HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Werewolf255

267 karma · joined May 2, 2020

submissionscomments
Werewolf255··on Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?
Are you joking? If anything, they'll use even more memory by shoving 8B LLMs in every single app.
Werewolf255··on The Software Engineering Identity Crisis
"Look, you're being a pessimist. Yes, over half of the airplanes we make kill everyone on board.

But you're really NOT focused on the planes that kill only 75% of the crew and passengers. Just think! In ten years, we'll know how to build a plane!

Please stop telling me that we already have designs for planes that work. I don't want to hear that anymore."

Werewolf255··on The Software Engineering Identity Crisis
Given the power and cooling requirements, and the underlying techniques used for LLMs right now, I think 'for now' is going to be quite a few years. Maybe a decade plus. Plenty of time to train a new cohort of human developers who do more than just code 24/7.
Werewolf255··on Age and cognitive skills: Use it or lose it
Given my ChatGPT and friends experience has been one of overwhelming frustration due to incorrect information, I would say Math Academy is in an entirely different galaxy. ChatGPT is great if you want to learn that pi is equal to 4.
Werewolf255··on A near impossible literacy test Louisiana used to suppress the black vote
You... You realize that they could just have two tests in a drawer, and they give one to black people, and one to white people, including reporters and federal officials? Why are you dying on this hill??
Werewolf255··on I've built a city, now it needs residents
Oh yeah, I remember the old StumbleUpon browser extension from the early 2000s myself! Good times.
Werewolf255··on Ask HN: Which LLMs can run locally on most consumer computers
It would be intensive but it's very doable. You could use koboldcpp or something like that with an exposed endpoint just on the local machine and use that. You'll likely run into issues with GPU vendors and ensuring that you've got the right software versions running, but with some checking, it should be viable. Maybe include a fallback in case the system can't produce results in a timely manner.
Werewolf255··on Rye Grows with UV
I too thought this might be about growing a cereal crop, possibly in a space habitat setting. My hopes, dashed yet again...
Werewolf255··on Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity
Sorry everyone, but this doesn't pass the smell test for me. Over half of their citations are for research that's 20-40 years old, and their more contemporary citations are from papers the authors themselves published in the last ten years.
Werewolf255··on The United States of Bed Bath & Beyond
I agree with this overall sentiment. When the author speaks of "crappy institutions and leaders" I understand he mean something along the lines of "we shouldn't accept this level of performance from things we can change" or some other call for more effective government/infrastructure/etc.

It's when the author drops into 'overwhelming debt ending in failure' that he drops the mask enough to show that he doesn't want any sort of government or public infrastructure. It's a libertarian, leaning anarcho-capitalist, viewpoint that explains the discontinuity in tone that permeates many of the articles I sampled from this author.

Werewolf255··on The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression
"One day -I- will be Sheriff of Nottingham, so it's in my interest to sell out my neighbors to King John."
Werewolf255··on Why walking helps us think
I wonder if it's the same mechanics as Zen Buddhism but from the western angle.

When do we do our best thinking? When we're not.

Werewolf255··on Electrolyzer efficiently converts CO2 into renewable propane fuel
Right, and the ones who are best able to figure out regulations are, of course, the businesses themselves!!

Look how well that's worked out for the financial sector. Nothing but good faith actors there. Immaculate.

Werewolf255··on More human than human: measuring ChatGPT political bias [pdf]
Using that gold standard of bias tests, politicalcompass.org
Werewolf255··on How a startup loses its spark
The article mentions Rippling as still having that 'spark', but they've been pretty awful the past few months. Between layoffs and data loss, it's looked pretty dire when I've talked to them.
Werewolf255··on Flux Pinning in sample of LK-99?
X-isms
Werewolf255··on Death of the physical library
I was interested in the authors views until it became clear this was an excuse to publish his 1950s attitude towards gay and non-western people.
Werewolf255··on Court of Versailles vs. the Wild West
If this article was written in the 1950s, the author would be blaming people of color and "that damnable civil rights act". I don't think this author is coming from a place of good faith when he starts off the article saying he was among the privileged few who was given a rare chance to possibly be a billionaire, if he just played his cards right. And then frames it as a real shame that his good (if not perfect!!!) ideas were ignored.
Werewolf255··on Ask HN: How do you get companies to talk to you about their problems?
Be careful with this method, lest you learn enough of the truth to be a threat to your manager or the company.
Werewolf255··on Focus on things that don't change
I want to like this article but I think it really underplays the nature and (modern) frequency of black swan events. If I were to take the advice of this article in 1994, I would be going full bore into telephony and set-top internet boxes that attach to 4:3 SD televisions.

This sort of thinking works. . . until it doesn't. It's how we get the vintage zeerust type of Sci-Fi works.

- Ebooks will, of course, be delivered to your TRS-80 after you dial a phone number to buy it from a print catalog.

- Daily news will never go out of fashion (there's always -something- happening!) but printing newspapers creates a bunch of waste. People will, instead, buy a single newspaper that they keep and exchange at a 'newsstand' where your old paper is erased and a new edition printed on top, for a small fee.

Werewolf255··on Letter to Sundar Pichai from TCI Fund Management [pdf]
"And another thing, employees keep using up a full allotment of oxygen every day. Consider half portions or cutting breathing gasses out of the budget entirely."
Werewolf255··on Restoring a Vintage Rolex GMT
I've just gotten into this hobby and the pivots on these watches are around the 0.01mm range with the individual teeth coming in around that size too. So might be that 0.1mm brass cutting could do the trick, if you finesse it right. From what I've been reading/watching, lots of classical jewelry education focused on learning how to manufacture extremely precise tools to shape, mill, and manipulate various materials.

I had extremely limited success replicating a gear using a 0.3mm FDM Cartesian 3d printer, but even then I had to manually shave off every single tooth under a loupe.

Werewolf255··on I Am the Ghost Here
Since we're all chiming in here, I thought the story was about coping with pressures and life, and uses the puppeteer as a stand-in for multiple, nebulous "whats" or "whos".

I think most of us can relate to somebody in our life who leaves either for school, or work, or for some reason is out of our lives for an extended period. I think it's also reasonably common when those same people come back and are changed, for lack of a better phrase. It may be that you, the reader, are that person who came back changed.

For whatever reason, the person is now different in a positive, or at least socially-acceptable, way; however, the other shoe is bound to drop. In this case, it was Michelle and the concept in their world of Puppets and Puppeteers.

But really, you can insert anything you want into Michelle's spot. Drugs, relationships, and religion are often the most common factors in these stories. Just as common is loss of one of those three (parent passes, kicked the meth habit, etc). It can also be something like an aggressive alternative medicine group with strong pressure to conform to the in-group. It could also be something more openly malicious, such as getting into a racial superiority group, a cult, or a conspiracy theory group.

In the end, it is something, or someone, or some group, that allows the changed person to be themselves, or express some other part or their personality. It may even be that this is a change the person wanted, such as being less violent or having more patience.

It also brings up an interesting question, in this framing. How are the outcomes different between using mind altering drugs, joining a cult, and letting a manipulative person guide ones actions? One could argue intent, where manipulation is putting the person in a place to go back to the manipulator, but one could argue the same about drugs, or the alt-medicine group, or any of the other types of things listed above.

When it's all said and done, I thought it was about how people outside of the changed person react to learning about the source of the change. Sometimes it's a positive reaction, but sometimes all anyone wants is the status quo.

Werewolf255··on Airbnb removed my negative review
> Its hard to think of another company outside of Facebook that has blown all their good will so quickly and so completely.

Twitter comes rapidly to mind

Werewolf255··on Why was western printing superior to Asian printing?
The article isn't bad, but why is the title so needlessly antagonistic?
Werewolf255··on Stable Diffusion PR optimizes VRAM, generate 576x1280 images with 6 GB VRAM
You know you can download the code yourself, right? You need not be reliant on their web interface if you're having these control issues.

It's also clearly in place because they don't have an age disclaimer, which would likely open them up to some sort of liability (or additional liability). Again, it's open source, and freely available, so like. . . this feels like a you problem, sorry.

Werewolf255··on Final thoughts on Ubiquiti
Yeah, this reflects my views too. He's using the veneer or pretext of journalism and reporting the truth in order for him to cover sloppy sourcing.
Werewolf255··on Final thoughts on Ubiquiti
Yeah, at this point I'm taking Krebs off of any alert or recommendation lists. Appreciate the Mea Culpa, but it's not like he's been making stellar decisions before this problem.

It also doesn't read as an apology, but an acknowledgment that he was given bad info from a source.

Werewolf255··on The Collapse of Complex Societies (Book Review)
So, real question, why does the tax code need to be -that- simple? Like, we've got computers and stuff to do the math these days? It sounds like an easy way to say that one is for 'a simple, common sense solution' while papering over the very real harm it's going to do to at-risk and impoverished communities.

To contribute, why should those communities that a flat tax harms be forced to bear that weight of simplification?

It looks like you'd be ignoring the reviewer's second point: that the other factor in societal collapse is when those portions of society that bear undue weight no longer can bear additional burdens.

Werewolf255··on The Collapse of Complex Societies (Book Review)
I think there might be room for misreading/misinterpretation of that part.

I read that part of the review as saying complex societies have 'bucked the trend' by not being -as- prone to collapse; but with a big caveat that it looks like complex societies may operate on longer time scales, so the collapse might be staved off for longer. It's an open question about what 'long enough' would look like though, one that's probably beyond the author's scope.

Page 1 of 4Next →