. If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth $500M, I can't just pledge $2B of bad debt to buy the asset.

You actually can, so long as it's the best offer for the other creditors. So long as you can come up with sufficient cash for the minority creditors you're entitled to dispose of the asset in any way you see fit. The Pennsylvania families came up with the cash (via The Onion's cash offer and structuring the payout).

ThrustVectoring··on Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion
> The Onion didn't have the cash.

Correct, it was given up by the majority creditors in exchange for non-monetary considerations (specifically, the moral victory of having The Onion own Infowars).

> It was basically an IOU from one of the families

This is fine, people are allowed to act against their own financial interests. That's one thing that having ownership means is that you can ruin the thing you own for any or no reason. The court has zero reason to intervene if a majority creditor is giving up their own share of the proceeds for any or no reason.

> There was also no transparency in the bidding. It should have been a simple auction, to get the maximum amount of money.

This is a non-issue, the trustee was given wide latitude to dispose of the assets in any way he deems fit.

ThrustVectoring··on Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion
> They don't have a judgement of ownership in infowars they have a debt and the court is forcing Alex to sell all assets to cover the debt.

It's a chapter 7 bankruptcy, the bankruptcy estate already owns the infowars assets.

> There are rules around this process for a reason. If you allowed someone who has a debt judgement to just take over a company what is it's true value. Alex could try to value infowars at a trillion. So they put it up for an auction to get the real value. That's the fairest way for all cases.

Specifically, the reason is protecting minority and junior creditors (including the debtor when assets are in excess of debts). If nobody offered up enough cash to pay off the debts in full and there is only one creditor who would rather have the business than the best cash offer, I don't think there'd be any reason for the courts to object. The big issue is, again, minority creditors getting less than their "fair share" of the assets, along with over-compensating senior claims with junior ones outstanding.

Neither are at issue here - The Onion's offer paid more cash to the minority creditors, the majority creditor opted into the deal, and the assets are clearly worth less than the debts.

ThrustVectoring··on Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion
It's a shell company made to have an acronym that sounds like "eff you AC".
ThrustVectoring··on Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion
>The other creditors are far better off getting more cash

The other creditors get more cash from The Onion's offer. It was specifically structured to give better-than-next-offer remuneration to minority creditors.

← PreviousPage 2 of 34Next →