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actusual

774 karma · joined April 25, 2018

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actusual··on What will our economic future look like?
> Only humans can do some tasks

> For instance, AI can’t bathe a patient.

Oh sweet, we're left with literally cleaning up feces. Thanks AI!

actusual··on No Man's Sky Cosmos
I feel the same. I want Rust in space, where there are constant stakes. NMS either takes too long to get to a part of the game where stakes become relevant, or doesn't have any.

If anyone has any recs on PvE/looting/base building games in space with the polish of NMS, please share.

actusual··on My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded
I daily a GR Corolla. It's insanely fun to drive. The hardest part is i) keeping under the speed limit (which I do more often than I don't), and ii) the suspension. My god, the ride in this thing is SO stiff. The shitty Seattle streets bounce me around like crazy.
actusual··on TabFM: A zero-shot foundation model for tabular data
150,000 rows of data, where will I store it all?!
actusual··on Shall we play a game? – LLMs use tactical nukes in 95% of simulations
This is like saying "FYI -- there's no such thing as a 'midsize luxury sedan'. A car is a car."

"Tactical" vs. "strategic" nuclear weapons is a real and well-established distinction in military doctrine, arms control, and nuclear policy.

actusual··on πFS
This is why I got pi tattooed. It's a tattoo of all tattoos.
actusual··on iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM
You are thinking about this exactly the right way.
actusual··on Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
My partner is a lawyer (prosecutor for a large city). The reason she is at low risk is simply because of the rate of adoption of AI tooling (or ANY tooling for that matter). IT in the public sector (particularly city government) is so much worse than I ever could have imagined before meeting my partner.

Our city just spent >$15MM on "case management software" that took 5 years to build by some fly-by-night outfit in California who won the contract, haphazardly bolted together MSFT Azure components, then vanished with zero support.

These teams can't in good faith freely adopt AI tooling into their workflow because they don't have the bandwidth to do it well, so they don't do it at all.

actusual··on The barriers to AI engineering are crumbling fast
I run an ML team in fintech, and am currently hiring. If a resumè came across my desk with this "skill set" I'd laugh my ass off. My job and my team's jobs are extremely stressful because we ship models that impact people's finances. If we mess up our customers lose their goddamn minds.

Most of the ML candidates I see now are all "working with LLMs". Most of the ML engineers I know in the industry who are actually shipping valuable models, are not.

Cool, you made a chatbot that annoys your users.

Let me know when you've shipped a fraud model that requires four 9's, 100ms latency, with 50,000 calls an hour, 80% recall and 50% precision.

actusual··on The decline of the working musician
Yep! Specifically up in Shoreline though. My dad grew up on Densmore north of 180th
actusual··on The decline of the working musician
We don't. I probably should make one of those, but as a solo act, the number of platforms I need to keep up with is ridiculous. Reddit/Spotify/Instagram keep my time occupied, it's brutal honestly.
actusual··on The decline of the working musician
Thanks for listening!! Every little bit counts :D
actusual··on The decline of the working musician
Don't disagree. I'm merely commenting on the dramatic change in his audience, which IMO opinion was driven by TikTok virality. Going from a crowd of people who were singing along to people standing around waiting for the "TikTok hits" was really strange.
actusual··on The decline of the working musician
I've played music my entire life (picked up a guitar at 6 years old and just never put it down). I actually just released a new record last Friday (https://open.spotify.com/album/6JU0jmz537a6r2xrTvCcmn?si=eg4...). I joined a band when I was 15 (~2004), and we had some long tail success. We were able to tour, play huge shows (the Gorge in Washington, sell out the Showbox in downtown Seattle, an arena here or there). After high school I went to school for audio production, and even then I knew it was going to be tough to make a living. I ended up pivoting, studying math, now I'm in machine learning.

Music is the thing I love more than anything. I love writing it, releasing records, playing shows, and connecting with people on an emotional level. Never once have I considered it possible to have a fruitful career as a musician, despite seeing more success as a musician than most can ever dream of. Additionally, the industry (like many others) has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. In many ways, it has put much more power back into the hands of artists: you don't need a huge studio/record label/promotion to release a record. You can just release records, and promote them yourself. The flip side of that is there are SO many more people releasing music these days, which makes it really difficult to cut through the noise if your music is halfway decent.

Finally, recommendation algorithms have truly transformed the landscape of content creation, likely irreversibly. I get messages _daily_ from people who have "hacked" the TikTok algorithm, and can get my bands plays. There is an entire cottage industry of algorithm "hackers", some of them actually have results too.

One odd anecdote: I love Alex G. I've been listening to him for over a decade, and have flown out to see him play in places like New york/Austin TX. A few years ago he played in Seattle, and the entire demographic of the audience seem to've changed overnight. Way younger, more "mainstream" looking kids, filled the Showbox in Seattle. The strangest part was that no one seemed to know the words to his songs anymore. I did some digging, and he'd gone viral on TikTok. A few of his songs went absolutely bananas on there, and it completely transformed his fanbase. They knew the words to those songs, but not his entire set. Is this bad? I have no idea, but the trimming down of content into bite sized morsels _feels_ bad to me, and I believe it will dramatically alter this next generation's baseline attention span. Again, not a moral judgement, just a factual claim.

actusual··on ChatGPT for Robotics
I think your worries are very valid, and I agree that this could be a level step change in the consolidation of power that we already see among a few extremely powerful entities. Another observation worth noting is that SDEs who embrace this technology immediately are going to absolutely smoke past those who ignore it, and the gap will continue to widen as time wears on. Imagine having a slightly dumbed down SDE 1 or 2 (eventually 3) slave that can work 24/7. It will completely redefine what "entry level" means for software engineers.
actusual··on ChatGPT for Robotics
I think "get it to write functional code most of the time" severely discounts the value of the code produced by ChatGPT. Knowing zero Swift (but being an SDE), I was able to build an audio plugin for Logic Pro X in a day, by leveraging ChatGPT. I'd previously tried this twice, and gave up because of the learning curve and my lack of free time. It's the most insane 0% to 80% tool I've ever seen.
actusual··on OpenAI used Kenyan workers on less than $2 per hour to make ChatGPT less toxic
So then what? If paying $2/hour is taking advantage, and paying over market isn't part of your solution...what is the solution? Not hire people in Kenya?

Also...yes it is a sentiment (a view of or attitude toward a situation or event; an opinion). Our opinions about what constitutes "taking advantage" are different. Saying otherwise doesn't make your argument more compelling.

actusual··on OpenAI used Kenyan workers on less than $2 per hour to make ChatGPT less toxic
This is a nice sentiment, but I think the answer is way more nuanced. You can't just roll into a developing economy and pay way over market without also disrupting the local economy and the people that live there. Imagine some similar situation in America, where for some reason, an international business comes in and pays 10-30X the market rate as similar businesses in the area, for the same product. The new jobs become highly (and potentially dangerously) desirable, other similar business go under because they can't keep up with the wage growth, etc.

To remain stable, economic growth must be slow and steady. The alternative is you simply don't go to Kenya, rather, you go somewhere else, and Kenyans get $0/hour.

actusual··on ‘Luddite’ Teens
They actually have a dedicated streetwear/hipper line called WIP (https://us.carhartt-wip.com/)
actusual··on US annual inflation declines to 7.1% in November vs. 7.3% expected
Given your confident tone, I'm curious how you are hedging against this in the market?
actusual··on Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?
> The last step was a really strange and uncomfortable 1-1 chat with a "very senior employee"

I had one of these once. The chief product officer came into the room, stared at me for awhile, then asked "tell me something you've thought really hard about...". It was a classic case of a narcissist exec. Glad I didn't get the job, as they are struggggggggggglin' right now.

actusual··on DoorDash lays off 1250 employees
Yowza, >20,000 employees?? Does that include drivers?
actusual··on Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots
This makes it sound so much easier than it actually is. Tracking where customers from on iOS device is extremely difficult. Now spread that difficulty over 10 different advertising channels (youtube, Facebook, direct visits, google, etc), each with millions of dollars in budget, and the problem quickly becomes impossible to track yourself.
actusual··on Meta and Google are cutting staff
My buddy at Meta literally has to re-interview for his job. Same with his entire team. What a colossal waste of time.
actusual··on Federal Reserve to increase interest rates by 75 basis points for the third time
Would appreciate some sources for these claims.
actusual··on Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011)
I have a rich aunt who would be ready to buy the $23M dollar book then back out because of the shipping.
actusual··on DALL·E: Introducing Outpainting
Lol I just want to be able to use the thing. How long is this waitlist?
actusual··on Student loan forgiveness will cost US $300B
There's another angle here too...and that is whether the people who are having loans forgiven even received X number of dollars in value from their college experience. A LOT of these students did not, which is why students that got swindled into scam "universities" are top of the list for forgiveness.
actusual··on Launch HN: Sematic (YC S22) – Open-source framework to build ML pipelines faster
Maybe on average it's true, but it's also a weird tone to strike in marketing materials. Where I work the MLE's are expected to write production level code and deploy their own services. We explicitly hire 1 level down on the SDE ladder when hiring MLEs, so a senior MLE should basically be almost a senior SDE.
actusual··on Launch HN: Sematic (YC S22) – Open-source framework to build ML pipelines faster
> Machine Learning (ML) and Data Science (DS) developers are not software engineers, and vice-versa.

Woof, I'm out.

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