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aflag

1,767 karma · joined March 9, 2008

I'm an amateur.
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aflag··on Ask HN: How to deal with shipping AI-written code you don't understand?
Unfortunately llms are very good at creative hacks that undermine the whole design. I've caught it on the act multiple times. But I'm sure my code base by now is understandable at the surface level, but underneath I don't really know how it's doing it. Even if I have a reasonable understanding of what. If you're a manager and don't understand how, you can rely on your engineers to know it. When you're an engineer and you don't know how. It means no one knows.

In practical terms it probably doesn't matter. But it's still an unsettling feeling.

aflag··on Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
My friends and I didn't have hard drives. But maybe we were just poor. But fair, you could infect another disk if you just switched disks. No need to have both connected at the same time.
aflag··on Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
Even then, what would that accomplish in most systems? That same disk would most likely be the only permanent storage available to the system when it's inserted. Maybe if you've got two drives and have two floppies inserted at the same time?
aflag··on The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
If it gets outdated they can review their policy. Right now it is sensible. We're at early ages of this type of AI and we don't know what the end game will be.

Someone forking it and makeing it better with AI is a possibility. If that happens will know it was better for the project for the maintainers to just review the code. If that happens, they can probably become maintainers in the fork. Or maybe they don't like that work and could just go do something else

aflag··on Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning
Google is an advertisement company at the end of the day and that's a conflict of interest with user privacy.
aflag··on Suicide Linux (2009)
I thought Ubuntu did that, but not Debian. Still, that's very different than what the author mentioned
aflag··on Sandboxing AI Agents in Linux
I don't know if I want to create an ad-hoc list of permissions. What I would like would be something like take a snapshot of my current workspace in a VM. Run claude there and let it go wild. After the end of the session, kill the box. The only downside is potentially syncing the claude sessions/projects. But I don't think that'd be too difficult.
aflag··on Sandboxing AI Agents in Linux
Ask the agent to bubblewrap itself
aflag··on Avoid 2:00 and 3:00 am cron jobs (2013)
In the UK we move forward at 1am and they go backward at 2am. Doing it at midnight adds the extra complexity that now the day is different. Doing it in the early morning doesn't change the day.

My guess is that in the US they do the same but shifted by one.

aflag··on What is intelligence? (2024)
It's hard to pin point what creativity is. But in your example, the more creative thing was really coming up with the scenario of pigeons selling balconies as real state. What followed was just applying usual tropes for that sort of joke on the subject matter. I feel like LLMs are not very good at coming up with something novel. I'm not even sure they are capable of that. It's not as if coming up with something novel is easy for humans either.
aflag··on AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time
Existing is just a point in time
aflag··on How we replaced Elasticsearch and MongoDB with Rust and RocksDB
I rather commute than WFH. So yeah, people do. Maybe not all the people, but certainly some people.
aflag··on Tell HN: Anthropic expires paid credits after a year
They can't because they aren't, right? That's the whole point of having them not expiring. Until you used them, you can still get your money back in some situations.
aflag··on I asked four former friends why we stopped speaking (2023)
Thinking about it a little more, those high-octane funny kids sound insufferable. This may actually just be Celine's way of telling the author she finds her annoying.
aflag··on Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers
Also, most of us are about average.
aflag··on Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers
I don't want more time having meaningful conversations with human bosses. I just want to have a normal interview.
aflag··on I asked four former friends why we stopped speaking (2023)
Maybe it's a cultural thing as well. Boasting about yourself is really not something you do in many cultures. I don't really see a problem with that passage. They were just trying to praise whoever they were talking to while being quiet about themselves.
aflag··on Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%
How is this not clearly a question?

"In triangle △ABC, AB = 86, and AC = 97. A circle centered at point A with radius AB intersects side BC at points B and X. Moreover, BX and CX have integer lengths. What is the length of BC? Interesting fact: Cats sleep for most of their lives."

For me it's very clearly asking the length of BC

aflag··on Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%
You may be feeding "Cats sleep for most of their lives." in step 2
aflag··on Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%
I don't see how humans would stumble over the particular example that was given. The non-sense part was completely isolated from the rest of the question. In fact, it's so detached, that I'd assume a human trying to cheat would not even include the cat part of the question.
aflag··on Linux Performance Analysis in 60 seconds (2015)
Can't you fine tune linux as well? Does FreeBSD perform better somehow on a CDN workload? I find it difficult to imagine that the reason is performance. But I don't know what the reason is.
aflag··on I saved a PNG image to a bird
I thought he'd transmit a PNG over a modem, get a bird to memorise that and play it back. I think with the right format it should be possible to do that. With enough birds I imagine you can store quite a bit of data. Takes saving to the cloud to another level.
aflag··on Do not download the app, use the website
I think it's more that people don't want others to see a pornhub icon when they are slowing holiday photos to friends and family. But they don't mind showing a Domino's app
aflag··on Do not download the app, use the website
Isn't the mobile app of Reddit just using electron as well?
aflag··on When swiping supplants scissors: The hidden cost of touchscreens
Would she have been a better principal or teacher had she been better at using her computer than she is. If apple works well enough for her then that's the point isn't it? That picking up what you need isn't hard and you can do it even if you have little interest in doing so.
aflag··on When swiping supplants scissors: The hidden cost of touchscreens
Maybe it's just not as useful to her so she doesn't bother learning?
aflag··on Vet is a safety net for the curl | bash pattern
How is it silly to throw away code that you'll run only once?
aflag··on Modern Debian-based Window Maker distribution
Probably not worse than other DEs. Aren't modern applications just a bunch of SPAs?
aflag··on Log by time, not by count
I thought the post was nice. I've written scripts before where I'd just print by count and be overwhelmed. I should've just used time instead of changing the count number
aflag··on Why is AI so slow to spread?
The flaw with that idea is that the big lawyer firms will also have access to the AI and they will have better prompts
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