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benwad

264 karma · joined July 17, 2015

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benwad··on OpenAI CEO's Identity Verification Company Announced Fake Bruno Mars Partnership
Seconds later:

> OpenAI CEO's company announces partnership with The Mars Volta

benwad··on Even 'uncensored' models can't say what they want
The set of training words for "anti-Europe" was weird though. "Belgian Congo atrocities" is just one way of referring to that period of history ("Congo Free State" might be a better match). And then "Margaret Thatcher" - that's just the name of a UK PM from the 80s.

Then there's the fact that the Bengal famine and the Amritsar massacre just aren't spoken about as much as (for example) the Tiananmen Square massacre. I'd assume the 'flinching' around anti-Europe stuff is mostly down to a comparatively low incidence in the training data.

benwad··on Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns
It reminds me of the time the band KLF burned £1 million in cash as a performance piece. They obviously regretted it afterwards.
benwad··on Containerization is a Swift package for running Linux containers on macOS
I've always wondered why only Linux can do 'true' containers without VMs. Is there a good blog post or something I can read about the various technical hurdles?
benwad··on Tesla seeks to guard crash data from public disclosure
Personally I think the strategy of starting with luxury cars and getting cheaper was a good one. The bigger profit margin of luxury cars could be fed back into R&D to make cheaper electric cars viable.

Of course, that's the ideal situation. Tesla in 2025 is very different from what they were talking about in 2014.

benwad··on When will tech workers start creating Unions?
Which union are you talking about?
benwad··on Stop over-thinking AI subscriptions
If you buy a machine to play the piano for you, you won't learn how to play the piano. You'll just become really good at using that machine.
benwad··on Google's Veo3 Is Already Deepfaking All of YouTube's Most Smooth-Brained Content
That's not the case at all. People all around are constantly making art just for the sake of it. Most of it won't ever even be seen by other people. Removing the financial incentive will definitely change the landscape (for the worse, imho) but creativity for its own sake is enough for most people.
benwad··on Ethically sourced "spare" human bodies could revolutionize medicine
How did gay marriage revolutionise the market for involuntary marriage?
benwad··on An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip
The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of Peter Jackson's LOTR movies released in 2001, made $887 million in its original theatrical run (on a $93 million budget). It would absolutely still have been made if copyright was only 20 years. And now it would be in the public domain!
benwad··on DOGE will use AI to assess the responses of federal workers
I wonder which will come first - total government automation, AGI or full self-driving?
benwad··on OpenAI fails to deliver opt-out system for photographers
Because Hunter S Thompson is a talented writer, and an LLM is a statistical method for generating text that looks like other text. An LLM isn't going to ingest all of Hemingway and write Hell's Angels.
benwad··on 47% of 160 Top Selling Protein Powders Tested Exceed P65 Limit for Toxic Metals [pdf]
Then why bother making this site?
benwad··on VR Has Had a Phase Change and I Didn't Know It
Does the Vision Pro support SteamVR or OpenXR or anything for games? Because if not then it's not really competing with the Quest 3. I only use my Quest 3 for games, and the Vision Pro's selling point seems to be as a way of looking at really big spreadsheets. The passthrough does look impressive though.
benwad··on Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks
The purpose of the homomorphic encryption is that they can compare similar landmarks without seeing the unencrypted image data on the server side.
benwad··on I am rich and have no idea what to do
The guy who started a video conferencing app called Loom (2 years after Zoom came out) then miraculously sold it for almost a billion dollars has no business calling anyone an "NPC".
benwad··on Germany Opened Its Doors to Migrants. Now It's Struggling to Cope
We have a similar issue in the UK. The government has refused to provide enough resources to process the backlog of asylum applications, so people are left in limbo being housed in hotels with no legal rights to work or anything. It costs way more than just processing their applications and allowing them to work, but the government are too scared of looking 'soft on immigration'. And these hotels are often in poor and disenfranchised communities, so people understandably ask "why are they getting hotels paid for by the government when we have such a lack of social housing?". It just creates more tension and doesn't help anyone.

It's also important to separate the different kinds of immigration. Refugees are a very different category from other migrants, because we have international obligations to grant them asylum in legitimate cases. So lumping them all under the banner of 'immigration' isn't really helpful.

benwad··on Türkiye Bans Roblox
I'm guessing Turkish residents probably use a VPN.
benwad··on Coq will be renamed into 'The Rocq Prover'
In the 00s there was a popular wine called "old git". It generally means someone grumpy and cantankerous, but in a playful way (otherwise you'd just call them a c***). So it makes sense for a self-effacing joke about Linus Torvalds.
benwad··on OpenAI: Cofounders Greg Brockman, John Schulman, along with others, to leave
They've been saying this for years, I'll believe it when I see it.
benwad··on The UK's Brexit dream is dead
We've had four: May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak.
benwad··on EU says Apple has serious issues for not complying with DMA
Proprietary charging cables lead to more e-waste, which is a public externality as well.
benwad··on Swiss army knife now available without the knife
I broadly agree with you, but all of those things are generally done inside the home, and I don't think anywhere legislates that you can't have a knife at home.
benwad··on OpenAI Bought Chatgpt.com
Tell that to PostgreSQL
benwad··on Show HN: See your current Spotify song in the menu bar
My guess is it's also down to the proliferation of cross-platform UX toolkits that allow for A/B testing of every single component. Making a cool UX thing that requires native OS features would go against that philosophy. And, as you say, it's not a revenue driver so nobody will be fighting for it.
benwad··on Marc Andreessen: I regret not doing more to support and defend Brendan Eich
It's not about making people suffer. Eich used his wealth to lobby for something that many people find objectionable. Mozilla is quite an ideological company (many who work there are probably somewhat driven by the "mission" rather than necessarily the company's financial performance), and so the CEO publicly supporting criminalising same-sex marriage could affect hiring and staff morale.

It's not like his career has been destroyed. He's still incredibly wealthy, and has a new browser company. People can use that, and work there, if they want.

benwad··on Man raped in jail after AI technology wrongfully identifies him in robbery
The whole point of those peoples' jobs is to do due diligence. If they're blindly trusting the next person/machine down the line then they're abdicating their responsibility.
benwad··on You Don't Batch Cook When You're Suicidal (2020)
It's true that Jimmy created value, but so did the people who chopped the trees and mined the graphite (or however you get graphite). But it's unlikely that Jimmy got the wood from the person who chopped the tree - they got it from someone who paid the lumberjack a wage and took the created value for themselves. If Jimmy starts employing people to make these pencils, he is now taking the value of their labour for himself, purely because he had the money to buy these raw materials in the first place.

That's ignoring the environmental impact of getting these raw materials. Value creation doesn't happen in a vacuum, and most people involved in the creation of that value don't get a share in the profits from creating said value.

benwad··on The Stroad
I just looked up Houston's commute time and all[^1] the[^2] sources[^3] I found seem to say otherwise.

I also found this[^4]: Apparently Europe's cities with the longest commute time have about the same commute time as Houston. Not to mention that Paris and Budapest have populations many times the size of Houston.

^1 https://houston.innovationmap.com/houston-worst-traffic-comm...

^2 https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/transpor...

^3 https://houston.culturemap.com/news/city-life/03-04-19-houst...

^4 https://www.mynewsdesk.com/eurofound/news/budapest-paris-and...

benwad··on The Washington Post Will Pause Its Advertising on X
MAMAA is a more recent acronym - Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet.

Updated FB/Google's names, dropped Netflix (because it's really more of a media company), and added MS.

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