HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

coliveira

10,549 karma · joined July 17, 2008

Data Scientist. Interests: algorithms, optimization. https://carlosoliveira290416.substack.com
submissionscomments
coliveira··on AI's debt binge can't last, hidden borrowing reaches $1.65T
> incredibly sophisticated companies

We need to stop thinking that just because they have money they're incredibly sophisticated. We have a few examples like Mark Zuckerberg, who had early success with FB, but he seems to be incapable of investing in profitable products. E. Musk: great at selling his companies, but laughably bad at making profits at the same level of expenses. Sam Altman: never had a real job he did well other than raising money. This is the kind of people that control these companies.

coliveira··on How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
Also, a lot of real estate is owned by the Hollywood investors or their close friends, so this is a circular economy where they get rich, then buy property in that place and get even richer with real estate increasing in value. The same thing happened in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and many other places.
coliveira··on How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
What will probably happen is that they'll buy the rights to use faces of famous people (actors or not) and use AI (or cheap actors) to do the real scenes.
coliveira··on Europe EV Sales BEVs Jump 50% & Reach 26% Market Share
Yes, but Americans don't have the freedom to experience this. They have to choose between expensive and more expensive.
coliveira··on Europe EV Sales BEVs Jump 50% & Reach 26% Market Share
EVs continue to be expensive in the US. But the trajectory is the opposite in the rest of the world due to the benefit of Chinese exports. In Brazil, for example, new car prices have a now a discount of up to $10K, all due to increased competition from China.
coliveira··on How the words we teach English language learners changed
When you're a foreigner learning a language your experience is mostly from reading. There are words, however, that are much more common at home and in spoken language. So you'll probably never learn the words that a 10 year old kid knows.
coliveira··on Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI
Yes, it is relatively easy to find any solution to a bug. It is hard to find the root cause and change only what is necessary to fix the bug. AI makes it very efficient to "fix" bugs with code that needs to be fixed again later. The big problem in fixing bugs is understanding what is causing it, not to suggest a temporary "bug fix".
coliveira··on Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI
Bingo. The issue is not lack of knowledge but prioritization at these companies. Microsoft has the ability to fix Windows bugs, they just think it's secondary compared to adding their own new bug ridden features.
coliveira··on Patreon laying off 20% of staff
Panic may only exist in a company that is already lying about its true situation. If managers were telling the truth about what is going on in a company, everyone would be Ok with new updates about its financial position.
coliveira··on Patreon laying off 20% of staff
A society that doesn't value honesty deserves to be deceived.
coliveira··on Patreon laying off 20% of staff
Business schools teach advertising, not business management. In modern business it is a crime to tell the truth about the dire situation a business is in, unless a CEO is starting anew to fix a situation left by another, and even then it rarely happens.
coliveira··on Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
That's nonsense, people pretend that a "frontier model" is the most important technology ever, but we know for sure it cannot be because several companies are doing copycats of one another. It is not China that is doing much effort to copy-cat, it's the US companies that are copying one another. The only real barrier in this technology is how many Nvidia chips you can buy and how much data you can get to train your LLM. All these models are basically moving in the same trajectory, it is essentially a very expensive copy-paste job they're doing.
coliveira··on China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
Chinese companies are cut out of the market by the US gov restrictions, so making the models open is a survival tactic.
coliveira··on A road to Lisp: Why Lisp
The issue is also social, the average software engineer will treat Lisp code as a liability because most people really don't know what to do with it. In the mind of a professional SE, code is "maintainable" only if it's writing in Javascript or some other commercial language.
coliveira··on Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline
That's an incredibly short sighted way of looking at countries. The US was never the country with highest population growth, and right now is also heading into a demographic collapse.
coliveira··on Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline
A group having more power has little to do with numbers. If that was the case the rich would be more numerous than the poor, and India would be the most powerful country in the world.
coliveira··on Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe
I did read it and I'm sure a whole generation of people also did, it is a very clear and readable book. Don't underestimate or minimize the impact of Hawking's book when it was released.
coliveira··on 22-year-old Mozart's handwritten notebook unearthed in 'major discovery'
Cursive was and still is a fast way to write by hand. If you want to be illiterate without a computer, then you don't want to learn handwriting. But if you don't want to be illiterate without a computer, learning cursive is a fast and efficient way to do it.
coliveira··on U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6
AGI is religion invented for the stupid. There's no world in which a silly LLM can make intelligent decisions. It's all smoke and mirrors to make insane amounts of money and to maintain the sheep agreeing with the powerful.
coliveira··on 22-year-old Mozart's handwritten notebook unearthed in 'major discovery'
That's one of the reasons why he spent several years to write a single symphony.
coliveira··on 22-year-old Mozart's handwritten notebook unearthed in 'major discovery'
Composers were also handwriting masters. Bach also had incredible handwriting, there's a youtube channel about it.
coliveira··on Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
What they're trying to do under the umbrella of "national security" is to legislate how we can use the results we pay for when accessing these models. This way they will control the "intellectual property" that was acquired illegally.
coliveira··on The war on terror primed America for autocracy
It's easy to control a country when all cybersecurity software used in that country reports to you.
coliveira··on U.S. science is in chaos
Because that's ultimately their goal! It's just smoke, mirrors, and complaining so they can get the cheap labor.
coliveira··on Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
> That being said. I thought it was a funny comment.

This is very passive aggressive. You should think about how you communicate to people.

coliveira··on Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
Yes, I read "Getting Things Done": he teaches you to make todo lists! That's it, nothing profound or from another planet. Basically you could get that information in 1 paragraph: "if you're overwhelmed, make a todo list", but he wouldn't have made a lot of money that way...
coliveira··on Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
What I find funny is people saying in social media that they read dozens of books, and when you see what they're reading is mostly self-help volumes! If you read one or two of these books you already know what they'll say in 100s of others. It's very similar to religious books: the content is always the same, they just rearrange things so people will continue consuming more of the same ideas.
coliveira··on Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15
I'm aways surprised that there's no open source language that provides everything you get with Wolfram language. For example, the level of pattern matching you can use when defining functions, as well as the high level of functional composition. It is like having a mix of APL, Lisp, and Prolog that is very productive to use.
coliveira··on Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15
Mathematica has a lot of clients in math and engineering. Traditionally these clients are not so concerned about software engineering issues you mention. What Mathematica offers also makes sense for small firms with a few engineers, because they can leverage their vast amount of ready to use functions and libraries. But I agree that for medium to large size companies it stops making sense.
coliveira··on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
Where's the people who complain about the government picking winners? Strange that they suddenly travel somewhere without internet or lose their vocal cords.
← PreviousPage 3 of 34Next →